The Unbroken Machine: Canada's Democracy in Action Read online

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Foreword

  The fact that you’re reading this means that you have decided to at least try entering the world of electoral reform. The fact that you could read this sentence means your eyes haven’t glazed over yet. Good. Keep going. It’s worth it.

  We are told that there is a terrible problem with our electoral system. It seems to be electing governments that don’t represent the will of the voters, or at least don’t represent the many views of the voters. A system that crudely crushes political dreams and ensures the hegemony of the established power grid. Apparently, following in the footsteps of Dante on the road to Hell, the only valid sign outside a polling station, should read “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” In short, the way we practice democracy is an absolute mess.

  Or so we are told.

  Fortunately, there are many solutions, and a virtual army of policy warriors ready to slay the dragon of democratic injustice by dispatching not only the current system, but anyone not adhering to the one true alternative. Just which one that is depends on which army you join, and it’s a crowded field.

  Here’s a simple guide: The smaller parties, like the NDP and the Greens, prefer Proportional Representation, because it’s the one system that could give them a secure and influential position in Parliament, despite their limited appeal. The Liberals want ranked ballots, because as a party of the centre, they will likely be the second choice of both those on the right and the left, thus ensuring political dominance for generations. The Conservatives don’t want any change, as the current system favours them every decade or so, which is why they are demanding a referendum. Referendums tend to kill change.

  Proponents of the various systems will no doubt quibble with some of this. That’s fine. In the electoral reform world, simplicity is eschewed and complexity celebrated. Listen to any of the public consultations.

  But hang on. Push the pause button.

  What if the electoral reformers have got it all wrong? What if this is not a problem of fairness but one of understanding? What if the real issue is a problem of indifference and ignorance, rather than competing systems and outcomes? Is electoral reform then just a solution in search of a problem, while the real issue is the steady erosion of the bonds between citizen and institution? Could be.

  Take a look at just two of the seismic political events of the past few years: Brexit and Donald Trump. They have both been seen, and rightly so, as expressions of anger and frustration against the ruling order. In Britain, the fuel for the revolutionary fire was the massive tide of human migration all too near to England’s green and pleasant land — the hundreds of thousands people from the war-torn countries of the Middle East and Africa streaming into Europe anyway they could. Their journey headed ever northward, through the Balkans and into the heartland. Tens of thousands tried to get through to England, stopped temporarily in Calais at an encampment known simply as “The jungle.” A great many Britons wanted nothing to do with it. While the migrants could travel freely on the continent because of the Schengen Agreement, they didn’t have the right to enter the UK, which stayed out of Schengen.

  So what, you may ask, got enough British voters so worked up that they decided to leave? Fear. Pure and simple. Fear that Europe would grant citizenship to the migrants. If that happened, Britain would be obligated to let them in. All of them, if they wanted to move there. And that didn’t include the other tens of millions of Europeans who might fancy a little place near the village common too. Faced with such possibilities, a majority of Britons said enough, we’re out.

  In the United States it was the middle class, and those who used to be in the middle class, who provided the oxygen for Donald Trump. Yes there were loud overtones of the migrant issue there too, but the larger elephant in the room was the failure of the economy to embrace tens of millions who could no longer afford to even dream about the American dream. Globalization and technology had killed their jobs and their spirits. Elites had all the money and power, they had little of either, and so they used the system to force what they hoped would be a correction.

  But in both cases there was something else at play under the surface. That fear evident in England, and that anger felt in the U.S., were magnified by a bigger force. A large number of people in both countries no longer felt any great attachment to their institutions. After all, the institutions had failed to protect them, either from rapid change or from economic hardship. What good is an institution if it can’t do something that basic? Besides, for years they had believed that politicians were corrupt, because so many politicians told them so. To be clear, the politicians making that claim were always talking about the other guy in the other party, but few paid much attention to the nuance. Increasingly all anyone knew about the instruments and institutions of government was that they were working against them, the working middle class, the majority of the citizenry.

  So with a combination of fear of the future and loathing for those in charge, the people rose up. They didn’t care a bit that they were being warned not to do what they were about to do. In fact, they were encouraged. If their vote was going to harm the elites, so much the better. In the case of Britain, a majority didn’t much care that it would also hurt them, and in the U.S. the mission was to drain the swamp, regardless of the consequences.

  Which, in an odd way, brings us back to electoral reform in Canada. Our middle class is doing better than our American cousins, and our immigration policies aren’t creating distress. But that doesn’t mean that we love or understand our institutions.

  On a recent tour to gauge the mood of the people, a meeting on electoral reform in Yellowknife attracted exactly zero people. Now that doesn’t mean people in Yellowknife don’t have an opinion or two on the matter, or on all sorts of other things, but engaging with the system may not be the way they want to express it. Ditto for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Canadians in towns and cities across the country.

  This disconnect to government could have something to do with the deplorable lack of teaching civics in school. Or it could mean that those in charge are losing the connection to the people.

  Either way, it’s a red flag that we ignore it at our peril.

  Dale Smith has taken on the task of looking at electoral reform through this lens. You may or may not agree with his thesis, but it’s an important debate, and his work is an important contribution to it. I commend him for taking this on. The work of a good journalist is to shine light in dark places. He has done just that.

  Tom Clark, chief political correspondent, Global News (retired)

  Ottawa

  December 2016

  Introduction

  While books describing the “broken” state of our political system are numerous, and the various proposals for how to fix that state mount, I turn the idea on its head — what if it’s not the system that’s broken, but rather our understanding of how to use the system?

  This book will look at the critical gaps in civic literacy that have become endemic within Canadian political culture, and serve as a kind of layman’s guide to the Canadian political system, since it’s something
we apparently are no longer learning in school. In fact, only one province has a dedicated civics course, and it’s one plagued with misinformation and misplaced in the curriculum.

  How endemic is the problem? Samara Canada’s study has shown that the majority of MPs that we elect don’t actually know what their job description entails, which is to hold the government to account by means of controlling the public purse. Meanwhile, Canadian voters have skewed expectations of the electoral system based on false readings of the significance of popular support numbers on the one hand, and on the other, years of people telling them that their votes don’t count if they don’t vote for the winner.

  Furthermore, nobody seems to know what political parties do anymore, and those very same parties have used that gap in knowledge to increase their own power, taking it away from their grassroots membership. And, of course, most Canadians think of our system along American terms because that’s what they’re exposed to in popular culture and even our own education system. Finally, and perhaps most alarming of all, there is a widespread tendency to treat democracy as a spectator sport where all one has to do is mark a ballot every few years and let everything else take care of itself, when the system is built for constant participation.

  Out of these gaps in knowledge have come proposals for reforms that people think will fix the system, and will, in the buzzwords of the modern era, make it “more democratic.” What is disconcerting about most of these proposals is not the fact that they won’t actually increase the actual democratic value of the system in the pursuit of “fairness,” but that most proposals also reduce the systems of accountability that are built into the political setup. For example, one-member-one-vote party leadership contests make leaders less accountable to their membership and allow them to concentrate power without an effective mechanism to be unseated. But if people don’t understand how the systems work currently, it’s easy to see how they don’t see the unintended consequences of their proposals.

  As a journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, I have not only observed what happens currently in Parliament first-hand but have also engaged with the public about their participation in the system. I have become increasingly alarmed by their lack of understanding of the system and their reliance on magical thinking and quick-fix proposals that demonstrate a flawed understanding of how a parliamentary democracy operates. The Unbroken Machine is an attempt to correct that problem.

  1

  The Age of Civic Illiteracy

  We will make every vote count.

  We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.

  We will convene an all-party Parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reform, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting, and online voting.

  This committee will deliver its recommendations to Parliament. Within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform.

  — Liberal Party of Canada

  In recent years, Canadian politics has been filled with talk of the need for reform of the system. Political action groups like Fair Vote Canada and RaBIT (the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto) have been advocating for changes to the way votes are cast in this country. A number of political parties have also become involved in attempts to change the political system in Canada. In 2005 the B.C. Liberal Party sponsored a province-wide referendum that asked voters to decide if they wished to replace the existing first-past-the-post system with another system called Single Transferable Vote — an attempt that failed. In the 2015 federal election, Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau promised that if elected his party would form a committee to consider reforms to the voting process. Since winning the election, they have followed up on that promise and that committee has met to consider proposals for electoral reform.

  This movement for political change is fostered by a widespread sense of dissatisfaction with Canadian politics as it exists now and a belief that the perceived problems could be corrected if the system was changed. In short, there is a belief that the machine is broken and that all would be well if somehow it can be fixed.

  The machine is not broken. It has a defined purpose and it works — it works well, in fact. At the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, candidate nominations are held. Political parties hold conventions to decide policy and elect leaders. Elections are held in towns and cities across the country to elect councillors and mayors, provinces and territories hold elections for their legislatures, and nationally, federal elections to select MPs, and thereby, a government. Following all of these elections, the various politicians and the government bureaucracies work to keep all of the offices and agencies of state running smoothly.

  But many of the people who operate it seem to have forgotten just how it’s supposed to work. They keep coming up with ways to “improve” it, to somehow change its outcomes — creating something that will be fantastic and magical, like unicorns. However, when they don’t use the machine properly, and when they have unrealistic expectations about what it’s supposed to be producing, well, they deem it to be “broken” and in need of an overhaul.

  Welcome to the state of Canadian democracy, something that many claim needs reform. While for decades now it has often been said that ours is an age of reform, it would also seem that ours is also an age of civic illiteracy. The demands that we see for electoral reform often spring from unfamiliarity with just how the system operates, and some blatant misrepresentations about the nature of some of our institutions. It doesn’t help that we are bombarded by depictions of the American political system in our popular culture, depictions that have created a distorted image of our own system — a fiction that involves elements of the American system mapped over ours in people’s minds. Things are made worse by the fact that many Canadians are wrapped up in American political concerns, never mind that they can’t actually vote in their elections.

  For some Canadians, the level of illiteracy is pretty extreme — you might even say that it is alarming.

  “Stephen Harper’s the mayor, right?” asked one constituent of a prospective MP who was knocking on doors in a Calgary riding during the 2011 federal election.

  Many can’t tell you the three levels of government, who the head of state is, and you might be lucky if they know who the prime minister is at any given moment. Others can’t distinguish between the public service and the elected officials, between government and Opposition, or between the roles of an MP versus the role of a minister. To them, everything is just “government.” Many people don’t know about the nomination process that political parties use to select candidates, or the policy conventions that parties hold to draft election platforms, or the roles that parties play within our system, and may instead believe a narrative that fits their world view, which often involves belief that a small cadre of powerful elites pulls the strings and makes our democratic institutions dance to their machinations.

  This general confusion about Canada’s electoral system and belief that it is “broken” is often encouraged by the very people who do know better. They do this because they have their own ideas about how the system should operate instead, which usually involves changes made for their own partisan advantage. They sow additional confusion into the system and then declare it to be broken because it is in their advantage to do so. Of course, they may not actually have engaged in enough of a consequence-based analysis of just what would happen if they should implement their “reforms,” but that doesn’t stop them from trying to push their own vision or agenda. “Reform,” they feel, will benefit them in the long term.

  And more often than not, their visions will go unchallenged by the media or the general public because of a pervasive lack of knowledge of how the systems of our democracy operate, or how they would be affected by changes that may sound novel or interesting.

  ⚙

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bsp; For many Canadians, this lack of knowledge of our system of government stems from inadequate education in the primary and secondary levels. Most provinces don’t require civics education or its equivalent in their social studies curriculums, and when students are offered civics education, they are often taught only a few basic facts without being given an accurate representation of the mechanics of a system. In some cases, such as in Ontario, it was found that the civics course being taught in high schools was imparting wrong information about the roles and responsibilities of the different institutions of government.

  Not only are our students being given an inadequate education in civics but they are often being taught by instructors who have a bias against the system as it exists. Studies have shown that teachers with the greatest interest in politics are also those with the greatest belief in the need for reform of the system. This bias among many teachers and political scientists for reform of one form or another, means that students often graduate with a distorted understanding of the system and how it operates currently.

  One of the most damaging misunderstandings about how the system operates stems from a pervasive misuse of the term democracy, or rather, democratic. This leads to the completely false notion that things can be made “more democratic,” as though there were a way to assign a point value to the “democraticness” of systems or proposed reforms, and the first one to get to a hundred, wins.

  The most popular notions for making things “more democratic” tend to involve adding more votes to the process — votes by the general public, or by members of the House of Commons — or require positions currently held by appointment be made elected ones, or that certain decisions that would ordinarily be under the purview of the Crown be similarly put to a vote. And while votes are a good thing, they need to be held with a specific purpose in mind and within a specific framework — what is this vote going to accomplish and what does the democratic weight behind it mean?