Carney says he is ‘open’ to electoral reform, takes subtle dig at Trudeau
OTTAWA — Liberal Leader Mark Carney said on Friday he is “open” to revisiting electoral reform but that it’s not a priority in the current political climate. And if he were to follow that route, he would not look to “tip the scales” like his predecessor Justin Trudeau.
Speaking in Sault Ste. Marie, Carney would not directly commit to changing the current electoral system and said that commitment is absent from his party’s platform. Trudeau abandoned the idea in his first term in office and recently said it was one of his biggest regrets .
“Government is about making priorities and given the scale of the economic crisis that we’re facing, the security crisis we’re facing, our commitment to supporting Canadians through a range of social programs… Candidly, it is not in the platform,” Carney said.
Carney offered his personal view on the issue. “I think… a prime minister should be neutral on these issues, so that a process — if a process is developed — that they are objective and not to be seen to tip the scales in one direction or another,” he said.
“I think that… looking back on what happened previously, that probably is part of what stalled progress on it,” he added.
Trudeau famously promised that the 2015 election would be the last time Canadians elect their federal government under the first-past-the-post system — where the person which gets the most votes in each constituency becomes the member of Parliament.
An all-party committee released a report in December 2016 recommending that a referendum be held to switch to proportional representation, but it became clear that there was no emerging consensus from all parties — especially from the governing Liberals.
While the report had the sign-off from the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and Greens agreed with the overall conclusion of the report but questioned the necessity to hold a referendum.
Liberals released their own supplementary report which suggested that their prime minister’s self-imposed deadline to approve of a new system by 2019 was too “rushed.”
Trudeau opted to abandon his election promise a few months later. In a mandate letter to his newly appointed Minister of Democratic Institutions, in February 2017, he wrote that a “clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged.”
Trudeau had made it clear by that point that he was not as interested in changing the system by which his party won power.
And while at the time Trudeau did not openly push for a ranked ballot — which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference and eliminates the least popular option until a candidate has more than 50 per cent support — it was clearly his preferred option.
In 2021, he admitted that he “never flinched in (his) desire for ranked ballots” and said he would not favour proportional representation because it would help fringe parties.
When Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister in early January, he said that not moving forward on electoral reform was one of his “many regrets.”
“I do wish that we’d been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country so that people could choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot,” he said.
“Parties would spend more time trying to be people’s second or third choices and people would be looking for things they have in common rather than trying to polarize and divide Canadians against each other.”
Carney said there “may be a point” where a re-elected Liberal government may have advanced on “other immediate, pressing priorities” like Canada’s relationship with the U.S. and that “those more structural issues in our democracy could be addressed.”
In French, he said he is “open” to the idea but that now is not the moment to engage in the process.
National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com
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