Official petition demanding Trudeau honour electoral reform promise gets record number of signatures

That’s funny – didn’t Justin Trudeau say no one wants electoral reform now that he’s prime minister? 

An official House of Commons e-petition demanding Justin Trudeau honour his campaign promise on electoral reform has closed and the results are in: the e-petition has received more signatures than any the House of Commons has ever received since the House of Commons first introduced online petitions.

With a final tally of just over 130,000 signatures, the petition – which reportedly caused the House of Commons website to crash multiple times last month – calls on Trudeau to reverse his decision to break an explicit campaign promise that “the 2015 election be the last federal Canadian election under the first-past-the-post system”:

“We, the undersigned, supporters of electoral reform, call upon the Government of Canada to immediately declare its on-going commitment to ensuring the 2015 election be the last federal Canadian election under the first-past-the-post system.”

That was a promise Trudeau repeated many times before and after the last election: 

Watch 2 straight minutes of Justin Trudeau promising to end Canada’s first-past-the-post system #cdnpoli #EngagedInER @acoyne @davidakin pic.twitter.com/b5KzGF8Y4Y

— PressProgress (@pressprogress) December 2, 2016

According to the House of Commons website, the petition received over 45,000 signatures from Ontario, over 30,000 from British Columbia, nearly 25,000 signatures from Quebec and over 10,000 signatures from Alberta.

By contrast, the 130,452 signatures collected by the petition is equal to a little over half the number of valid responses (243,057) collected by the Government of Canada’s MyDemocracy survey – promoted to every household in Canada at a cost of $2 million. 

NDP Democratic Reform Critic Nathan Cullen, who sponsored the e-petition, released a statement Friday that the response reflects growing frustration with Trudeau’s Liberals:

“People are angry. They were told these Liberals were going to be different, that they would restore faith in our politics and our democracy … The Liberals have chosen cynicism over doing what is right, and they’ll have to answer to voters.”

The House of Commons passed a motion on online petitions put forward by NDP MP Kennedy Stewart in 2014, with support from both Conservatives and Liberals across the aisle – in fact, Trudeau was one of the MPs who voted in favour of online petitions. 

As per the rules surrounding e-petitions, the government must now table a response to the petition within 45 days.

^{Photo: PMO.}