Yesterday's vote
- Details
- Published on Friday, 02 June 2017 14:30
- Written by editor
Yesterday the House of Commons voted on a motion that, if passed, could have put pressure on Trudeau to put electoral reform back on the table after breaking his promise earlier this year.[1]
146 members mostly from the NDP, Conservative, Bloc Quebecois and Green parties voted in support of yesterday’s motion, which was to endorse the final recommendations of the all-party committee on electoral reform.
Thanks to your phone calls, emails and letters, you even convinced two Liberal MPs, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith (Beaches-East York) and Sean Casey (Charlottetown), to break ranks with their party and vote in favour of electoral reform.
But 159 Liberals voted against it, and the motion was ultimately defeated. We’re disappointed, but we know this is not the end of the road for electoral reform in Canada.
Your MP supported the motion yesterday. Can you take a moment to send a thank-you message to your MP for voting in support of the motion and standing up for electoral reform? If we show MPs who stand up for electoral reform that we support them, we make it more likely that other MPs will stand with us in the future.
Send a message: https://act.leadnow.ca/ty-mps/
It’s disappointing that Liberal MPs voted down this week’s motion -- but there are also lots of reasons to feel hopeful about the prospect of electoral reform.
Across the country a wave of reform is building. In Ontario, towns and municipalities are starting to move away from first-past-the-post. PEI will hold a binding referendum on electoral reform in 2019 after a successful non-binding vote in support of mixed-member proportional representation in 2016. And in BC, the BC NDP and BC Greens have just announced a pact to govern together - we can expect a referendum on electoral reform to happen within the next year, with both parties campaigning in favor of proportional representation.
Big changes don’t happen overnight, and all movements have setbacks. It’s a good reminder that we need to work to build power at the grassroots, so that we can continue to move this issue forward. If we keep organizing, we will win.
While the vote didn’t go the way we’d hoped, we’re inspired by the way the Leadnow community came together to put pressure on the Liberals to keep their word. Over the last year we flooded townhalls, organized rallies and actions, organized in neighborhoods and canvassed at farmer’s markets, and we delivered almost 50,000 signatures to the steps of Parliament Hill just this week.
Because of this work, our movement is stronger than ever. More Canadians are educated about electoral reform. They are empowered to talk about it with their friends and neighbours. And most importantly, they will be prepared to ask Liberals tough questions between now and the next election about why this promise was abandoned.
We’ve compiled some of the numbers and pictures from the last year and half into a blog that tells the story of this movement. Check it out here. http://www.votebetter.ca/votebetter-recap/
Stay tuned for a survey from us next week - we’re going to ask you what we think we should do now, as a community, to keep this fight alive.
I believe that we will win. Let’s keep going forward, together.
With gratitude,
Katelynn, Rachel, Lyndsay and Logan on behalf of the Leadnow team
Sources:
[1] Liberal MPs Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Sean Casey Vote To Call Out Electoral Reform Pledge (Huffington Post) http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/05/31/liberal-electoral-reform-pledge-ndp-vote_n_16900086.html
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