To Vote on the Principle,or the Package?
Our first two national referendums were on principles (whether to impose prohibition, whether to release the government from its pledge not to impose conscription), while the third was on a complete package (the Charlottetown Accord’s extensive and interconnected constitutional amendments).
The pros and cons of asking people to vote on the principle of something, or on its details, have been weighed ever since Parliament first debated this in 1898. Some MPs wanted the electorate to deal with prohibition in principle. Others argued it only made sense for the people to consider a detailed bill that went beyond general opinion.
Justice Minister David Mills was in a predicament. He’d previously said in the Commons, “There should be a well-considered Bill prepared, and the vote should be taken upon it.” Mills asserted, “The question is not whether the public favour prohibition in the abstract. It is whether they are ready honestly to carry it out in the concrete. The abstract position does not mean anything.” Now a minister bound by the doctrine of cabinet solidarity, Mills was obliged to support the Laurier government’s plan for a simple ballot question on the principle of prohibition alone. Not for the first time did a parliamentarian confront the public dilemma of personal opinion and a previously stated conclusion that had to be subordinated to the party’s official position on an issue. It is, in fact, common diet on Parliament Hill.
Other parliamentarians, some newspaper editors, and the liquor interests also considered it problematic for electors to express their opinions only on the principle of prohibition in broad terms. However, this broad-brush approach — prohibition, Yes or No, rather than the detailed legislation to implement it — was favoured by the prohibition movement and by Prime Minister Laurier.
In support of his government’s bill for a direct vote on the principle of prohibition, Laurier addressed a number of the issues raised in this debate. A major one was the loss of government revenues from liquor tax that would result from prohibition. “In the matter of the falling-off in revenue, should such a law be enacted, that is a question we thought better to leave to the electors themselves to ponder over and to consider, and to state their judgment upon in the best way they thought fit,” Laurier explained.
At this time the Government of Canada was reaping $7 million a year from taxes on liquor, a significant portion of the public revenue. The minister of finance would just have to provide other sources of revenue if the excise taxes flowing into the public treasury from the liquor traffic dried up. The PM suggested more tax revenue could come from coffee, tea, sugar, or tobacco, but then added, upon reflection, that the finance minister “cannot put a single penny more duty on tobacco. If he were to put any heavier duty upon tobacco it is well known that it would not produce any revenue at all.”
The PM addressed whether and to what extent this revenue aspect should be included in the question submitted to the voters and whether a rider should be added to the ballot requiring the government to implement prohibition legislation if a majority voted in the affirmative — in short, making it a referendum rather than a plebiscite. He didn’t want to require voters to decide specifically on how the additional revenue should be made up, or oblige the government to act in a certain way given the voting results. Laurier rejected the idea of any riders to the ballot, and likewise turned back the idea of submitting to voters a detailed bill on prohibition, wanting lots of room to manoeuvre.
“All these considerations might well have formed part of the question to be submitted to the electors,” the PM told the Commons, “but we thought it better to leave the question unhampered by these considerations, so that every man would be free to give his vote on the simple question, according to his own judgment and conscience.”
Deciding whether a ballot should ask approval in principle, or present a specific plan that includes the hard trade-offs and working details, has been a recurring topic ever since that inaugural parliamentary debate in 1898. In 2016 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government had an electoral mandate on the clear principle that it would replace the first-past-the-post electoral system by a method of electing MPs that more “fairly” reflected the levels of popular vote that parties and their candidates received from Canadian electors. Yet many still called for a referendum on the Liberal’s specific plan, which, it turned out, was something the prime minister didn’t have.
In cases in which the new model electoral system is ready to roll out before voters, we’ve seen a recurring pattern in five provinces where the complexities of the proposed voting system bogs down discussion. From British Columbia to Ontario, through New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the quest for electoral change was accompanied by complaints, after the proposed new electoral method failed to win approval, that many facing their provincial ballot question on the subject “did not understand the proposed system.”
We’ve now had enough such votes to see a pattern of inept political communication that gives voters a sense they need to know how the system works, rather than understand what outcome it could produce. Most citizens voting for a party promising a child tax credit don’t know how the calculations are made, just that they’ll get a cheque in the mail. Wilfrid Laurier knew that it was enough to address the principle, not try to work out the details during a campaign, such as trying to make regular citizens familiar with the mind-numbing details of an electoral system’s inner workings.
A benefit of our federal system is that one province can try something new — such as health care insurance, votes for women, a minimum wage for workers, election finance reform, mandatory seat belts, a human rights code — while governments and residents of other provinces observe how that works out. If the experiment seems an improvement over the status quo, other jurisdictions in time replicate the measure, adjusted to their regional standards. Profiting from this kind of “leadership by example” with electoral system changes in one province would be a good way to observe how it really works. This tried-and-true Canadian pattern requires only that some leader has the vision to start.
For a century and a half, a parade of nation-defining issues has marched through our political arena. The broad concept of each plan then encounters the specifics of implementation, and we regularly hear it said that “the devil is in the details.” Working out the trade-offs, integrating jostling interests, and watering down the grip of effective measures to achieve necessary compromise is the work of elected representatives, public servants, the courts, special interest groups, and associations. It won’t escape Canadians wanting to improve this democratic operation and enhance political accountability that a refinement of process is needed to close the yawning gap between general electoral mandates and specific issue mandates, between major public issues and citizens’ limited connection to them, and between broad principles and specific laws and programs. Nor will it escape democrats that the necessary connector is a revamped twenty-first-century Parliament operating in harmony with Canada’s sovereign people.