If parliament is prorogued until March 24th, then I guess they’re not going to hit the March 19th deadline to resolve the unconstitutional “Lost Canadians” issue: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/court-blasts-trudeau-government-for-delays-in-passing-lost-canadians-bill/article_5f2076be-b982-11ef-97b5-b76bc081d0ec.html
Hmm. And they’re already pissed. What actions could they actually take here? It’s not the kind of law you can just strike down, because you need it to define things.
While announcing his resignation, Trudeau reflected on his one regret in public office: killing electoral reform.
“I do wish that we’d been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country so that people could simply choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot,” he said Monday.
Can it not still be done?
He threw the whole idea aside as soon as he won based on the current system. He didn’t even have to think twice before saying it couldn’t be done. The only reason he’s coming back to it now is because our voting system is showing him the door.
It’s pure self-preservation at this point. Too little too late. And I’m someone who voted for him.
No, this characterization is flat out horse shit.
The Liberals enacted a parliamentary committee to study how the voting system should be changed, while still clearly signalling that they’d rather just pass legislation to enact ranked ballots.
The committee ended up coming back saying “yeah we should probably do proportional representation, but maybe put it to a vote”, and then the conservatives started hollering that you had to have a referendum because FPTP is the only system that benefits them and a referendum is an easy way of getting people to vote NO, and then the NDP joined them in hollering that we needed a referendum because they got high on the intellectual rigeur and perfectness of Proportional Representation. Trudeau ultimately decided fuck that it’s not worth it and didn’t go through with it. He expressed shortly afterwards in an interview that he wanted ranked ballots which was easy to do through legislation, but once it became clear that a referendum was going to be demanded, and then after that if PR was chosen a whole constitutional amendment process would have to be gone through across all the provinces, that he didn’t want to put that country through all of that in light of the fact that Britain had just gone through Brexit and Trump had just won for the first time.
You can doubt his reasoning, but there was no indication they just abandoned the idea after winning, and literally every indication for years that he wanted to just push through ranked ballots but ultimately decided not to.
Perhaps, yes. I know he’s a politician and truthful likely isn’t in his vocabulary, but one would think that if this is actually his biggest regret, perhaps the pressure to nix the plan came more from other MPs. After all, they also gained their positions from that same system.
