Lifeblood For A Moribund Democracy?

By any measure, I think it is safe to say that ours is not a healthy and vital democracy. One only has to look at election turnout statistics to see ready proof.

In the last two elections, barely half of Ontarians bothered to cast a ballot — an embarrassing 48 per cent voted in 2011, and a dispiriting 51 per cent turned out in 2014.

Federally, the last election saw increased turnout, but that was only due to the lofty but ultimately largely empty rhetoric of Justin Trudeau, who attracted the youth vote, a topic I will return to momentarily.

While the virus of demagoguery is most readily apparent in the United States, Canadians are hardly immune. One has only to look, for example, at the Toronto mayoralty of the late Rob Ford, the crack-smoking bad boy who many voters could not get enough of.

And of course now, in Ontario, many are predicting that his brother, Doug, will be the next premier, despite the fact that he will not allow media on his campaign bus and is skipping out on the first leaders' debate on April 11. His strategy seems to be to speak in generalities (finding new efficiencies - where, oh where, have we heard that one before?) promising everything to everyone, and at a very attractive cost - none. And on top of that, he promises to lower taxes.

What is the cure, or at least an effective treatment, for this rash of nonsense? Perhaps it lies in lowering the voting age to 16. Lance Copegog, one of those 16-year-olds, writes:

It is a shame that voters in Ontario do not cherish their democratic right to vote.

Liberal MPP Arthur Potts, who represents the Toronto riding of Beaches—East York, introduced a private members bill that proposes the voting age be lowered from 18 to 16 in provincial elections.

His arguments have a compelling quality as he looks at youth activism:

First Nations-led youth councils are holding the government to account on its promises to Indigenous people in Ontario, young activists involved in the Black Lives Matter movement are advocating for systemic change, and many others are making a difference in their communities.

Most young people do not deny that climate change is the most pressing issue of our time. The action that we take now will determine our very survival.

As well, Copegog takes encouragement from what young people are doing in the U.S.

The activism of the survivors of the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting demonstrate that today’s young people are articulate, courageous, and passionate. Their activism saw them go head-to-head with the National Rifle Association and Senator Marco Rubio, a darling of the gun lobby.

I can see additional advantages to lowering the voting age. At 16, most are still in school, a wonderful venue to engage meaningfully on today's vital issues, promote discussion and foster some critical thinking amongst peers.

Voting at 16, whether through peer pressure or increased awareness, would likely further the chances of electoral participation as a lifelong habit.

Finally, such youth engagement might shame their indolent, disengaged parents into the same participation.

In his column today, Tim Harper offers sundry reasons for increased participation by young people who already have the right to vote, millenials:

They prefer government spending over balanced budgets (understood by Justin Trudeau and Kathleen Wynne), don’t believe corporations pay their fair share of taxes, don’t believe income inequality has been properly addressed and are more comfortable with big interventionist government.

They also want to see action on climate change, policies to lift people out of poverty and they back a more open immigration system.

Those very issues resonate with younger people as well. Theirs is a broken world that they will have to contend with far longer than someone of my generation will.

Why shouldn't they have a voice?

A Brief Programming Note

Since spring finally seems to be arriving in my place on the planet, it seems like a propitious time to take a day or two off from this blog and contemplate other matters. In the interim, I recommend the following for your perusal:

The Star's Thomas Walkom writes about democracy, voting and past democratic reform measures in his column today.

A series of thoughtful letters from Star readers provides an ample basis for some serious contemplation of climate change.

And finally, on the oligarchy that has essentially subverted supplanted democracy, the Mound of Sound recommends this interview with Thomas Krugman, who discusses a new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Pikey argues that modern capitalism has put the world "on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy—a society of inherited wealth."

See you shortly, and enjoy the long weekend.

A Guest Post From The Mound Of Sound

I have missed reading the Mound of Sound since he put his blog, The Disaffected Lib, on hiatus about five weeks ago. A man of wide-ranging interests and passions, his posts on climate change and politics never failed to catch my attention and stimulate my own reading and research.

Yesterday I received an email from Mound; while he is not interested at this point in restarting his own blog, he asked if I would be open to hosting the occasional guest post from him. I responded with both alacrity and pleasure. What follows is the first of what I hope will be a regular guest feature of my blog. Mound's essay might best be described as a unified theory of our collective, global malaise, with corresponding suggested cures.

Enjoy:

For a number of years I posed a challenge to my blog readers. I asked them to think about various woes that afflicted mankind today, among them:

...global warming, including severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity; droughts (both cyclical and persistent); floods; sea level rise including storm surge inundation, erosion and salination of coastal freshwater resources; ocean acidification; deforestation; desertification; air, soil and water contamination of all varieties; resource depletion, particularly the freshwater crisis; species extinction, especially the collapse of global fisheries; species migration and loss of biodiversity; overpopulation and population migration; pest and disease migration; and a host of entirely man-made security challenges including food insecurity; the collapse of social cohesion resulting in political instability, upheaval and civil war; politically engineered inequality; nuclear proliferation; and both superpower and regional arms races.

Then I challenged my readers to identify the common threads that ran through all of these challenges and existential threats. I asserted that these problems shared a common feature - if we were to solve any of them, we must solve them all and, to have much hope of achieving that, we had to understand how they were connected.

At first I had only the vaguest ideas of what the answers to the questions I posed might be. Yet, gradually and with a great deal of time pondering the puzzle, the common threads and the answers began to emerge. It became evident to me that our society, our global society, was created, run and maintained on dysfunctional organization. We were organized dysfunctionally - socially, politically and economically. In the course of this, to keep the party going, we had taken on the characteristics of addiction, final or late stage addiction at that. We were bloated, covered in our own filth, our organs were failing and yet we remained completely powerless to confront our underlying addiction.

There were three lethal processes underway - over-population, over-consumption, and our obsessive compulsion to pursue infinite, exponential growth. We were constantly expanding all of these processes, trying to find new ways, often gimmicks, by which we could temporarily compress them within the very finite boundaries of our planet, our one and only biosphere.

Peter was not only robbing Paul, he was raping him in the process. Anthropogenic global warming? That's a by-product of these three processes. Without cheap, abundant fossil fuels we could not have grown to 7+ billion people en route to 9-billion or more while, at the same time, steadily increasing our per capita ecological footprint. We could not have plundered the world's resources, easily pillaging even our resource reserves, until we are now dependent - to use the junkie's term "hooked" - on devouring 1.5 times Earth's replenishment rate of natural resources every year, a rate that is steadily increasing to propel us to the inevitable day of reckoning.

Like junkies, we fall victim to the powerful and their predatory brutality. Their growth restrained by the realities of a finite world, America's most privileged turned on their own, their once robust middle class, sucking the life out of them in perhaps the greatest unearned transfer of wealth in western history. To achieve this they subverted and overcame democracy, quietly supplanting that with oligarchy and rule by technocrats.

Between an ill-informed electorate, voter suppression, engineered voter apathy, legislated inequality, mass surveillance, gerrymandering, the corruption of elections by tainted money, a 'bought and paid for' Congress and a corporatist Supreme Court, it is obvious that oligarchy has now decisively routed democracy in the United States.

If you think Canada is far behind, think again. Think the Orwellian named, Fair Elections Act. Think CSIS and CSEC. Think of every rotten incident attendant upon petro-statehood. Think of the rise of corporatism and the corporate state, its path greased by today's corporate media cartel.

Above all else, think 'incrementalism'. Our prime minister's former BFF, Tom Flanagan, years ago described incrementalism as the foundation of Harper's approach to government. Radical transformations can be effected if implemented through baby steps over time, small increments that go unnoticed until they accumulate into a mass too great to be undone. This is the very tactic so instrumental in America's transformation from democracy to oligarchy. Twenty, thirty years is all it takes and the deed is done.

I perceive this subversion of democracy and the associated wholesale transfer of economic and political power to a new oligarchy, a modern feudal-corporatist aristocracy, as an entirely foreseeable, perhaps inevitable end product of over-population, over-consumption and endless, exponential growth.

This is bound to end badly. The plutocrats are themselves slavishly addicted to the conditions that underlie our three lethal processes. When growth becomes restrained, disaster capitalism beckons as a means to continue accumulating the residual wealth, however meager, of others. Water can be transformed into a commodity to be supplied to the highest, often the most desperate bidder. The food supply can likewise be commodified unnaturally by the global agri-business and the monopolizing of the best farmlands throughout the world. They're locking up especially productive swathes of farmland even in countries already plagued by chronic food insecurity such as Somalia. Not for nothing is Goldman Sachs' biggest trading desk that dealing with food futures. Vulture capitalism is drawn to global food insecurity like jackals to a rotting corpse. These people are squarely and quite wilfully at odds with humanity itself. They're gaming the market of survival of the most vulnerable and we tolerate that. What have we allowed ourselves to become?

We stand at the edge of abyss and it would be dishonest to claim with any confidence that we still have time to step back. That's not clear but we may have time to act, even if not much. The path back begins with the first step - restoration of democracy. This, for Canada, means the dissolution of the corporate media cartel through forced divestiture of closely held and clustered media outlets. To nurture an informed electorate we need far more voices in the media offering the widest range of opinion. We need to restore an information-based media to remedy the messaging-based, corporate-dominated media. We need a media that is again the watchdog of government rather than its lapdog.

Our leaders need to address the real consequences to the country and our democracy of petro-statehood. Petro-states exhibit fairly uniform behaviours and they're rarely democratic. We need to pattern ourselves more on Norway and far less on Nigeria. We also need to transition, as quickly as the rest of the world, to a decarbonized society and a decarbonized economy. That entails understanding that "because we can" is not synonymous with "because we should."

We need to rehabilitate the heart and lungs of our once healthy, robust middle class - health care and education. These are not expenses but investments and, like all prudent investments, they deliver their return not in short-term profits but in long-term dividends. We have, for too long, sacrificed the safety and security of our future generations for our short-term benefit and we have amassed a huge debt to them and the country that must be honoured. This is a small price to pay.

We must arrest and reverse the scourge of inequality already becoming established in Canada. That entails recognition that most inequality is engineered, the handiwork of legislatures. Very little of it is either market-driven or merit-based. It is the end result of tax policy, subsidies and grants, deferrals and the transfer of natural capital, resources, belonging to the public at far below market value. It is sometimes the result of corruption but more often it results from the fear of our leaders that failure to prostrate the country at the feet of the powerful will diminish us. Bollocks.

We need laws to defend our democratic process against subversion. Those who practice voter manipulation and voter suppression must be stripped of the freedom they would deny to others. Heavy fines and lengthy prison terms are required to reverse this malignancy being introduced by today's Conservatives. These are the acts of individuals wilfully intent on subverting our democracy.

Yes this is a tall order but mainly because these challenges have grown gradually over an extended period of time while we looked the other way. Malignancies are rarely discovered early. What matters is that they are here now, exposed, and we are nearing the point where we have to either find solutions, remedy these excesses, or submit to them. A 3-pack a day smoker can not restore his health by going on a gluten-free diet.

On Our Democratic Deficit

These Star readers, whether you agree with them or not, have some interesting perspectives to offer:

Re: Growing disconnect between Canadians and Parliament, May 2

Democracy is just a mirage, Letter May 5

Al Dunn is essentially correct in his characterization of democracy as it is generally practised today. But the fact that democracy is clearly the ultimate bait-and-switch trick pulled on us by the elites — keeping up the illusion of a fair say whilst actually holding us at arm’s length from the levers that could operate our share of the balance of power — doesn’t mean there is no hope for us or for democracy. It doesn’t have to be this way. The funny thing about democracy is that behind that veneer is an institution that can be reconfigured to actually work as advertised. The trick wouldn’t have worked otherwise.

Democracy can be a true and substantive system for the rest of us but only when each and every representative in our parliaments owes their seat and their allegiance to their electorate more than to their party and every voter gets a rep insofar as the number of seats in the House permits. This is achievable; it only needs a properly designed electoral system.

When voters are truly empowered to truly empower their representatives, democracy will no longer be an illusion. That is the “paradigm shift” our democracy needs.

And while our party elites have (unsurprisingly) seen fit to reject calls to cooperate for meaningful electoral reform the door is still open for individual candidates to respond to the challenge. What do you say, chaps: will you cooperate with us to empower each other or are you content in your role in maintaining the pretense in the face of our dire need?

Mark Henschel, Toronto

Growing disconnect between Canadians and Parliament, May 2

Over the past few weeks there have been numerous opinion pieces in your paper discussing the “disconnect” between Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the general public. This is by no means an unplanned occurrence. Governments in general — Conservative ones in particular — have been changing the way that governments and the governed interact. They have done it through simple changes to the lexicon.

The most notable change is the words that governments use to describe those who are governed. We are no longer referred to by politicians as “residents” or “voters,” “citizens” or even “Canadians.” We are referred to as “taxpayers,” even by your newspaper and the media as a whole. To be fair, everyone pays taxes, whether it is on one’s salary, real estate holdings or a $2 bag of candy at the corner store. But being referred to primarily as a “taxpayer” by the government carries with it a certain understanding.

Taxpayers pay for goods and services provided by the government for personal use. It is a consumer transaction. As long as you get your money’s worth, there is no reason to expect more or to know how it got to you, as long as you received value for your dollar. If someone else cannot access these goods and services, it is because they cannot contribute as much as you can, not because the government won’t provide.

Moreover, your responsibility ends the moment you sign the cheque. There is no need for any additional input or concern. You can’t question Walmart’s foreign policy, environmental track record or how it deals with dissent from within or without either. After all, your only decision is whether you will purchase or not.

“Citizens.” on the other hand have both rights and responsibilities. Yes, they pay taxes, but their duties go beyond the financial transaction. They are expected to engage in public debate, care for those who need to be cared for, and concern themselves for the community at large. They often put the good of society before themselves. Unfortunately, from the government’s perspective, “citizens” tend to question agendas, complain on grounds of principle, and worst of all, vote … sometimes for other parties.

Many “taxpayers” are content to simply give up their rights as citizens if it means they pay their taxes and not be bothered beyond that; after all, the government has everything in hand, right?

Being a “citizen” is a lot of work, requires you to be passionate about mundane things and pay attention, but the citizenry develops the political power necessary to steer public discussion. Is it any wonder that these two aspects define the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy?

Neil McClung, Brampton

Your editorial and the excellent article a few days earlier by Bob Hepburn on the disconnect between Canada’s parliament and its people accurately indicates that something here does not work well.

I am familiar with the governance structures of both Germany and Sweden and both have far more involved and informed electorates and a far better relationship between their people and their governments, and what their governments do. They both have an electoral system based on proportional representation, where every vote counts.

Our system gave Mr. Harper a strong mandate to govern although only 24 per cent of the electorate voted for him, 76 per cent did not. If we had had PR at the last election we would have since had a Liberal-NDP coalition probably supported by the Greens and an overwhelming majority of the voters. I am sure they would have done many things differently than Mr. Harper, things both you and I would have supported.

The Star has always strongly opposed proportional representation and consequently we must thank you for giving us the current Conservative majority. It would be wonderful and a great blessing for Canada to fix our mess on Parliament Hill.

In your case it might be useful to fix your attitude toward what is a far superior and more democratic electoral system. We can really only fix ourselves.

Chris Smith, Toronto

Democratic Renewal

I just got back from my Algonquin trip, so just a very brief post. In skimming today's Star, there is a very interesting piece by Bob Hepburn on efforts at democratic renewal in Canada to combat the ongoing Harper attack on citizen engagement and voter participation. Small seeds can yield tremendous fruit if properly nurtured.

Rick Salutin on Proportional Representation

The problem with parties is they don’t exist to represent the views of the public, or even sections of it, or even their own members. Maybe they once did, or maybe not. But now they exist to win elections. They’re “election-day organizations,” to quote political scientist Donald Savoie. They take public opinion into account mainly in their strategic calculations.

Is some form of proportional representation the answer to the 'democratic deficit' reflected in the above excerpt from Part 2 of Rick Salutin's series on democracy?

Salutin admits to an ambivalence about a reform he once enthusiastically embraced. The most popular version, called the Single Transferable Vote, is explained by the writer:

You indicate your second, third, etc., choices along with your top choice so if your No. 1 is at the bottom and gets dropped after the first tally, your vote is transferred down the line until a set of winners — ridings are larger but total numbers of reps stays the same — emerge. It’s complex but it means most votes actually matter and something proportional emerges.

In my mind, that version would be effective only with a very engaged and informed citizenry, something that I'm not sure we have ever had in Canada, and certainly absent in the current political landscape, where complex ideas are reduced to cartoonish stereotypes, a strategy that the Harper Conservatives seem to have perfected, aided and abetted by buffoons in the media, Ezra Levant and the rest of the crew at Fox North being prime examples.

Until Canadians manage to cure their addiction to sound bites and simplistic bromides and platitudes and begin demanding substance and integrity from our politicians, I very much doubt that any systemic reform will be effective.