Democracy fever
Take two polls on electoral reform and call me in the morning
BY Andrew Potter
Photography by Bryan Delodder
If the political left and right in this country agree on anything, it is that Canada’s system of parliamentary government is outdated. And if anything confirms Canadians’ appalling lack of understanding of elementary civics, it is the dopey attention being given to various suggestions for democratic reform.
The main focus of attention in Ontario right now is electoral reform, thanks in large part to the new Citizens’ Assembly. An import from British Columbia, the idea is that a committee of 100 or so average Joes and Janes are delegated to take a look at the electoral system and make recommendations for how it might be changed. There are plenty of other ideas floating about, from “free votes” in the Commons, fixed election dates and Senate reform to citizen initiatives, referendums and legislative recall, and what they all have in common is that they are likely to make things worse, not better.
Take recall, for example. As Americans have always shown, and as the residents of British Columbia discovered a few years ago, it is possible to have too much democracy. The province’s Recall and Initiative Act, passed in 1996, allows for MLAs to be removed if 40 percent of registered voters in that riding sign a recall petition. At one point in 2004 there were more than 20 such initiatives underway, which led John Les, then chair of the B.C. Liberal caucus, to complain that the recall act was being “misused for purely political purposes” by people trying to fight the results of the last election. This was a bizarre complaint, since the entire point of recall is to weaken and thoroughly politicize the process of representation. The ultimate effect of recall is to subject representative government to what John Stuart Mill called “the great mischief of unintermitted electioneering,” where everything an MLA does in the legislature has to be judged in light of how it will play back home in the riding.
In his classic book of Canadian political science, Democratic Government and Politics, J.A. Corry pointed to what he called one of the hard realities of representative government: “Government action is collective action taken on behalf of the whole and, if it is not to be self-defeating, it cannot give expression to all the cross-purposes entertained by particular members and parts of the whole.” One of the great benefits of Canada’s system of government is that it makes it politically unfruitful to pander to the extremes; the oft-noted “consensual” nature of Canadian society is largely a happy artifact of parliamentary government.
It would be bad enough if the effects of the proposed reforms were to simply weaken our system of government. But many of them actually undercut the evolved relations of power and obligation that make up responsible government, and are therefore of dubious constitutional legitimacy.
Consider the obtuse push for fixed election dates. We already have fixed election dates, since Section 4 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that “No House of Commons and no legislative assembly shall continue for longer than five years from the date fixed for the return of the writs at a general election of its members.” So elections are set every five years, unless Parliament decides otherwise and brings the government down.
And what is wrong with that? The fact that the legislature might be dissolved at any time sometimes works to the advantage of the government, sometimes to the opposition. But in either case, it is hard to see how democracy suffers when the people are asked to vote. When a prime minister threatens a recalcitrant House of Commons with a snap election, or when the opposition votes against a budget to deny a minority government supply, neither side is abusing its power. Rather, they are defending our system of responsible government.
It is obvious why the right wants democratic reform, since the principal effect of all of the various proposals would be to weaken the government and make it harder to sustain the strong executive authority that is needed to push through substantial new social programs. What is less clear is why activists on the left are so keen in joining their ideological opponents in tying the hands of the state.
Our democracy is in a crisis, but it is more a crisis of faith than a crisis of form. But to quote from Corry once again: “All our social institutions must face periodic crises. The sick do not always die and institutions often surmount their crises.” True progressives can only hope that responsible government can hang on till this democracy fever passes.
