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So, that was last week. Now welcome to this week, and the pondering of questions. Welcome to mydemocracy.ca — the long-awaited survey of Canadians’ views on their democracy — and welcome to the cavalcade of abuse it received online thanks to its false dichotomies and insistence on black-and-white responses, which could only have enraged people well versed in the issue.

Anthony Furey, writing in the Sun papers, finds it passing strange “the electoral reform survey doesn’t ask your opinion on electoral reform.” He is flummoxed by the request to opine on whether “governments should have to negotiate their policy decisions with other parties in Parliament, even if it is less clear who is accountable for the resulting policy.” He thinks it’s a swell idea for the government to seek input from other parties, but “what does ‘have to negotiate’ mean”? Good question. Furey, among many others, suspects foul play in a survey that doesn’t ever even ask if you think the electoral system should be reformed. “The government is slyly trying to make it look like you like electoral reform even though you flat out don’t,” he argues.

Frankly, we detected nothing nearly that coherent in the questions. We are prepared to believe it might have been an at least half-serious attempt to do … something. It does have its defenders, after all.

“It’s designed to see what kinds of outcomes people are looking for and then (work) backwards to find an electoral system that favours those outcomes,” Dale Smithwrites on his blog, “and anyone who thinks that you can focus on electoral reform without looking at outcomes is deluding themselves.” He quotes Carleton University professor Philippe Lagassé’s tweets on a similar point: “The survey rises above FPTP vs (alternative vote) vs PR to ask whether you’d be comfortable with outcomes of each.”