It’s how Canadians roll: we decide we like a party leader, we elect them, and after eight or ten years we decide it’s time for a change. It doesn’t matter who the other leader is, we just decide to switch.
I mean we elected a party that promised Electoral Reform and that this would be the last FPTP election. That should’ve been enough. They just changed their minds after they won.
This is not accurate, the majority on the electoral reform committee on the house was the NDP, Greens, CPC and BLoc. They passed from committee reccomendations that ensured electoral reform wouldn’t pass the house. They should wear this as much as anyone.
The ER committee laid out options for the Government and made the following recommendation:
Recommendation 1
The Committee recommends that the Government should, as it develops a new electoral system, use the Gallagher index in order to minimize the level of distortion between the popular will of the electorate and the resultant seat allocations in Parliament. > The Government should seek to design a system that achieves a Gallagher score of 5 or less.
Recommendation 2
The Committee recommends that, although systems of pure party lists can achieve a Gallagher score of 5 or less, they should not be considered by the Government as such systems sever the connection between voters and their MP.
That means that STV (which is multi-member ranked-ballot with large ridings), MMP (local ridings with a regional proportional fallback), and the urban-rural hybrid (cities get STV, rural areas get MMP) were all on the table as options. The Liberals just flipped the chessboard because the committee didn’t recommend their preferred ranked-ballot-instant-runoff-single-member system.
Open-list MMP with ~12-member regions would be an excellent solution for Canada.
I’d oppose any system that doesn’t tie members to single seat ridings. “Councillors at large” are the bane of any system they’re in: they float in the background beholden to none of the voters, almost impossible to remove, and loyal only to the party. More than one member per district and you end up with two or more people playing hot potato and pointing at each other claiming the other was supposed to handle it, whatever the “it” happens to be.
The Gallagher Index is not the be-all, end-all of fairness. The last Canadian election had an index of 12, the last US election had an index of 5. I don’t think very many would say the US system is better.
The CPC were going to oppose any change, and got their way on having a referendum which was absolutely going to fail, especially with the CPC framing it as a Liberal power grab, regardless of the eventual method chosen.
Internal polling, not the dog and pony online poll, showed that while 50ish% of voters might support a change, support fractured once the different options entered the mix. A high number of voters were absolutely tied to their preferred method and would oppose the others.
The Liberals read the writing on the wall, cut their losses and abandoned the project. If nothing else, it’s killed any chance of electoral reform for the foreseeable future.
