Justin Trudeau finally offered some greater elaboration late last week about why he decided to pull the plug on the electoral reform file, and the plaintive wails from the proponents of electoral reform were fairly predictable.  And despite the protests, I do think that Trudeau made some very salient points about the issues of stability of the country under different electoral rules, and certainly if we were to hold a referendum on the issue, as the Conservatives made a precondition for any movement on the file.

The question Trudeau asked in return to a woman who pressed the point about electoral reform while he was in Nunavut was "Do you think Kellie Leitch should have her own party?"  The usual suspects on social media responded with the same old sarcastic points like "Newsflash! Leitch is already running for the Conservative Party" without actually understanding why it would be a bigger issue for her to have her own party as opposed to leading the Conservative Party of Canada, and yes, there is a difference.

One of the biggest questions about what a move to proportional representation would mean in this country is whether any of our established "big tent" parties largely meaning the Conservatives and the Liberals would actually survive in a system that offers different rewards than the current one does.  In many ways, those "big tents" operate as coalitions already, bringing in different regional concerns and fiscal and social concerns in order to come up with a fairly cohesive policy framework that they can present to the public, and once in government, use that internal coalition to try and distribute the benefits that flow from it in ways that placate the various factions in a way that brings as much peace to the table while allowing that government to maintain the confidence of the Chamber.

The benefits of big tents, as has been long proven over the course of our history, is that it moderates the extremes in our politics.  In order to have a chance at gaining power and holding it, it's pushed our parties to the centre of the spectrum because that's how you win.  Where you straddle those lines is how you get enough seats to form government, especially with an electorate that is not especially tribal in their partisanship so as to create the kinds of permanent cleavages you see in some other countries.  It also moderates the various excesses of regional politics because the math simply isn't there to ignore or inflame regional grievances and gain or keep power in any real sense.

Have we had regional parties before?  Sure.  Have they formed governments or lasted as solid movements beyond a couple of electoral cycles?  No, and that's where a lot of the arguments against the current system start to fall apart.  For everyone who yells about the 1993 election and how the Bloc Québécois were able to become the official opposition while the Reform Party dominated the west, it ignores that the system largely self-corrected within a couple elections.  The Bloc's vote retreated as the protest politics that fuelled it died out, and the Reform Party realized that they couldn't make meaningful gains without being a national party, which eventually allowed for them to merge and create the modern Conservative Party, and it moderated their regional grievance-nursing in the process.  And while these same PR proselytizers insist that FPTP only gains by clustering regional votes and allows for governments to form without seats on some parts of the country (like the Liberals in Alberta or the Conservatives in Quebec), that makes a couple of mistakes in how they're conceptualizing things, namely that those parties don't make efforts to reach out to those regions (and the Liberals have made tremendous gains in Alberta, as the Conservatives have in Quebec), but it also assumes that elections are the only ways in which people get representation, as opposed to how our system actually works toward engagement such as through riding associations that feed people's concerns to their party caucuses in the House.  Your region can still have representation without having a seat in the Commons.

And this is where the fear of fringe parties starts to come in.  Under a PR system, the incentives for big tent parties to moderate extremes in order to win power are thrown out the window.  When the calculation is no longer how do you broaden your appeal to win enough seats to gain power, but rather how do you narrowly target enough voters to gain enough seats to win you leverage in a coalition, then we are likely to start seeing more regional and social cleavages, which would also include things like ethnic or religious parties (something the current system is moderating as there are very real voting blocs out there that respond to these impulses), and single-issue parties that could agitate around things like being anti-abortion or anti-immigration.  We also have a demonstrated history in this country about getting behind cults of personality, as with Rob Ford, and could possibly replicate itself with Kevin O'Leary (or Kellie Leitch, per Trudeau's suggestion).  Break up the Conservative Party into these fragments, and hive off enough Liberal voters into the various camps, and the big tents could find themselves a thing of the past, which is where those smaller, more fringe parties start to hold more sway, and that could be the start of bigger problems.  Not all PR countries are made up of nice left-wing coalitions, and there are enough far-right and populist forces rising in Europe right now to demonstrate the dangers of these fringe voices getting closer to power.

It could be that this may not happen.  We could have coalitions that behave more like big-tent parties and things could stay largely unchanged from they are now.  Or they might not.  Trudeau is not blind to this possibility, and at least has taken the responsibility for making this call, and we shouldn't dismiss this out of hand.