Letter addressed to the Premier of Quebec,
Friday, December 17, in the middle of the afternoon, a week before Christmas and while parliamentary work had already been suspended for a few days, one of your main advisers informed us by telephone that you, your government, your deputies and your party renounce your electoral commitment to have a new proportional-type voting system adopted during this mandate. Even more and more seriously, he told us that you did not intend to make the change in the voting system an issue for the next election and therefore to remain consistent by being in favor of fundamental reform. Clearly, by your denial, you are making yourself the gravedigger of a high democratic project of which you presented yourself as the new hero! This is an unexpected and loathsome holiday gift.
In short, not only are you betraying your word and your signature, but you are renouncing all the speeches and all the remarks made for eight years by you, your managers of the file and the members of your party, who had embraced the plea for the relevance and the importance of abandoning the old voting system inherited from England.
Mr. Legault, the members of the New Democracy Movement and the tens of thousands of people belonging to some 80 major citizen organizations of the Coalition for Electoral Reform Now! never forced you to make the many promises on this subject since 2014. They never forced you to say that you would do better than all the other political leaders before you, that you would not make a Justin Trudeau of yourself, that it would encourage people’s cynicism towards politicians not to complete this fundamental reform.
Your political advisor did try to blame your decision on the pandemic, but, pushed to its limits, he ended up saying that it is first and foremost your deputies who do not want to go any further now and for the next few years! However, you had already made a major concession to them by renouncing to set up, as promised, the new voting method for the general election of 2022. Your deputies thus had the assurance of being able to benefit from the twisted advantages of the system next October. system in place since 1792 which, if trends continue, will produce a National Assembly in which more than half of the Quebeckers who oppose your government will be even more seriously under-represented.
By definitively burying the reform project that the DND has been defending since 1999, not only are you throwing years of labor and non-partisan activism away, but you are killing any hope of a representative democracy based on respect for the plural popular will and equity, as has existed for a very long time in a majority of advanced societies.
You were part of the lineage of the great René Lévesque, who considered the current voting system to be “democratically infected” because of the electoral distortions and the abuse of power it generates. With your decision, you join the camp of politicians who lured their population to seize power and who, once well established in the command post, cavalierly changed course to retain all the partisan advantages that represent the status quo and its outrageous distortions.
Mr. Prime Minister, we believed you. We believed in your minister. Today, in front of your about-face, we are disgusted. Yes, disgusted and appalled by this major democratic setback and this shameful lack of ethics. We are also outraged by your decision not to announce it publicly yourself by taking the trouble to explain it to yourself. There is a lack of respect, courage and honor that must be remembered under the rubric of the dark pages of our political history.
* Letter co-signed by the other members of the MDN Board of Directors: Françoise David, Sylvie Cantin, Luc Bordeleau, Marie-Claude Bertrand, Henri Milner, Shahad Salman, Jean-François Delisle, Mireille Bénard, Jean-Benoit Ratté, Charles-Émile Fecteau.