To this, 61.0 per cent answered yes, 14.9 per cent answered no and 24.1 per cent were unsure.

Longfield said he’s been hearing “strong messages” from the local community that people want him to focus his efforts on issues such as jobs, energy, affordable housing and mental health.

“I don’t see a Guelph uprising” when it comes to electoral reform, he remarked. “I don’t see the community saying this is what we want you working on.”

Now that an all-party committee of MPs that studied electoral reform last year has submitted its report, the government has “a very tight time line” if it wants to change the voting system for the 2019 election, Longfield said.

“I don’t know what we are going to do on this,” he said.

Parliament has been on a winter holiday break and the Liberal caucus hasn’t yet reviewed the report of the all-party committee, said the Liberal MP.

That committee didn’t produce a report with unanimous support from members of all the parties.

In December, the government tried to start what it called a national conversation about electoral reform through a mass mail-out directing Canadians to MyDemocracy.ca and asking them to respond to a series of questions. There were 383,000 respondents to this online survey, Longfield said.

This government survey wasn’t random, though, so it isn’t considered a scientific survey.

Longfield said his priority is to represent in Ottawa “what I feel the community wants to see ... outside of that group (Fair Vote Guelph), I’m not hearing a lot from the community” on the issue of electoral reform.

He said his office sent out 5,000 postcards last spring on this issue. “I got mixed responses from the mail-out,” with those wanting change in the electoral system in the minority among respondents, he said.

Last September, Longfield held a town hall meeting on electoral reform that drew about 150 people to the Italian Canadian Club. In a show of hands, not many of them favoured first-past-the-post, and only a couple of the 28 audience members who spoke there clearly favoured Canads’s traditional system of electing people to federal, provincial and municipal governments.

Trudeau added electoral reform to the Liberal Party’s election platform in June 2015, promising that electoral-reform legislation would be introduced within 18 months of the Liberals forming a government. At the time he made the vow, the Liberals were trailing in the polls and seemed unlikely to form a majority government in the Oct. 27 election.

That June, Frank Valeriote, who was wrapping up his years as Guelph’s Liberal MP, praised Trudeau’s vow as having “the fingerprints of the progressive minds of Guelph all over it.”

Trudeau’s vow was in keeping with a resolution on electoral reform approved at the 2014 Liberal convention in Montreal, which was “created with the help of local constituents” as well as Kitchener-Waterloo residents, Valeriote said.

Canada’s current electoral system allows majority governments to be formed by parties that get well under half of the votes cast, Valeriote said, and this means that “you essentially have the tail wagging the dog.”