Chris Selley: Justin Trudeau’s electoral-reform mea culpa only makes him look worse

Fifty-two years too late, Justin Trudeau seems to think a bit of humility might do him good. In an hour-long podcast interview last week with relatively freethinking Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith, the prime minister lamented the way he had handled the electoral reform file. He even posted the clip to his social media, with the caption, “If I could have done one thing different, it’d be this.”

“I made two big mistakes on this (file),” Trudeau told Erskine-Smith. In order to assuage “some very strong voices in my caucus who were very clear they wanted to at least make an argument for proportional representation (PR),” he said he “left the door open” to that.

“And that made a whole bunch of people who heard me say, ‘last election (under) first-past-the-post,’ translate that into ‘he’s going to bring in proportional representation,’ which I was … never … going to,” he said.

Well, no. People didn’t just hear what they wanted to hear. The 2015 platform document itself promised to “convene an all-party parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting and online voting.” PR supporters expected their ideas at least to get a fair hearing. They were incredibly naive to do so, but naiveté isn’t a sin. Lying to the naive is a sin.

Indeed, the most remarkable moment in the interview was when Trudeau admitted his campaign language was deliberately designed to “bring in the Fair Vote (Canada) people” — i.e., the most prominent PR-advocacy group in the country, whose members overwhelmingly vote NDP. Trudeau wanted to purloin those votes, at least partly under false pretences. The results show that it worked.

Trudeau was certainly correct when he told Erskine-Smith that, having deceived Fair Vote Canada, NDP voters and his own caucus, he should have reneged on the deal first thing — like, on the day he unveiled his first Cabinet and said “because it’s 2015,” and half the country and two-thirds of the media fell in a swoon.

He should not, say, have struck a committee to spend untold time and money traipsing around the country hearing people ask for PR, then throw the committee’s report recommending PR in the garbage and deride the very PR supporters he courted. “Do you think that Kellie Leitch should have her own party?” Trudeau barked at an impudent audience member at a 2017 event in Iqaluit, referring to the former Tory cabinet minister’s proposed “values test” for immigrants.

But at their root these weren’t “mistakes” at all. In Trudeau’s own description they were deliberate actions, not just to trick NDP voters into voting Liberal but to bamboozle members of his own caucus. And then he just posted the whole clip on X, where everyone could see it!

It would be like Stephen Harper saying he “made a mistake” in the Conservatives’ 2006 campaign platform, which promised to “stop the Liberal attack on retirement savings and preserve income trusts by not imposing any new taxes on them” — and then flip-flopped eight months later, citing the need to prevent corporate tax leakage.

This was hardly a new concern: the Conservatives were warned about leakage by many people, including conservative economist Jack Mintz. They chose to ignore those concerns until they were safely in office. At best that’s negligent incuriousness. (Fun fact, from John Ibbitson’s 2015 biography of Harper: The new regulations for taxing income trusts were drawn up by a fellow named Mark Carney, then a senior finance official.)

Or it would be like Dalton McGuinty saying he “made a mistake” when he promised in 2003 never to raise Ontarians’ taxes — having apparently never considered that circumstances might change; again, negligent at best — and then raised Ontarians’ taxes.

These were greasy political calculations, and they can only legitimately be apologized for as such.

Lying in politics isn’t criminal and there’s no point trying to make it criminal, though some have suggested it.  Politicians would never pass any such law that had any teeth, and it would improperly outsource to some enforcement body what should be a very basic individual moral obligation to be honest.

One’s family, friends, colleagues and political supporters can best decide what judgment is due for one’s record on that front. The Trudeau I heard on Erskine-Smith’s podcast richly deserves the judgment that seems to be coming to him next election day … if he lasts that long.

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