What a gutless letdown on electoral reform by Justin Trudeau: I’m committed, I’m all in, Let’s do this — oh, never mind.

I know a contemporary of mine in B.C. who wrote to him saying: if your dad had been as gutless as PM, we’d still have laws on bedroom behaviour and our Constitution would still be in the U.K. He’d have whipped the ranked ballot through and people would’ve got used to it as quickly as they did to the once demonized loonie. You could’ve used your fake majority to make sure we never again have a fake majority. You could use some of his intellectual arrogance.

But this time in the service of ending forever the democratic embarrassment of first-past-the-post.

I know a young guy in the east who wrote a similar letter. The young do care about how undemocratic our democracy is because they’re still capable of being shocked by our shabby, sclerotic system. They believe you can make obvious, fair changes to it. He says he and his peers will look for other options next election. This faint-heartedness is how everyone gets ground down and rotten ways, not sunny ones, hang on, apparently forever.

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