As John and Hargreaves (2011) note:
“Alternative Vote supports and perhaps encourages hostility between the largest parties thus contributing to Australia‘s harsh political culture.”
“Alternative Vote is also unique in its tendency to direct votes into seats for the two established major parties and prevent the success of new movements and parties, especially moderate parties”.
“Alternative Vote is found to be unique amongst ordinal methods in supporting a rigid, adversarial, two-party system.”
3) Trudeau claims that proportional representation makes MPs accountable only to parties instead of local voters and communities.
The Prime Minister said:
“The big one is I am really worried about is decoupling Members of Parliament in the House from communities that they have to serve.
Then you also have people who got elected because they were on a party list and you have MPs who owe their existence as MPs to a political party as opposed to specific Canadians.”
These statements were so obviously untrue that Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith (the interviewer) attempted to interject twice to rebut them, saying:
“I don’t think any advocate in Canada is arguing for… doing away with local representation” and
“You can do open lists”.
The Prime Minister talked right over him.
All credible models of proportional representation for Canada are designed to maintain strong local representation. Local representation has been a core value of every commission and assembly in Canada that recommended PR.
All models of proportional representation for Canada mean MPs are directly elected, as individuals, by local voters to represent voters in a specific geographic area.
It is not believable that the Prime Minister made these statements because he does not know the very basics of how proportional representation for Canada could work.
The only reason he would have used misleading or discredited opponent talking points is to manufacture a contrast between his straw man PR system and his preferred winner-take-all ranked ballot system, to get around the problem he acknowledged earlier, namely that nobody agrees with him.
The entire segment makes the case for why electoral reform needs to be informed by evidence and decided by multi-party agreement, so one party (or leader) alone cannot control the agenda.
Leaving a Legacy?
Seven years after Justin Trudeau dismissed the expert consensus for proportional representation and declared “it was my choice to make”, the real fallout from the broken promise may soon be hitting Canadians hard in the face.
One of the consequences of all winner-take-all systems is policy lurch, where one government elected with a false majority undoes the work of the previous one.
Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London recently explained how it works at an event about polarization called “The Centre Cannot Hold”:
“If you think about the kinds of policy issues confronting us today, whether it’s climate change, aging populations, AI, maybe the thing they all have in common is they require medium to long term solutions. In multi-party systems you tend to get longer term public policies because parties are forced to compromise and work together.
If you look at the UK system, one of the greatest problems which I think is at least partly attributable to polarization is their complete inability to do anything even medium term let alone long term. A party comes in and what’s the first thing it does? It promises to overturn what the last party did.
We’ve reached that stage where a political party that thinks it’s going to win an election says we’d like to do this on a cross-party basis knowing full well that when push comes to shove our system just seems incapable of building those sorts of long term coalitions.”
If Justin Trudeau truly wants to foster politics that looks for common ground and avoids massive policy lurch, he needs to get past his partisan myopia, take a good look at the evidence for electoral reform, and most crucially, be willing to compromise. | 
