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After the backlash, inevitably, comes the backlash against the backlash.

The storm of criticism that greeted the Liberals’ latest pass at public consultation on electoral reform, the now notorious mydemocracy.ca, has since been answered by a raft of sympathetic interviews with its creators, supportive political scientists and Liberal MPs.

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The theme: people just didn’t understand what the survey was trying to do. Far from the dippy pop quiz or botched push-poll it might appear, it was in fact a laudable effort to delve into voters’ underlying values: a complex matrix of orthogonal preferences that cannot be understood without reference to the inevitable trade-offs etc etc etc.

And if that were in fact what the fuss was about, that might be a solid defence. The problem with the survey is not that it sought to understand people’s values, or to present them with trade-offs. Or at least, there would be no objection to such a survey had it been conducted, say, a year ago, in advance of the various other public consultation exercises that have since been conducted, notably by the special parliamentary committee on electoral reform.