In The duty last Saturday, a former advisor to Minister Sonia LeBel, Louis-François Brodeur, proposed that we abandon any attempt to reform the voting method and that we fall back on some institutional changes. However, unlike this former advisor to the Coalition Avenir Québec government, the New Democracy Movement, created 25 years ago this year, does not believe that the fight for changing the voting system should be put aside.
I attended, with my colleagues Jean-Pierre Charbonneau and Louis Bibaud, from the leadership of the New Democracy Movement, a conference on the subject organized by Mr. Brodeur. The main point that emerged from the review is that it was a very small group of people in the Prime Minister’s office who decided to put an end to the reform. The desire to keep power and continue to govern unchallenged was stronger than the party’s commitment to reforming the voting system.
This grayness of power — I repeat, of a small group of apparatchiks supported by the prime minister — caused the reform to fail. And it’s the same partisan behavior that explains previous failures, when the Parti Québécois was in power in 1984 and when Jean Charest’s Liberals were there between 2003 and 2008. What do all these exes think now?
As for François Legault’s troop, which is suffering a big drop in the polls, does it regret the short-term vision of its leaders? Are they embarrassed to have betrayed their virtuous promises repeated for years?
Should we give up now and abandon a reform project that has been carried out in a large number of democratic societies where electoral systems make every vote count? No ! Perhaps we need to consider changes outside of a reform, as Louis-François Brodeur is proposing and as the Chief Electoral Officer is currently proposing in a consultation. But will these changes solve the root of the problem described in Mr. Brodeur’s letter? No !
Only an in-depth reform of our voting system will help to alleviate “persistent electoral distortions, the growing gap between large cities and regions, the increase in inequalities, the absence of collective projects and the short-term vision of our political” — and I would add the disengagement of the population with regard to our democracy.
Nearly 22,000 people signed a petition to the National Assembly last fall calling for reform of the voting system. A new bill has been tabled in the National Assembly — and could be studied quickly if the CAQ regains a sense of honor. I am not the only one who believes that reform is necessary and still possible. It would just take political courage, a true democratic bias and honesty in relation to respecting the signature made in the National Assembly itself.