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Referendums are for the birds

Éditorial - This country needs fewer referendums, not more. Such voting has been tremendously divisive just about every time it's been tried in Canada, whether the issue has been Quebec's status, or conscription, or even prohibition.

So this week we owe thanks to Brent Tyler, the pugnacious lawyer who leads Alliance Quebec, for driving a stake through the heart of the latest half-baked Quebec government scheme to make referendum voting much more common here.

This trial balloon was sent up this week by Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, Quebec's minister for electoral reform. If ever there was a superfluous chair at the cabinet table, it's the one Mr. Charbonneau inhabits. His recent proposals - direct election of the premier, proportional representation and now this - all seem to fall into the category of "It ain't broke, so don't fix it." On the great failure of our electoral system - grotesque under-representation of urban voters in the National Assembly - he has been eerily silent.

Mr. Charbonneau's latest scheme would allow anybody who can drum up 250,000 petition signatures to force a province-wide referendum on just about any subject. This proposal comes with the usual garlands of rhetoric about "the voice of the people."

Up pipes the voice of Mr. Tyler, cheerfully offering to go first. Let's have a referendum, he says, on access to English schools.

Interesting idea. Current law opens the doors of English schools only to children who have at least one parent schooled in English in Canada. A substantial anglophone consensus wants to see the existing law at least widened to open English schools to English-speaking immigrants. More importantly, surveys have suggested that as many as 71 per cent of Quebecers think schooling in English should be available to all children in Quebec.

At present, most anglophones are free to choose English or French schools for their offspring, but francophones have no such choice. That 71 per cent includes many francophone parents who want their kids to really master English.

Mr. Tyler has pursued this political embarrassment for the government in court cases, and now he sees the opportunity to force the issue with a referendum. After that, he adds, might come further popular-initiative referendums, on the sign law and even on Quebec's symbolic signing of the 1982 constitution reforms. Imagine the consternation in Quebec City.

Still, if ever there really were a referendum on school choice, Mr. Tyler might get a surprise: many of the francophones who want school choice surely also want Quebec to remain predominantly French, and schooling is the key to that.

This paradox points out the fundamental problem with using referendums to settle complex public issues: a referendum at once oversimplifies and overemotionalizes a complicated issue. We elect and pay a whole Assemblyful of professional politicians - not to mention civil servants - to find the compromises society needs to work smoothly.

Mr. Tyler's threat is just one of the reasons this proposal will never become law; the Liberals are wary of it, and some of Mr. Charbonneau's cabinet colleagues will see the danger of unleashing the demon of activism: for one thing, PQ hard-liners could use the law to force a separation referendum the PQ leadership doesn't want.

Recourse to referendums deepens the divisions that political life should be reducing. If we never see another referendum, on any subject, that's soon enough.