Electoral reform was the focus at a rally outside of a Kitchener church Thursday afternoon, after Justin Trudeau announced in February that reform wouldn’t be part of his mandate.
Inside the church local Liberal MP’s hosted a meet and greet with the minister of Canadian heritage, Mélanie Joly. Outside, the group hoped to remind the Liberal politicians about their promise to make every vote count.
“A lot of people feel extremely betrayed because they possibly voted for this particular campaign promise, so they were willing to vote strategically for a Liberal.” says Sharon Sommerville a co-chair for the Waterloo Region chapter of Fair Vote Canada
One of Trudeau’s campaign promises was to abandon the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system and replace it with a system that would be more representative of the population.
In February, after telling Canadians that a clear preference for a new voting system didn’t emerge, Trudeau removed electoral reform from his mandate.
Thursday’s rally was Terry Labach’s first time coming out to an event in defence of electoral reform, he says that the Liberals set electoral reform up to fail.
“They came up with a committee that was hobbled, that didn’t have a strong mandate, they didn’t try gathering consensus among Canadians to build support even though they said that they would.”
Another attendant at the rally, Glenda Wall, lost trust in the Liberals after hearing Trudeau say that there wasn’t enough interest in electoral reform.
“I think that’s just an excuse, I think that he wanted a ranked system, and when that didn’t happen, that he decided to back out of it.”
Sommerville says that there will be consequences for reneging on the promise but that it’s still not too lake to make good on the promise.
“I live in hope.” She says.
With reporting by Leena Latafat
