Nathan Cullen may have an unfortunate tendency to glean his foreign
policy from Netflix documentaries, but it is undeniable that he has done a
number on the Liberals in the special committee on electoral reform. On the
heels of cash-for-access, and then the hamfisted approval of Kinder Morgan,
today the Liberals lurch into the awkward position of hopping up on a soapbox
to rail against their signature electoral promise: electoral reform. Who put
the Liberals in this uncomfortable position? NDP MP Nathan Cullen did. In
terms of sheer political maneuvering and fortitude he is easily among the NDP's
best, and has certainly displayed that acumen in his work on the special
committee on electoral reform. The Liberal apoplexy today, their blatant
hypocrisy, their stammering anti-intellectualism, all Cullen's meticulous
construction. This began back in June when, after an unrelenting dressing down
by Cullen, the Liberals acquiesced to a committee composition in which they did
not comprise the majority. The optics of an undemocratically constituted
committee on electoral reform, after all, were very bad, and the Liberals
caved. Today, however, was the coup de grâce. In returning an ostensible
green-light for a referendum on First Past the Post versus any system which
meets the standard on the Gallagher Index on proportionality, the agreed members
of the multi-party committee on electoral reform, and Cullen in particular,
have forced the Liberals hand; and the Liberals, in turn, have taken the
opportunity to become loathesome and ridiculous.
The Liberals are doing what they always do, dissimulation and
distraction, the latest being Maryam Monsef attempting to fall on the grenade
and make the story about herself, and her personal insults and retractions of
said insults directed to the members of the special committee. But, make no
mistake, the story is rather, of course, that the Liberals are doing everything
in their power to scuttle electoral reform as such. That their efforts to do so
include insulting the members of the special committee as a cheap distraction
from the strategic blow that the committee has dealt to them is secondary.
Having been outmaneuvered at every turn, they have given up the ghost of trying
to appear the good guys, and are now simply spitting bile and vitrol in hopes
that it will overshadow it’s occasion.
The Liberals, having been the party of ‘sociology now,’ are now relying
upon base anti-intellectualism. Canadians don’t want electoral reform, we are
told, because look, here, in Maryam Monsef’s hands, a mathematical formula.
‘Isn’t it complicated?’ she asks, ‘inscrutable even?’ The Liberals are waving
pitchforks at statistical modeling, fearmongering about formulas. The purpose
of the Gallagher Index is to ensure that any system of elections conforms very
closely to proportionality. It is as though the Liberals had cracked open a
conventional radio and said ‘aren’t these electronics complex? Canadians don’t
want the songs and voices that this indecipherable hash of wires and speaker
cones offers.’ What the Liberals despise about the Gallagher Index is not its
indecipherable complexity, but rather that it sets a standard and benchmark for
proportionality that the Liberals cannot fudge, mystify, or obfuscate. Justin
Trudeau and Maryam Monsef desperately want an exit-strategy from their
electoral reform promises and their options were to either scuttle the entire
business, or move forward with a variant of electoral reform that is not in
fact proportional. The committee’s hard work has denied the Liberals the
opportunity to champion a self-serving and disproportionate electoral system
like ranked ballots, and so they have been left to flail about, smashing and
sabotaging what they can.
The Liberals are incensed because the committee actually did something
really smart. They were hoping that the committee would come back with one
system so that the Liberals could smother it with a pillow in the night.
Instead they returned with a standard, or benchmark, below which the Liberals'
preferred system[s] fall and before which they flunk. Its important that they
not let the story become 'Maryam Monsef was mean, but now she's apologized.'
The story is 'the committee has greenlit a referrendum with FPTP vs. any system
which meets the standard of the Gallagher Index (within 5% of absolute
proportionality).' The Liberals have been trapped and cornered by Cullen, the
rest of the special committee, and, most importantly, the Gallagher Index. They
hate it intensely because it precludes their preferred mystifications and
obfuscations, they hate that they are now stuck with a rubric from which they
cannot escape. What is insufferable, however, is the shock and disappointment
from Liberal voters. Of course the Liberals are unscrupulous, of course they
are disingenuous and hamfisted. These are not ‘new Liberals,’ they are the same
sorry, corrupt, and undemocratic technocrats that were evicted in 2003. The
Gallagher Index and its function is not, as Monsef and Trudeau would have it,
beyond the comprehension of the poor hinterland Canadian’s intellect; nor are
Monsef and Trudeau’s true motives in suggesting as much. Far from ‘not doing
the hard work,’ as Monsef alleged, the committee has made it ‘hard work’ for
the hackneyed and duplicitous Trudeau Liberals to wriggle out of their
signature campaign promise.
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