OTTAWA — Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef has a problem with confusion.

She seems afflicted by it.

She was confused as to where she was born. Was it Iran or was it Afghanistan?

At the age of 31, after 20 years in Canada and now a rookie MP and cabinet minister in Justin Trudeau’s government, she was still so confused when questions of her birthplace continued to arise that she had to finally ask her dear old mom.

“Iran,” she was told. “Write it down. Commit it to memory.”

Or words to that affect.

Now, some weeks later, she is confused again because the special all-party committee studying electoral reform, and which had been consulting Canadians for months, did not come back with the answer that she had apparently already etched in stone.

The committee had forsaken her.

This bothered her to no end. How would Monsef explain her abject failure to the prime minister who made it obvious to her that the only answer he wanted when it came to electoral reform was a ranked ballot that would undoubtedly see the Liberals as forever unbeatable?

This was an embarrassment of the highest order.

She had failed.

But strike that last thought. Monsef had not failed. She was just confused, so it was best for her to clear up that confusion now so that the prime minister had the straight goods.

It was the special committee that had failed, not her.

And so she publicly let committee members know what a bunch of losers they were.

“On the hard choices that we had asked the committee to make, the members of the committee took a pass,” Monsef told the House of Commons. “We asked the committee to help answer very difficult questions for us. It did not do that.”

It was an unprecedented insult, even from a neophyte.

If eyes could kill, she was a goner.

After wrongly condemning the committee for coming to the “consensus that there was no consensus on electoral reform,” Monsef backtracked Friday with an apology that was too little too late.

The consensus on her? She had now become a joke.

The consensus on electoral reform? It’s now a non-starter.

What the committee recommended, of course, was a national referendum on changing Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system to one of proportional representation.

It did not recommend nothing, as Monsef had proclaimed.

What it did recommend, however, would take years to implement, and would certainly extend beyond the date of the next federal election in 2019.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who promised electoral reform come hell or high water before Canada next goes to the polls, now has Maryam Monsef as a millstone.

Whatever Trudeau believed she brought to the table is now irreversibly and irretrievably gone.

There should be absolutely no confusion on that point, not even to a bewildered Maryam Monsef herself.

Considering her history of confusion affliction, however, she may not be able to comprehend her political life is unravelling.

But she had done her boss great damage.

markbonokoski@gmail.com