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 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.