Article content continued

You can’t have a consensus if nothing has been put on the table.Had the government been serious about electoral reform they would have worked with the other parties on the committee to put forward a proposal to Parliament. Town halls could have been used later to build consensus or refine the proposal.

Alternatively, a citizens’ assembly could have been tasked with generating a reform proposal. This would have created meaningful deliberation, with a discussion of trade-offs grounded in concrete alternatives, and it would have taken the issue out of the arena of partisan politics.

It now appears clear that the government was never keen on fulfilling its promise to make 2015 the last election under first-past-the-post. They like their false majority government and hanker after another.

Indeed, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tipped his hand when he mentioned his own preference for a preferential ballot (which wouldn’t address the lack of proportion between the vote count and the distribution of seats). He was never really into PR.

This was predictable enough. But many experts, advocates of one position or another, and engaged citizens played along with the process in the hope that the government might actually be prepared to do things differently. It now appears we were had.

One of the reasons for seeking electoral reform was precisely the hope that by creating a more proportional system Canada’s political parties would have to learn to work together more co-operatively, and that the public could become more engaged in our political process.