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Here’s what Trudeau and his closest advisers want you to know about that. First of all: The PM is a keen student of electoral reform. Alexandre Lanthier, his long-time senior aide, recalls to Wherry that the two of them “covered this so many times in car rides across the country.” And this rumination led Trudeau to some pretty firm opinions about which reforms he liked and which he didn’t. “Too many people don’t understand the polarization and the micro issues that come through proportional representation,” he said in 2013.

Trudeau was quite enamoured with ranked ballots, by contrast, and supported them during his run for the party leadership. “What we need is a preferential ballot that causes politicians to have to reach out to be the second choice and even the third choice of certain (voters),” he said during a leadership debate.

He would readopt these opinions quite aggressively after his party jettisoned the electoral reform promise. “Do you think that Kellie Leitch should have her own party?” he famously asked a woman in Iqaluit when she inquired after proportional representation. Indeed Trudeau was suddenly, again, full of anti-PR sentiments: “Proportional representation in any form would be bad for Canada,” he declared, because, he said, it would encourage people to divide off into special interest parties instead of assembling under big tents like his.

So why on earth did the Liberals promise an end to first-past-the-post, with no specified preferred replacement? Trudeau and gang ask us to believe this was not — repeat: not — a dead-obvious, wildly cynical (and successful) ploy to suck up NDP votes, which now makes them look like absolute jerks.

Instead we are asked to believe that this scholar of electoral reform, who felt quite strongly that proportional representation was “bad for Canada,” was convinced by his caucus to “leave the door open at least a crack for proportional representation” because he thought (per Wherry’s interviews) that he might be “willing to be convinced that (he was) wrong.”