Liberal MPs who voted NO to electoral reform May 31 2017

h/t Anita Nickerson for above graphic 

It was a bid by NDP Nathan Cullen to put pressure on Trudeau to put electoral reform back on the table.

All Liberals but two, and the ones listed below who didn't vote, voted NO to accepting the final ERRE report, including the Liberal MPs on the ERRE committee. 
The NDP, Bloc, CPC, and Green voted in favour.

Two Liberals who kept their promise, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith @beynate  and Sean Casey @SeanCaseyLPC , deserve our thanks.

Vote details : "That the Third Report of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, presented on Thursday, December 1, 2016, be concurred in."

The ERRE Report in question.

21 Liberal MPs did not vote : 

.
























4 consrvatives did not vote:
Mel Arnold North - Okanagan — Shuswap
Blaine Calkins  - Red Deer — Lacombe
Ed Fast ~ Conservative - Abbotsford
Randy Hoback - Conservative ~ Prince Albert 

5 NDP did not vote:

Niki Ashton - Churchill — Keewatinook Aski
Fin Donnelly - Port Moody — Coquitlam
Peter Julian - New Westminster — Burnaby

Pierre Nantel - Longueuil — Saint-Hubert
Tracey Ramsey - Essex

Bloc Rheal Fortin and Independent Hunter Tantoo also did not vote.

.

So this was a *free vote* then, was it?

From the Liberal Party Platform:

For members of the Liberal Caucus, all votes will be free votes with the exception of:

• those that implement the Liberal electoral platform;

• traditional confidence matters, like the budget; and 

• those that address our shared values and the protections guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Unless you'd like to argue that *not* implementing anything *is* the Liberal electoral platform.

So which argument from Trudeau was so compelling that all 173 Liberal members in the HoC voted No? 
The first one where we could not have electoral reform because there was no consensus among Canadians? 
Or the second one where we could not have electoral reform because there was too much consensus for an electoral reform you didn't like because a party like the one which just held power for the last 10 years might win a couple of seats?

Which argument really sold all 173 of you to vote NO and then send out letters explaining how really really disappointed you all were with the way things turned out?

.

The Emperor has no shirt

Today, after sending out his new rookie Minister of Democratic Institutions to deliver the news his electoral reform promise was officially dead , Justin Trudeau stood in the HoC and said: 

 "As people in this House know, I have long preferred preferential ballot..."

Yes. Here he is in 2014 explaining that preference at length. Jump to the 24:09 mark.



Excerpted : 

"First of all on first-past-the-post, you’re absolutely right that it doesn’t matter if someone gets 31 percent of the vote, and the other parties only get you know 26 and 20 percent, and it’s all divided up, then they get to represent one 100 percent of the community, and that’s why I entirely agree that it has to move beyond first past the post.

“But how we do that is very important. I personally and the Liberal Party has adopted a format of a preferential ballot, where the person who would be elected gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the community, so they represent the majority of the community.

I think that a ranked ballot, a preferential ballot, is a strong way of changing our electoral system that I’ve been pushing and I’ve committed to look at once we form government.”

The problem with preferential or ranked ballot, also known as Alternative Vote, is that it's the only electoral system worse for voters than what we have now. As the second party of choice for supporters of the Cons, NDP, and Greens, the Liberal Party would be the obvious benefactor of a ranked ballot in a single member riding and would likely form the government in perpetuity. This point was driven home by expert after expert to the ERRE committee, some 88% of them, despite hopeful entreaties by the Liberal MPs to the 4% of experts they could cobble together in support of it.

We had some earlier inkling the choice would be between preferential ballot or nothing.

On December 1 2016 after Monsef's math meltdown, the four Liberal MPs on the ERRE committee announced at their presser that they believed any change to our electoral system would be too "radical". Liberal Chair Francis Scarpaleggia explained :

"Perhaps if we chose preferential ranked ballot we could do that tomorrow. 

Yes, the PM made that commitment but a lot of people thought he was talking about a ranked ballot. You could do a ranked ballot like that. [Snaps fingers] Nobody wants ranked ballot, so what does that leave us?" 

Apparently nothing.

Two weeks later on December 13 2016, an ERRE motion was up for a vote in the House. Approved by Scarpaleggia, it proposed to add the committee's own previous electoral reform e-consultation, which included specific questions on voting systems preferences including proportional representation, on to the Liberals absurdly vague and misdirecting MyDemocracy VoxPops quiz : 

That, in relation to the questions on democratic values that the Minister of Democratic Institution intends to make available for Canadians' response on the websitemydemocracy.ca, the Committee encourages the Minister to reproduce and include in its entirety the questions within this Committee's e-consultation survey, either as a replacement for the other planned questions, or in addition to any other questions that the Minister wishes to include; 

Five minutes later, all 173 Liberal MPs in the House had unanimously voted it down, including the four Liberals on the ERRE committee - Ruby Sahota, John Aldag, Matt DeCourcey, and Sherry Romanado, plus the Liberal Chair Francis Scarpaleggia - while the Cons, NDP, Bloc, and Green all voted in favour.
Final vote : 173 No to 131 Yea.    Justin Trudeau was not present.

Yet out on the hustings the past few weeks, he continued to reassure us that he had stated in 2015 that "our electoral system is broken", alongside a promise to make that election the last one under First Past the Post, and he was fully committed to keeping that promise.

So it looks like this was just a vote-grabbing campaign promise borrowed from the NDP and Green platforms to outflank them when the Libs were the third party in the House. 
Vote strategically for us this one last time, they said, and we'll make sure you never have to vote strategically again. Desperate to ditch Harper and excited at the prospect of an end to cynical party politics, Canadians did.
When the Liberals got a majority in 2015, it looked like they could both keep that promise and control of parliament as long as electoral reform was restricted to their preferred preferential or ranked ballot option, but when that was no longer a credible choice, they scuttled the whole thing.

I wonder if they'll promise it all over again in 2019. This page below is still up on the Liberal Party website.

Excellent satire piece from Andrew Coyne: It’s not the Liberals’ fault for lying about electoral reform, it’s yours for believing them.

Liberal’s abandoned electoral reform

Fears Of Alt-Right, Divisive Referendum Behind Liberal Electoral Reform Reversal: Insiders

And congrats to Liberal ERRE committee obstructionists Matt DeCourcey and Sherry Romanado on your recent appointments as parliamentary secretaries at an additional $16,800 a year.

.