Surprised, Reid Still Takes the Long View on Electoral Reform

Jeff Green | Feb 15, 2017

Over his long career as an MP, Scott Reid has seen a lot. As a student of, and advocate for electoral reform he has also seen how the interest of parties in power affect their attitudes to changes in electoral systems.

But, he admitted freely in a phone interview this week that he was surprised when the Liberal government abandoned their commitment to bring in electoral reform two weeks ago.

“I did not see that coming. I did not anticipate they would walk away from it in that way. I thought they were going to take a different route,” he said. “Part of the reason it surprised me was the vehemence with which the Prime Minister insisted there was no way he was going to back down from his promise.”

Reid, who first began studying electoral reform when he was a staff member of the old reform party in 1996 and has been involved in debates around the development of a new electoral system for Canada ever since, said that he did not expect the Liberals would be able to bring in a new system for the next election as promised. He said he thought they would “wait a length of time, and then say we just can’t get there before the next election, and put it off for study in some fashion. I did not think they would abandon it.”

In anticipation of a delay, he had been talking to people and beginning to work on making sure that if a citizen’s assembly was constituted to develop a new system, that it would be done right in order to allow participation on a broad level and would lead to a detailed proposal.

Unlike the Reform Party, The Conservative Party that he represents as MP for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston takes the position that they will not pursue electoral reform if in power. But they do support the position Reid has pushed for many years, that only by being accepted through a national referendum can any new system be viable for Canada.

To those that say electoral reform cannot pass in a referendum Reid says that 5 referenda on reform have taken place in different parts of Canada since 2000 and 2 have passed.

“Those aren’t bad odds,” he said, “and I just don’t agree with those that say people cannot be trusted to make decisions on complex proposals.”

This puts him at odds with Fair Vote Canada, a group that lobbies for electoral reform but is adamant that a referendum is not the way to bring it about.

Reid believes that if a system is designed that fits the needs of Canada, and it is put out in a straightforward manner to a fair vote, it can pass in a referendum and would be good for the country.

The parliamentary committee, which he co-chaired with NDP MP Nathan Cullen last year, asked the government to develop a system that would attain a defined level of proportionality and would then be put to a national vote. He believes that any new system worth pursuing must make the electoral system a more proportional system than the current one.

“While the Liberal members of that committee did not sign off on our final report, it was not because they disagreed with proportionality. They disagreed with the timing we proposed, which was to get it done in time for the next election. They were not opposed to proportional representation, in principle, as Mr. Trudeau now says he is.”

On February 9th, Prime Minister Trudeau said “proportional representation, in any form, would be bad for Canada” which seemed like a complete about-face from the position he took during the 2015 election and kept to until two weeks ago.

In studying Justin Trudeau’s statements about reform over the years, Reid  says he now thinks Trudeau may have been opposed to reform all along, noting comments made in 2014 and at other times.

“I’m starting to think that he never supported it, which makes his election promise and everything he said over the last 18 months somewhat suspect.”

Still, Reid does not believe that the project of electoral reform is dead.

“It was never put to a vote in Canada before 2000, but it has come up again and again over the last 15 years, and it never goes away completely.”

He noted that in Prince Edward Island, the next election, slated for October 7, 2019 will include a referendum pitting two options against each other.

After twenty years working on the issue, seventeen of them as an MP representing a party that is lukewarm to the idea at best, Scott Reid spent eight months last year travelling the country with a committee of MP’s who were committed to bringing about a change. He then saw the idea tossed aside like a dirty rag two weeks ago.

Yet he still thinks the idea of electoral reform and proportional representation is alive in Canada.

But it may be as hard to predict when that will happen as it was to predict the Liberal complete about-face on the matter that happened two weeks ago.

A series of rallies took place across the country last Saturday opposing the Liberal government’s change of policy.