The Liberals have officially walked away from their electoral reform pledge. To be honest, I think this was the most responsible thing for them to do.
Implementing a fair voting system by 2019 was never a realistic goal, and the campaign promise was reckless. Any practical, fair and proportional system would require a re-drawing of our federal riding boundaries, and that alone could take years. We'd also likely need to switch from hand-counted ballots to electronic tabulators, which would also take years to implement (terms of reference, tendering process, purchase, manufacture, distribution, testing, and training).
Trudeau had to find a way to get out of this mess, and he had two main options:
1) Call a referendum.
2) Walk away.
Of those two options, I'm glad he walked away.
Canadians aren't informed enough nor engaged enough for this process to take place right now. Our school curriculum, sadly, teaches nothing about voting systems and the media has largely ignored the details of this important issue. What Canadians deserve, is a less-rushed deliberative process that is educational, informative, and well-funded. A responsible campaign promise for 2019 would be a commitment to creating a randomly-selected Citizens Assembly or Citizens Reference Panel to look closely at the issue, followed by a single-election pilot project and then followed by a referendum. In other words, let a non-partisan body choose an alternative system, let citizens try it out, and then give voters the final choice.
In the meantime, let's focus on where voting reform is indeed possible in the short term: City Councils. Municipal voting reform across Canada will break the stranglehold of first-past-the-post. It will show people that other options are available. It will normalise reform, and slowly marginalise our current system.
This federal situation was always a mirage. Let's get back to work: bottom-up is the way forward. First we take back our Councils, then we take our Parliaments.