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Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on what has just occurred. In the past election the Liberals became the first major party in Canadian history to campaign and win on a platform explicitly calling for reform of our electoral system, colloquially known as “first past the post,” in time for the next election.

Now an all-party committee appointed to study options for reform has reported back, with another historic first: four of the committee’s five parties have formally recommended the public should be asked in a referendum to endorse reforming our system on the basis of proportional representation. The lone dissenters: the Liberals, who rejected both the proposed reform (“too radical”) and the timeline (“rushed”), which is to say the very promise on which they were elected.

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Then the minister who had asked the committee to report, Maryam Monsef, dismissed its findings and insulted its members, presumably including the Liberals, for not doing what she had not asked them to do, namely to recommend a specific model for reform — proportional representation apparently not being specific enough — at the same time claiming to be unable to detect a “consensus” among the four parties and 87 per cent of witnesses before the committee that recommended it. She concluded this performance by mocking the committee’s use of a mathematical formula to measure the proportionality of different systems, falsely claiming that this was what they were suggesting the public should vote on.