OTTAWA – The Trudeau government is finally getting around to creating a long-awaited special parliamentary committee on electoral reform.
A motion to create the committee was placed on the House of Commons order paper late Tuesday evening.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised during last fall’s election campaign that it would be the last election conducted under the first-past-the-post electoral system.
He promised to create a committee to examine alternatives and report back with recommendations within 18 months.
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But as his fledgling government passed the six-month mark last week with no committee on the horizon, advocates of proportional representation worried that Trudeau was planning to rag the puck long enough that there wouldn’t be enough time to implement reforms by the next election in 2019.
The motion should help put those fears to rest, at least for now. It specifies that the committee is to study “viable alternative voting systems, such as preferential ballots and proportional representation” as well as mandatory voting and online voting, and to present its final report no later than December, 2016.