If you are old enough, you might remember the Dorothy Lamour, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope series of Road movies that cashed in on Lamour’s looks, Crosby’s crooning and Hope’s humour. The all-party parliamentary road show on electoral reform is supposed to be invited by all MP’s to 338 town halls in every constituency in Canada. That would not only be a laugh a minute but the committee would have to stop that foolishness before they got more than 10 town halls under their belts.
First of all, organizing, advertising and holding town halls in even a tenth of the electoral districts of Canada would take more time than the Minister of Democratic Institutions, Maryam Monsef, has allowed for the committee to hold hearings and write a report. They are on an impossible deadline to do an impossible job. And why bother when the most experienced MPs on the supposedly bipartisan committee have already made up their minds?
Can you just see MP Jason Kenney, the former minister of everything from the Harper government, facing off with MP Nathan Cullen of the New Democrats? Mind you, Kenney might just send in a substitute for the hearings part. He is only interested in the report because his party will demand a referendum on any change.
And town halls could be a disaster anyway. You can count on an organization that calls itself ‘Fair Vote’ to try to co-opt any public meetings. The last thing those people are is ‘fair.’ They are mainly New Democratic and Green Party supporters and their predetermined solution is proportional voting. They have never been particularly interested in debating the issue as their arguments are not built on much reality.
So you have the committee with five Liberal MPs and seven opposition MPs trying to reach a consensus. And the five Liberals only have a vague idea of what they want. Their leader Justin Trudeau has put them in an awkward spot as he has been suggesting some form of preferential voting. No opposition MP will go along with that as in the last federal election preferential voting would have given the winning Liberals an even larger majority of seats.
To make matters worse, there are very few experts on this subject in Canada. It is not even a hot subject among political science professors. The few supposed experts who sold their theories on voting to the B.C. and Ontario citizens’ committees were stopped by the referendums. And when the voters in B.C. had a chance to reconsider, the ‘No’ vote increased.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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