-by Kimberley Love

This week, our government announced that – after a year of heavy work on this file - changing our voting system has, for now, been dropped from the legislative agenda. That is a bitter pill for me, and for voters in this riding. But let's acknowledge, it's also a bitter disappointment for Justin Trudeau himself.
There are people who feel betrayed by the news. That feeling crossed my mind as well. I still feel strongly about the need to change the way we elect our politicians. I was the local organizer for Trudeau's leadership campaign – because I knew how strongly he believed in electoral reform.
But I don't think Justin Trudeau was doing anything other than communicating our shared predicament this week when he asserted that there is presently no political consensus and so no clear path forward on this decision. Anyone tempted to frame Trudeau's actions as self-serving should remember that he has the option, with a majority government, to pass legislation on the electoral reform option he prefers. He understands that doing so, without a broad political consensus, would be wrong. That is leadership, not cynicism.
So how did we get into this mess and how do we get out of it? I'd offer two observations. Since we can't agree on the solution, maybe one problem is that we didn't really agree on the goal. The main ways the goal has been framed – either "electoral reform" or "replacing first past the post," are so vague that they don't provide enough guidance on the evaluation of reform options. Had the process begun with a shared common goal, something like: "increasing the engagement and participation of the Canadian electorate, and making parliament more representative of the electorate's interests," perhaps we'd be in a better place now.
Or maybe not. Hyper-partisanship – blind loyalty to party brands and the "othering" of other parties, candidates and supporters – is a cancer in parliamentary democracy: here in Canada, and around the world.
When we think about the policies that have made Canada great – things like universal healthcare, a national public pension plan, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – we should acknowledge that those policies were created in a parliamentary environment where the public interest came ahead of partisanship.
That happens less often now. The hyper-partisan trend is producing a dangerous wave of cynicism among democratic electorates. That cynicism is suppressing the electorate's engagement and damaging democracies. The discussion about electoral reform in Canada has been coloured by partisan gamesmanship. And it is hard to see how more character attacks levelled at Justin Trudeau on this file make the situation better.
The electoral reform issue has dropped from the legislative agenda – it has not gone away, nor should it. But before it can move forward again, we need more authentic public consensus on a clearer set of goals, our parliamentarians need to act as representatives of that consensus first, putting their partisan affiliations second, and we all need to go back to a more collaborative style of interaction to get the job done. We're Canadians. We can do this.

Kimberley Love was the 2015 candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound.