Gotta say the Trudeau government looked good on electoral reform yesterday. Surely breaking a dumb promise is better than going ahead with it.
The blog Routine Proceedings has links to a lot of commentary. Here is part of one I liked, which reminds us that proportional representation is not proportional to us, it's proportional for the political parties, which achieve proportionality by getting to appoint their own representatives to the legislatures:
PR generally weakens the connection between elected officials and local ridings (in some cases, doing away with the concept of ridings altogether) and so serves to consolidate power in the PMO, especially at election time, when ranked candidate lists are compiled in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms.
My own view is that the best kind of electoral reform would come from within the parties themselves: democratizing the nomination process so that grandees no longer can block impassioned activists and iconoclasts who challenge the party line.Some of the Liberals' other promises could use some attention, however: reforming Bill C-51, for instance, or developing a Home Care plan.
