Vincent J. Curtis
21 Sept 21
In an appeal to progressives in 2015, Justin Trudeau promised to reform Canada’s electoral system into something resembling proportional representation. He gave up the project, if he ever had any intent to go through with it, when he learned that the system he had in mind required constitutional amendments. If implemented, the reforms would have utterly deranged the system of parliamentary representation that has been the English-British-Canadian tradition for 850 years, going back to the Great Parliament of 1265.
(There are some progressives who believe that if something has worked well for 850 years, there’s got to be something wrong with it. The system at issue is plurality election, which operates on the principle that the person with the most votes wins. To disparage this principle, plurality election is sometimes called pejoratively “first-past-the-post”, as if elections were a kind of horse race.)
In the last desperate days of the 2021 campaign, Trudeau once again promised progressive he would look at electoral reform. Progressives are bound to be disappointed again.
Trudeau is not going to mess with a system that gave him a near majority government with only 32 percent of the popular vote, leaving the party with 34 percent far behind in seats and in fact losing a few seats at the election.
The lesson for progressives is this: fool
me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment