Democracy is in trouble if we don’t change
At this point, many of us have a “where was I when I heard about the storming of the U.S. Capitol building” story.
The insurrection on Jan. 6 is no longer seen as a standard Trump shenanigan, but an event of historic significance.
The motley crew of Q-Anon cosplayers, far-right activists, white supremacists, everyday conspiracy theorists and misguided militia members who attacked the seat of U.S. democracy never had a real chance of overturning an election.
But their actions crystalized a reality we’ve known for a long time: Western democracy is in trouble. Our systems for electing leaders and governing are losing legitimacy, many of our fellow citizens have checked out from politics all together and a sizable group are questioning the value of even having a liberal-democracy in the first place.
There are lots of explanations for how we got here.
Ross Douthat of the New York Times wrote a whole book on decadence, arguing the issues with America’s political system are a symptom of the moral decay of privileged and spoiled society.
Robert Putnam’s recent work “The Upswing” talks about how a move away from communal values towards a highly individualistic society is to blame for democracy’s ills. Others blame the rampant inequality.
All of these arguments have merit, but they all assume the issues our democracies face are caused by external factors. But maybe, part of the problem is democracy itself. While almost every aspect of human society has seen tremendous innovation and change over the past few generations, our democratic systems looks very similar to where they started from.
The truth is, democracy as we know it was a radical, transformative, groundbreaking and revolutionary idea … in the late 1700s.
Still, let’s be real. When we think about pressing 21stcentury issues, democratic reform isn’t usually top of the list. But it should be, because if we do not get serious about fixing our democracy, Jan. 6 has shown it’s possible we could lose it.
And our recent Canadian history shows our political leaders aren’t doing a great job on democratic reform. Many residents are still reeling from the way the Ford government slashed Toronto’s city council in half, midway into the 2019 election.
While this certainly was a change, the unilateral way it happened, the fact it was a reduction of representation and strengthened incumbents, hardly made it a move to revitalize Toronto politics.
Federally, we had a Liberal government that promised to fundamentally change our electoral system, then got cold feet and bet that enough Canadians wouldn’t care about that promise not being kept.
These disappointing episodes reinforce that we need real, thoughtful reform of our Canadian democracy. Over the past few weeks I reached out two people who have spent a lot of time thinking about our democracy: Brittany AndrewAmofah, senior policy and research analyst at the Broadbent Institute, and organizer Dave Meslin, author of “Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up.”
They both agreed our democracy is in trouble and highlighted the spread of narrative critiquing democracy across society. In “Teardown,” Meslin contrasts speeches from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, noting the common rhetoric both used around a “rigged” and “corrupt” system, controlled by a small group of economic and political elites.
Amofah spoke about the way populist movements reject our democratic norms and values as customs that only exist for the benefit of elites and the wealthy. Meslin also highlighted the parallels between the rhetoric of David Miller with his broom to sweep away corruption and Rob Ford’s mantra of stopping the gravy train.
Clearly this message is resonating, because politicians both left and right are winning elections and filling stadiums by tapping into a feeling that the current system isn’t working and serves the few. And it’s not hard to see why, despite being birthed as a system of meritocracy opposed to family rule, our democracies are filled with family dynasties of every political stripe: Bush, Clinton, Trudeau, Ford, Layton.
Meslin’s research shows no municipality in Ontario with over 150,000 citizens has a city council that matches the racial diversity of their actual populations, and that gender parity also remains an issue. One example in the GTA: Pickering, whose council is filled entirely by men. It’s easy to see why many people would feel the system does not work for them.
But how did we get here? As Brittany noted, “we underestimate how much democracy runs on compliance. Without people choosing to engage and support the system, it will ultimately fail, which means the system really stands on its legitimacy. So democracy needs to be strengthened constantly, because society is constantly evolving and shifting and democracy has to shift and evolve to.”
The problem is our democratic systems show incredibly low levels of innovation. While Canadian democracy was not born from a revolution like in America or France, the British North America Act of 1867 was still an innovation, part of a global movement to replace the rule of monarchs.
But the last major evolution in Canadian democracy were women’s suffrage in the 1920s and full voting rights for all Indigenous people in 1960. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, of course, was another important addition to the system.
But these necessary additions around equity and human rights did not profoundly change the model. And certainly, our rate of democratic innovation has lagged far behind how other aspects of society (technology, work, arts and culture) evolved over the 20th century.
And the failures of the Charlottetown and Meech Lake accords a generation ago scared Canadian political leaders off from ever attempting constitutional changes again.
Dave Meslin points out that democracy is unique because it’s one system where we put incredible value in doing things exactly like our grandparents did.
We keep our parliaments looking like museums, people wear robes and carry bejewelled medieval weapons, we give the mayor a blinged-out chain and call them “Your Worship.”
As he writes, traditionalists make it seem that “any change to our political system is sacrilegious, as if the British Westminster system of governance were handed to us by God, its rules etched onto tablets carved from the Canadian Shield.”
But part of the difficulty of changing our democracy was purposeful.
“The systems themselves were not built for change, they were built to uphold and maintain power structures, to provide stability and maintain what was already there,” commented Amofah.
So where do we go from here? Well despite the fact it’s assumed people don’t care about democratic reform, there seems to be a clear hunger for change. Meslin argues the anger that drives disengagement from electoral politics is not wrong.
The issue is this anger needs to be channelled not at individual leaders but the system. He points to recent victories on ranked ballots in Canada and successful initiatives around campaign financing reform in the United States during the last election as examples of the potential to get popular support around innovation in democracy.
But what could such innovations be? I’ll come back to these ideas in future columns, but there are three exciting ones to consider.
Brittany’s first suggestion was giving more powers to cities, whether through amending the constitution (which says nothing about municipalities) or provincial laws like the City of Toronto Act.
Our big cities have few ways to raise their own revenue and are totally beholden to wishes of their provinces. But globally, big cities have been leading around issues like climate change, decent work and immigration. Perhaps it’s time for Toronto, with more citizens than most of our provinces, to get more control of its own destiny.
Another idea was election vouchers, taken from Seattle. Instead of asking people to donate to election campaigns and then get most of the donation back at tax time from the government (which favours those with disposable income), those same government funds would be turned into vouchers.
Every citizen would be issued an equal amount of democracy vouchers, which they could donate to any political candidate, who would then cash them in with the city government. This makes a run for office much more viable for a candidate whose message focuses on low-income communities.
Finally, all three wanted to see us add a fourth level of government in Toronto, through ward councils, where local residents and locally elected leaders could work together on hyper-local issues. With Toronto now only having 26 councillors for nearly three million people, adding a level of governance like this (something Montreal has already done) could help make democracy a lot more accessible.
The reality is, though, none of these transformations are possible without us first recognizing that our democracy can and must innovate. And as Jan. 6 demonstrated, if we don’t rebuild legitimacy and trust in our democratic systems, the consequences are almost too scary to fathom.