February 12 is Not the End

Does anyone actually understand what the referendum that we will be voting on on Election Day, February 12, is all about?

We can think of few more ill-conceived and poorly executed initiatives than the referendum which is intended to operationalize the July Charter.

At this late date, you would be hard-pressed to find a half dozen people who can credibly argue that they fully understand what is in the referendum and therefore what they will be voting for (or against, as the case may be).

There are many problems with the referendum.

The first is that it seeks a single yes or no vote on three quite distinct questions. Indeed the third question refers to 30 reform proposals on which consensus has been reached by the political parties, so that is actually 32 different questions.

We are leaving aside the fourth point, which is meaningless pablum.

The problem has always been that we need to vote yes or no on all 32 proposals. If we wish to have a bicameral legislature with the upper house decided by proportional representation (Article 2), then we have to also go along with every one of the 30 reform proposals referred to in Article 3. 

Very well, then what are the 30 proposals in Article 3? To answer this, we need to go to the text of the July Charter and see there.

But even this is not particularly helpful because the July Charter itself refers back to the Constitution and various other Acts.

In short, to truly understand what one is voting for would take considerable research and if this has been undertaken by anyone outside the Consensus Commission and possibly (though even here I have my doubts) the hapless signatories to the Charter, we would be surprised.

To expect voters to say a simple and single yes or no to such a wide-ranging set of reforms is unrealistic and unserious.

Nor has the communication surrounding the referendum been any more helpful and it is therefore anyone’s guess which way the voters will pull the lever on Election Day.

However, we would like to make two points with respect to the reform/referendum process, one backward looking and the other forward looking.

We neither endorse nor take any position on whether voters should vote yes or no, save to point out that we have long been in favour of a PR-based upper house and caretaker government and that while we are not sufficiently familiar with the intricacies of the 30 reform proposals encompassed in Article 3, we can’t imagine that they could do much harm.

However, we leave it to each individual voter to determine for himself or herself whether they feel they have been informed sufficiently to give a meaningful vote, one way or the other. 

We can understand and sympathize with those on either side of the question.

The first point we would like to make, however, is to point out how misbegotten the entire reform process has been, culminating in this referendum that has left everyone confused.

Detailing the missteps taken along the way is far beyond the scope of this editorial, and in fairness it should be acknowledged that the shifting political sands over the past eighteen months complicated the matter enormously.

But many if not most of the reforms detailed in the July Charter are not constitutional in question and do not require being put to a referendum. They could simply have been passed into law. 

The actual issues for determination by referendum should have been kept much more limited in scope. 

Which brings us to the second point: neither side should take the referendum to be the final word when it comes to reform. 

Reform is a long, arduous, painstaking, and above all, continuous process. It does not end with a vote or a referendum, either in the positive or the negative.

A yes vote is only the beginning, not the end. The real work of implementation of the reform agenda is what matters.

Similarly, we should not interpret a no vote to suggest that the voters are against reform or that the reform agenda dies there. 

There are many reasons the voters may vote no, but this does not mean that there is not support for any one or more of the reforms that have been proposed. 

Either way, the reform agenda must go on. But reform does not have a timeline. It is a process and a mindset, not words on a piece of paper, and we need to not let the confusion of the past eighteen months give it a bad name.