A new voting system for Canada wasn’t the only casualty when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walked away from his electoral-reform promise this month.
The whole idea of consulting the public on difficult policy decisions may now be in doubt, too. And that’s a problem for a government so avowedly attached to consultations — at least 80 of them by some estimates late last year.
What’s now clear, in fact, is that this is a government that knows how to launch an exercise in consulting the public, but not a way to turn that into real decisions.
The electoral-reform decision, we’ll remember, came after two sets of public hearings: one, the more traditional set conducted by the all-party committee of the Commons, and another, more contemporary, online exercise called MyDemocracy.ca.
Essentially, Trudeau and his new democratic reform minister, Karina Gould, have said these exercises were a failure, at least in terms of giving guidance for how the government should proceed.
“There is no consensus among Canadians on how, or even whether, to reform our electoral system,” Trudeau told the Commons on Feb. 1.
What then, was the purpose of all that consultation — that big, controversial online survey, which never really asked Canadians what exactly they wanted in a new voting system?
This isn’t the first time either that the government has headed in a totally different direction than the results of its consultations.
Last year, a special, joint Commons-Senate committee was given the important job of seeking views on assisted-dying legislation and shaping a new law for Canada. The eventual legislation, introduced last April, was at odds with the committee report — so much so that one of the committee chairs, MP Rob Oliphant, couldn’t vote for the bill on first reading. (He would eventually support the bill, only because he came to the view that any law was better than no law at all.)
This week, I was sitting in on a session in Ottawa in which academics were reviewing the progress of the assisted-dying law last year, and all that had happened since the Trudeau government took power.
The timeline had a big hole in it — what one academic called the “black box” between the committee report and the introduction of the actual law. No one was entirely sure who was being consulted during that period or who was exerting clout while the bill was being drafted. It’s still a mystery, in fact. Whatever happened during those two months could not exactly be called open consultation.
A recent story in iPolitics, about the government’s climate-change consultations, also raises some serious questions about whether all this talking to the public is just window-dressing. The story evokes echoes of the electoral-reform fiasco — free-form, town-hall sessions with no one taking notes and participants directed to deposit their views with an online website, which turns out to be overrun by Internet trolls.
This week, the government also threw a bucket of cold water over a proposal it recently received to help revive the media industry. The Huffington Post reported that Ottawa had no enthusiasm at all for the idea of setting up a special fund to encourage civic journalism, as recommended in the recent Public Policy Forum report.
“There is no way we’re doing it,” an anonymous source, identified as a “senior Liberal,” told the Huffington Post.
Though the PPF report was independent, it did receive $200,000 from the Trudeau government to carry out the comprehensive study, and as far as I can tell, this is the first, real reply to the substance of the findings, or at least one of them.
How did the government source arrive at that decision? Why is the source anonymous? Those, too, are more mysteries inside the black box.
In a way, this is nothing new. Governments have always committed themselves to talking to the public and then hammering out decisions behind closed doors. I seem to remember a couple of constitutional agreements that went off the rails in the 1990s because the final deal bore too little resemblance to what the public thought it wanted. In the couple of decades since, the Canadian public has grown even more cynical about whether the government is actually listening.
The current government came to office mindful of that cynicism, and wide-open consultations were supposed to be a remedy to it. But that’s only half the solution. If the decisions aren’t as open and transparent as the hearings, we still have a government operating inside that old, black box. And if that’s the case, why bother with consultations at all?
sdelacourt@bell.net
sdelacourt@bell.net
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