Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers a statement in Washington, on Jan. 9.Marko Djurica/Reuters
Given the momentous nature of Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement last week, it’s not surprising that one of the lesser bombshells he dropped got lost in the shuffle. After all, there he was telling Canadians he would leave office as soon as his party chooses his replacement, and that he had asked the Governor-General to prorogue Parliament until March 24. That’s historic stuff.
But we cannot have been the only people who went “Wait – what?!” when Mr. Trudeau said his biggest regret as Prime Minister was his inability to bring about electoral reform.
“I do wish that we’d been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country so that people could simply choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot, so that parties would spend more time trying to be people’s second or third choices, and people would have been looking for things they have in common instead of trying to polarize and divide Canadians against each other,” he said.
“But I could not change unilaterally without the support of other parties our electoral system,” he added. “That would have been irresponsible.”
On that point we can agree. It would have been an abuse of democracy if the Trudeau government had used its first-term majority to ram through something as epochal as electoral reform. But for Mr. Trudeau to rewrite the history of that omnishambolic saga to make himself its hero is just too much of a stretch to remain unchallenged.
It goes back to the night in 2015 when he won a majority and declared in his victory speech that the election that had brought him to power would be the last one conducted under the first-past-the-post system.
That was the moment a lot of voters found out the Liberals had included such a promise in their platform. It had not been an issue on which they had campaigned with any great force, yet suddenly it was central to their governing agenda. They vowed to introduce legislation to enact electoral reform within 18 months.
Alarm bells immediately went off. Ending the first-past-the-post system that, while not perfect, had provided Canadians with 150 years of stability, prosperity and progress was not something a party should unilaterally attempt to do.
Worse, the Liberals had never declared what the alternatives might be. It quickly became apparent, though, that the Trudeau government was steering the conversation in the direction of ranked ballots.
With ranked ballots, voters pick their first, second and third choice of party or candidate. With a cadre of voters equally at ease with the Liberals or NDP, such a system would have conveniently made the Conservative Party, or any other right-of-centre party, a dark horse in every future election.
Under the other alternative, proportional representation, seats in the House are assigned according to the percentage of the vote each party receives. Such a system would likely ensure the Liberals (or any other party) never formed another majority government.
It soon became clear voters didn’t have an appetite for the Liberals’ self-serving project. Mr. Trudeau himself exposed the nakedly partisan politics behind it in October, 2016, when he argued voters had lost the taste for getting rid of the existing system because it had elected “a government they’re more satisfied with, and the motivation to change the electoral system is less compelling.”
To suggest that FPTP was only bad when it resulted in the wrong government was the height of Liberal arrogance, and Mr. Trudeau was pilloried for saying so. By the start of 2017, the party had effectively dropped its promise for good.
And yet there was Mr. Trudeau last week bemoaning that his noble attempt to reform federal elections in order to make Canada less divisive was defeated because the other parties wouldn’t sign their own death warrants.
Let’s also remember that, when it comes to wedge politics designed to exploit the weaknesses of the FPTP system, Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals are experts in that dark art. Just think of how Mr. Trudeau weaponized vaccine mandates in the 2021 vote, or how he concentrated power in his office at the expense of the ability of his MPs to think for themselves and best represent their constituencies.
In the end, if Mr. Trudeau rues the fact that he wasn’t able to change the way Canadians vote, he should acknowledge two things: his failure is his alone, and so are his regrets about not tilting the table toward the Liberals.