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Or if a mandate from the people is required, surely they should be demanding the government call an election on the issue, in the time-honoured way — not a referendum, which let me remind you is the sort of thing they go in for on the Continent. What is it about a referendum they prefer, other than, say, the requirement for a popular majority in a ballot in which every vote counts equally?

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We reach peak irony, of course, in the Conservative position, which is that in the absence of a referendum they will hold up any electoral reform bill in, of all places, the Senate. But it doesn’t end there. The same people, for example, who insist that “nobody cares” about electoral reform seem to be quite passionate about it themselves, or at least about the sacred right of the public to express themselves on this issue they apparently can’t be bothered with.

And while democratic fairness is invoked on the side of holding a referendum — on the grounds that the rules of the game should not be left to the players on the field to decide — the notion that the mere holding of a referendum is enough to guarantee neutrality seems, to say the least, naive.

I’ve written about this before. Just as the rules governing an election are crucial to deciding who wins or loses or what winning or losing even means — the basis of the referendum argument — so the rules under which a referendum would be held are even more crucial to its outcome. All sorts of issues arise: the size of majority that should be required (British Columbians, often said to have rejected reform, in fact voted 58 per cent in favour the first time); whether it should simply be of the nation as a whole, or of constituent subgroups, and if so which ones (region? language? race? sex?); what options should be on the ballot; and (the ironies are starting to breed, and multiply) the voting system itself: should voters simply mark an X beside their favourite, or should they rank them in order?