Trudeau: Referendum “Would Not Be in Canada’s Interest”

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Nicholas Amato
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Any hope voters had of reforming Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system has been quashed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

In a mandate letter released Wednesday to the Canadian Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau abandoned his promise of electoral reform.

Trudeau’s letter to Gould asserted that “a clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged. Furthermore, without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada’s interest. Changing the electoral system will not be in your mandate.”

With this statement, any chance of electoral reform geared toward proportional representation, a system Trudeau and his supporters advocated, has completely vanished.

This is a major flip for Trudeau, as reforming Canada’s electoral system was one of his central campaign promises. While campaigning in June of 2015, Trudeau vowed that “the 2015 election will be the last federal election using first-past-the-post.”

Data from a government report shows that Canadians are generally satisfied with Canada’s democracy, but also suggests that people want some form of electoral reform. 70 percent of respondents to a government-led survey stated that they want a government in which several parties need to agree collectively on an issue before a decision is made, rather than allowing one party to make all the decisions.

Canada is a representative democracy, in which the country is divided into 338 districts. Residents vote on a representative to become their member of Canada’s parliament in Ottawa. Whichever party manages to elect the greatest number of representatives forms the government.

Canada’s system is often seen as unfair because many candidates win their seats with less than 50 percent of the vote. Trudeau and the Liberal Party won with just short of 39.5% of the total vote, and so this was a self-serving decision for Trudeau and the Liberal Party, as they have no need to change a system they benefited greatly from in the most recent election. Trudeau decided to stick with the status quo instead of making the change that the people asked for.

 

Photo Credit: Getty Images

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Nicholas Amato

Nicholas Amato is the News Editor at Being Libertarian. He’s an undergraduate student at San Jose State University, majoring in political science and minoring in journalism.

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