The Trudeau government’s path toward reform of Canada’s electoral system keeps getting more and more convoluted.

The latest twist is that voters will be asked in December to take an online survey about how they feel about democracy and voting – just after a committee of MPs is due to submit recommendations on the same subject.

That’s left the MPs, who spent weeks touring the country holding hearings on electoral reform, wondering exactly what all their work will be worth.

If the government is going to consult Canadians directly, instead of relying on the research and conclusions of the committee it entrusted with that task, what was the point of the whole exercise?

If anything, the survey should have been carried out as part of the committee’s work, under its supervision. That way the results could be incorporated into its recommendations.

But as things stand, the government plans to mail postcards to every household later this month to find out how voters feel about how they elect members of Parliament.

Some 13 million postcards will go out, encouraging people to go to a website (mydemocracy.ca) starting on Dec. 1 and fill out a survey about democracy and the voting system.

That’s the same date the committee of MPs is to produce its conclusions and recommendations. The timing, says Conservative MP Scott Reid, “raises the question of what was the purpose of having the committee at all.”

It just adds to the confusion surrounding the government’s attempt to fulfill its ill-thought-out campaign promise to make the 2015 federal election the last one to be conducted under the so-called first-past-the-post system.

It’s worth recalling that the Liberals made that pledge in June of last year, at a time when they were stuck in third place behind a surging NDP. It was part of a bold, and ultimately successful, bid for support from progressive voters. But it’s now clear the Liberals didn’t fully think through the implications of actually delivering on the promise in time for the next election.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau muddied the waters further in mid-October by telling a Quebec newspaper that the case for reform is “less urgent” now that Canadians have a government they like (i.e., his). A day later he insisted he was still “deeply committed” to reform, but what was said was said.

All this leaves MPs and the rest of us with questions about how keen the government really is about changing the system. It set up a committee of MPs to produce recommendations, and now proposes a massive consultation that may well undercut that process. And the prime minister has made it a lot harder to take seriously the work of the minister in charge of the project, Maryam Monsef.

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In the end, we can only benefit from a broad and deep national conversation about how our democracy functions, and how best to capture the will of voters. But for that to happen, Canadians need to have confidence that the conversation won’t be manipulated by the party in power to its own benefit.

The latest twists along the road don’t help to achieve that goal.

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