If Trudeau is still interested in 'real change,' Liberal supporters have some ideas

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes the stage and addresses Liberals at their biennial convention next week, he will have been leader of the party for a decade and prime minister for seven and a half years.

So it seems fair to assume that his days of representing political change are long past. "Real change" was the right slogan for 2015, but it's 2023 now.

But if Trudeau is at all inclined to revisit the reformist spirit that marked his early years as Liberal leader, party members have some ideas.

So far, Trudeau's record as a political reformer has been both loudly underwhelming and quietly consequential.

His signature commitment to electoral reform — he famously vowed that the 2015 election would be the last federal vote conducted under the first-past-the-post system — collapsed in a heap after a convoluted consultation. The promise of a new era of government transparency amounted to only minor changes. And an attempt at comprehensive parliamentary reform was largely abandoned after an opposition filibuster.

But Trudeau has pulled off the most significant reform in the history of the Senate — his push to make the Senate an independent institution will be difficult to reverse. The new National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians may also stand the test of time, especially if it proves useful in resolving the current imbroglio over foreign interference. And the federally appointed judiciary is on the verge of achieving gender parity for the first time ever.

It stands to reason that the most dramatic changes of a prime minister's tenure are most likely to happen in the early days — when the government is fresh and new and most eager to mark a break from its predecessor, before the burdens of governing crowd out all other concerns.

At this stage, the Trudeau government's chances of re-election also seem to depend most on the basic business of governing — implementing policy, fulfilling the numerous commitments already made, addressing the most immediate needs of Canadians, and building out a record to run on.

But of the 36 policy resolutions set to be debated by Liberals in Ottawa next week, the most interesting are four proposals for political and democratic reform — a citizen's assembly on electoral reform, mandatory voting, a "truth-in-political-advertising" law and a lower voting age.

All such proposals come with a significant caveat: the party leader and the government are not required to heed the resolutions passed at party conventions. Ultimately, it's the senior Liberal leadership that writes the party's election platforms and the government's budgets.

But support at a convention can also anticipate a change in party policy. The Liberals endorsed the legalization of marijuana at a convention in 2012, more than a year and a half before Trudeau adopted the position.

The pros and cons of reform

The first of those four reform proposals would require Trudeau to revisit the scene of his failed promise on electoral reform. However awkward it might be, doing so might give him a chance to atone for his original sin.

But if Trudeau still has misgivings about proportional representation (he restated his opposition as recently as September 2021), it's not clear why he would want to hand off the decision to an independent assembly that might very well choose such a system.

The case for making voting mandatory — as it is in Australia — rests on the belief that voter turnout isn't as high as it should be. In that respect, it works; turnout in the most recent Australian election was 90 per cent. But there remains the question of whether making voting mandatory would actually improve citizen engagement or the relative quality of Canadian democracy — beyond simply increasing the absolute number of people voting.

When the special committee on electoral reform considered mandatory voting in 2016, it also noted a "general discomfort" with the notion of "penalizing people for not participating in the electoral process."

A "truth-in-advertising" law for political ads holds a certain immediate appeal. Most people like the truth. And many people think politicians don't always tell the simple truth. But writing a suitable law would be easier said than done and it's hard to guess at how effective it would even be — politicians generally don't lie so much as they as are selective about facts and context.

Changing the voting age is by no means an obvious political winner. In 2016, the Angus Reid Institute found that just 25 per cent of survey respondents supported lowering the voting age to 16; even among those between the ages of 18 and 34, support was only 34 per cent. Mandatory voting, meanwhile, was supported by 52 per cent. And Trudeau himself voted against an NDP MP's bill last fall that would have lowered the voting age.

But Trudeau has long associated himself with the causes of young people. He chaired a task force on engaging young Canadians as part of a Liberal Party renewal process in 2006, then promoted the idea of a national youth service program after he got elected in 2008. When he became prime minister in 2015, he made himself minister of youth and appointed an official youth council to advise him (members of the council can be as young as 16). 

A compromise approach to the voting age

When speaking before an audience of young people, Trudeau invariably tells them that they should think of themselves not just as "leaders of tomorrow" but as leaders of today. And undoubtedly it's young people who have the most to gain or lose from the dominant public policy issue of the moment and one of the Trudeau government's most loudly stated policy priorities: climate change.

While Trudeau and the cabinet voted against the bill to lower the voting age in the fall, 20 Liberal MPs voted in favour (they were joined by every NDP and Bloc Quebecois MP). The resolution prepared for the upcoming Liberal convention also offers a compromise. Noting that previous calls to lower the voting age to 16 have failed, the resolution sponsored by the Alberta wing of the party suggests moving the voting age to 17.

Maybe that extra year makes a difference to Liberals. It would at least give them cover to move now after rejecting the NDP bill last fall.

The courts might eventually force Parliament's hand — a legal challenge filed in 2021 will test the Supreme Court's suggestion in 2019 that any limit on the right to vote needs to have a "compelling justification." That challenge and moves to lower the voting age in countries like Scotland and New Zealand at least make the case that lowering the voting age in Canada is an idea worth serious consideration — something more than the usual scoffing about "kids these days."

Then again, Liberals might simply decide that rejecting this motion would be too ironic. After all, their party constitution allows registered Liberals as young as 14 to vote at conventions.