LETTER

Public appeal to our Liberal MP

 

Dear Liberal MP:
At the end of May, Parliament will be requested to accept the Final Report and recommendations of its Special Committee on Electoral Reform. The report was submitted on December 1, 2016, yet no opportunity has been given for Parliament to debate or examine its key recommendation that a new electoral system should “minimize the level of distortion between the popular will of the electorate and the resultant seat allocations in Parliament,” i.e., minimize deviations from proportional representation.

PM Trudeau decided to abandon voting system reform. His claim that “this was my choice to make” suggests a delusion that the election had somehow transferred Parliament’s authority to him as dictator of Canada.

Party self-interest and fear of the PMO has apparently persuaded Liberal MPs, who claimed pre-election to be supporters of proportional representation, to meekly repeat the PMO’s implausible defence, “… even after an enormous amount of consultation across the country, there is no consensus on which different electoral system to adopt.”

What type of consensus was the government expecting? Was it reasonable to expect that a clear majority of the public would spontaneously recommend a single specific voting system? Very few know the details of various voting systems or the pros and cons of each, in a Canadian context; hence such an expectation was clearly ridiculous. Setting an unattainable goal, however, provides a convenient excuse to claim failure when the goal is not achieved.

It was reasonable to expect public agreement on the general nature of the voting system needed to replace First Past the Post. That goal was achieved. The public consultations revealed a clear majority preference for a new system that supported Proportional Representation (PR). This was a majority recommendation in the Final Report of the Committee on Electoral Reform supported by input to MPs’ Town Hall meetings, submissions and testimony to the Committee and by 22,000 responses to the committee’s online survey including: (1) 70% agreed the current system should be changed, only 24% disagreed; (2) 70% agreed the number of seats held by a party should reflect the proportion of votes it received across Canada, only 17% disagreed.

Please endorse the PR recommendation from the Electoral Reform committee and co-operate with other parties to task a panel of experts with designing a voting system that complies with the recommendations of the committee. With multi-party support there will be no need to “ram” through legislation.

Nor will a referendum be needed since PR relies on voter equality. Equal rights have always been advanced by courageous political leaders who didn’t need a referendum to tell them it is the right thing to do.

Please get on the right side of history.

Rob Williams
Cherry Valley (Ontario)