Roundup: An imaginary crisis

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The summer hearings of the electoral reform committee have ended, and now they move to cross-country hearings before they begin their deliberations. The optimistic among them think they can achieve consensus. The remarkably optimistic insist that it’s going to be some form of proportional representation. And the Conservatives say that any consensus would be contingent upon a referendum, while some Liberals say that if they can get consensus there would be no need for one. So, with any luck, that means it’ll all go down in flames. That said, there was still more eye-rolling testimony yesterday that should be commented upon.

There’s this existential drama going on where a Liberal MP on the committee noted that they’re not in a crisis situation, so is this the best time to have the debate, and Elizabeth May, true to form, prompts a witness to say that we should change the system now before there’s a crisis. But what crisis are we talking about?

This I can’t figure out. We’ve had 149 years post-Confederation of free and fair elections, and reasonably good governance, and do I keep needing to remind everyone that the system isn’t broken? Because it’s not. And people who tend to talk “crisis” have been the ones from whom that crisis is that the party they favour didn’t win. “Oh, but Stephen Harper!” the exclaim. To which I remind them that he wasn’t a Bond villain. Yes, he bent the rules of Parliament to their breaking point, but that had absolutely nothing to do with our electoral system and everything to do with all of the other tinkering that we’ve done to our system in the name of making things “more democratic,” like changing the way we select leaders. Harper had a “democratic mandate” from his party members, the cachet of having united the party, and an immense amount of goodwill among the party members for that. But he was also unchallenged by his own party members for his going too far and his excesses because the party members let him, in large part because of civic illiteracy on their part in not knowing they had agency enough to push back, and their accountability measures having been weakened by successive generations of ways in which people tinkered with the system. This whole electoral reform exercise is just tinkering with the system on a more massive scale, and I have zero confidence that things will end up better because (to quote Colby Cosh), it’s a contrived moral panic over a solution in search of a problem. There is no crisis. There will not be a crisis, and it will certainly not be over the perceived legitimacy of a so-called “false majority” (which doesn’t exist because it’s a sore loser term to try to make a Thing out of a logical fallacy). The crisis is one of civic literacy – not the electoral system. Attempts to cast it as such are disingenuous in the extreme.

Good reads:

  • In Shanghai, Justin Trudeau delivered a speech that pointedly referred to China’s human rights record, while other worry about the South China Sea issue.
  • Trudeau’s visit thus far has netted 56 deals signed worth $1.2 billion, plus an agreement to open seven new visa offices to facilitate Chinese tourism to Canada.
  • The PBO says that because the new Canada Child Benefit isn’t indexed (yet), it will lose value over time.
  • The former head of the CSE says that we should develop offensive cyber-weapon capabilities rather than just play defence.
  • The federal government moving away from newspaper advertising is hurting the bottom lines of the print media industry.
  • Maryam Monsef’s electoral consultation tour continues to talk values rather than voting systems, which has the other parties steaming.
  • Kellie Leitch polled her followers if we should screen refugees for “anti-Canadian values.” And how do we test this? Polygraph? Telepath? Cripes.
  • Peter MacKay says he’s almost ready to decide if he’s going to run for leadership, which is getting boring by this point.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/771498869989502980

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/771499304464871424

https://twitter.com/journo_dale/status/771499614080004097