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Our Democratic Instinct
Moving with some uncertainty into the twentieth century’s concluding decade, the world is experiencing unscripted confrontations both with new environmental and economic realities and with enduring problems, such as war, crime, racial prejudice, shortages of food, and religious fanaticism, that are sometimes dressed up in new ways. Accompanying this daunting phase of change, however, is an opportunity to involve people more directly in making decisions about the solutions to problems.
Using Democratic Means
Giving fuller reign to this democratic instinct is in itself a challenge, since over the years our decision-making process has jealously been guarded by the smooth hands of the political establishment. Yet such a transition is important if we are to successfully address the issues currently before us. As Nelson Mandela told members of Parliament when addressing us on June 18, 1990, just four months after his release from thirty years of imprisonment in South Africa, “We must use democratic means in our search for a democratic result.”
A tide of democratic change has been sweeping the world, not only recently through the once-monolithic Communist bloc of countries in eastern Europe where the wave hit in a way as dramatic as it was sudden, but earlier in Mediterranean Europe in the mid-1970s after which it spread to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and today is felt even in South Africa.
This historic transformation from totalitarian systems, which imposed a single view, to democratic regimes, which provide a process of choice, is bringing changes that allow for resolution of the very dilemmas that have ended numerous dictatorships. Democracy in these countries is largely a process of communication and an instrument of choice that offers alternative solutions to any given problem. In this context political scientist Dankwart A. Rustow has noted how “situations that confront rigid dictatorships with insoluble dilemmas thus allow democracies to show themselves at their best as mechanisms for change, specifically for orderly change among parties in power.”1
Democratic Evolution in Canada
Although Canada has been an exemplary multi-party democratic state for well over a century, many Canadians today argue that the “democratic revolution” in other countries also needs to wash anew through our own institutions and political practices in order to take democracy, Canadian-style, to the next phase in its evolution.
Much can be done to democratize our society more fully: referendums could be held to ratify constitutional amendments (like the proposals now before the country, or previously the Meech Lake Accord, or before that, an entrenched Charter of Rights); plebiscites could be held from time to time on issues of great national importance (like converting the national system of measurement to metric or imposing a moratorium on government spending and taxation); native Canadians deserve powers and structures of self-government; election law requires further reforms; standards of ethical conduct in public affairs at all levels need a more balanced emphasis; and practices and programs in government must be retested against the democratic principle of “the greatest good to the greatest number,” to ensure they cease serving only special interest groups with narrowly defined interests; shareholder democracy could reassert important accountability over companies; greater employee participation in the profits and decisions of the plants where they work will be a more beneficial form of industrial democracy; many of the 3,300,000 Canadians with varying degrees of mental and physical disability want to assume “the dignity of risk” and experience a less paternalistic approach when it comes to their education, employment, transportation, recreation, and accommodation. These are only some examples. Quite apart from these and other specific measures, the real change must take place in a cultural dimension, a new attitude that is positive and accepting about what “to use democratic means” entails.
On many levels and in many ways, people can participate more in the decisions whose consequences affect their lives. Canadians can become less the passive spectators, and more the active participants. This fresh manifestation of the democratic instinct is strongly entrenching itself in Canada these days. Widespread support across the country for native goals is specific evidence of our new sensitivity to participation and accountability. In addition to a “healthy and well-justified sense of guilt,” which has begun to take hold regarding the conditions of Canadian native peoples, John Dafoe also observed of western Canada in the summer of 1991 that “native claims these days are being viewed as more acceptable than Quebec’s because they are expressed in terms that are more in harmony with the populist mood that has taken hold.”2
Some Canadians have lamented the emphasis on rights in the new era of our Charter, saying that equal stress should be put on each citizen’s responsibilities. Yet until we regenerate an attitude of self-reliance in our culture at all levels, until we are increasingly prepared to say to one another, “It is your decision – make it, and live with the consequences,” we ought not to pretend such dismay over the anaemic state of people’s interest in assuming duty and accepting responsibility. To become a healthier democracy where people’s lives and values matter more, it will help to shed the traditional Canadian instinct of paternalism.
Accountability Depends on Participation
We Canadians – like the British, French, Americans, and Mexicans – live in a large country with representatives elected by the population at large. We all may exhibit a somewhat proprietorial attitude towards democracy. Yet many smaller countries (from Switzerland to the Netherlands, Iceland to Israel, and New Zealand to Papua New Guinea) also show, as Patrick Watson detected in his examination of the ageless struggle for democracy around the world, how “democracy and smallness go hand in hand.” In some of these countries, Watson notes, “accountability depends more on the participation of citizens than on the conduct of leaders.”3
Democracy, a concept born in the Greek city states, at its simplest means the rule of the demos, the citizens’ body, or the citizens in full assembly together. It was the right of each citizen to decide what should be matters of public concern, and how those matters should be resolved. The evolution of modern nation states and the growth of populations necessarily resulted in democracy being converted from direct to indirect forms – through the election of representatives of the people.
Blending Representative and Direct Democracy
Most contemporary nation states calling themselves democracies not only incorporate into their constitutions the apparatus of representative legislative assemblies, but also balance this by maintaining some provision for direct democracy. Certainly the more successful democracies creatively combine a healthy mix of direct-voting procedures with representative assemblies, and use each approach according to its appropriateness for resolving the matter at hand. In Canada the uses of this device of direct democracy have been somewhat limited – we have held only two national plebiscites so far, although about sixty have been held at the provincial level, and several thousand in our various municipalities.
Before a detailed discussion of the who, what, where, when, why, and how of referendums, it would be best to face up to the rigid attitude which holds, quite simply, that direct voting by the people on major issues is incompatible with our system of representative democracy. In Canada’s parliamentary democracy, goes this reasoning, we elect members of Parliament to make our decisions, and we do not want them passing the buck, or ducking an issue. Many eminent and eloquent Canadians express this line of thought. Some add that issues are too complex to be put to the (uninformed) people in a simple “yes or no” question decided by a single round of balloting. Still others support this with a “floodgates” argument, suggesting that if we start holding referendums on one or two issues, this will open the gate to the vast dam that currently holds back mob rule. What would be the point, they ask, of having MPs at all? Buttressing that with a final argument, some critics conclude that direct voting is simply “unparliamentary,” or even worse, “un-British.”
The answer to all this is that referendums and plebiscites are not meant to replace parliamentary rule, but rather to enhance it. Our system of government depends, ultimately, upon the consent of the people being governed. Canada is not a dictatorship where tyrannical force is used to obtain public acquiescence in the measures and programs of the government. Nor is it a theocracy where we follow the dictates of our leadership because of blindly obedient religious faith. Ours is a democracy, where, at the end of the day, there simply must be public consensus about where we are going, and general agreement on how to get there. Without consent, the whole elaborate superstructure – the legislatures, the courts, the financial system, the commercial marketplace, the acceptance of laws and norms of behaviour – will corrode until it collapses.
How are we to achieve consent, this indispensable glue of a democratic society? Elections every four or five years? Opinion polls? First ministers’ meetings? One method, that of diffusing amongst the electorate a greater sense of personal responsibility for the actions of government, Vernon Bogdanor has noted, results in decisions of government acquiring greater authority and legitimacy because they are based upon a wider degree of support.4
Because the major issues facing Canada now are as much political and psychological as they are economic or technical, the all-important educative role of referendums and the consent that can be created by an inclusive and participatory approach are both vital. The environmental and social behaviour challenges currently facing our country, for example, cannot simply be resolved by a mechanical application of legal rules or precepts of the social sciences; they depend crucially upon the mobilization of popular consent.
“This consent requires that there be in the political system some focus for the public interest,” says Bogdanor, adding that this interest would come about through “a feeling that the policies of a government reflect more than merely the interests of its supporters” and that such a community of interest “cannot be assumed, but must be constructed through intelligent political action.”5
Of course, many of the issues of immediate concern to most Canadians in the social and economic sphere are not simple, and they could not be readily solved through a single direct vote of the people. Nor can such complex and interconnected decisions be separately referred to the voters. Direct voting – like everything else involving the exercise of statecraft – must be used intelligently. This book gives a number of examples of wise and unwise uses. Where referendums and plebiscites can be appropriately used, however, they additionally serve the fundamental role of creating consent for the actions of government, taken through parliamentary voting.
Our Democratic Instinct
The democratic instinct permeates Canadian life. Many laws and constitutional provisions within this broadly formed political milieu form the legal framework of our democratic system.
Ten fundamental political rights and freedoms present in Canadian law are: the right to elect governments periodically, the right to vote for one’s representative, the right to vote on certain laws, the right to a secret ballot, the right to free speech, the right to assemble freely, the right to information about public policies, the right to be a candidate for public office, the freedom to participate in the political process, and the freedom to form a political party.6 These freedoms and rights are accorded differing levels of constitutional and legal protection in our country, as the examination in this book of one of them – the people’s right to vote on certain laws – will demonstrate.
In addition to these express legal provisions, many norms and practices of a democratic, populist, and favour-the-underdog or egalitarian nature are intrinsically, even instinctively, part of the “Canadian way.” From tax laws to immigration practice, Canadians have a healthy abhorrence of a double standard. Our democratic instinct compels us to insist on fairness to all, special privileges for none.
Patterns of Anti-democratic Thought
Yet a countervailing attitude also operates within Canada today. This anti-democratic attitude accepts democracy if necessary, but not necessarily democracy.7 Those having this outlook prefer a controlled democracy. This is the Canada that believes in deference to authority and that stresses the values of peace, order, and good government. Tourists from abroad marvel at how tidy and efficient our cities are. In government as in urban living, Canadians love orderliness. The same mindset that has bequeathed us a smothering thicket of laws to govern the minute details of our daily living has been present to keep us from the disorderly conduct of an easy-going democracy.
Puritanism, extended from religious dogmas into codes of personal conduct aimed at the moral uplift of society as a whole, was in turn carried through into political puritanism, which has produced a tangible expression of denial.
Some of our oldest institutions, such as the Senate, which still bedevils Canadian political and parliamentary life, were expressly designed to curb the popularly elected assemblies, to provide “sober second thought” after elected representatives, implicitly “intoxicated” by their power, may have acted rashly (that is, in a way in which the governing establishment did not approve).
Quite apart from institutional manifestations of anti-democratic thought, attitudes can be found in many quarters of Canada today which proceed from the unspoken premise that the people simply cannot be trusted. This denial of any genuine role for the people in our system of government is itself a betrayal or disavowal of the core given, that our society is a democracy. I listened in disbelief as a fellow MP, several years ago, explained why referendums were “not a good idea.” “I was talking with some ladies in my constituency, and they had no clue about even basic aspects of government. How could they be entrusted to vote on an important issue facing the country?” he asked. This from a man who was sitting in Parliament because he had been elected by those same people!
Lamentably, it is at this superficial level that the assessment of participatory democracy usually ends. It is time to take the analysis a little deeper and show how these patterns of anti-democratic thought have actually served us poorly.
Three Criticisms of Democracy
Some critics of democracy are opposed to it, root and branch, on the basis that it is the least efficient form of government and one in which the stability of the state is threatened by factionalism; complex issues are distorted by popular discussion; difficult decisions are evaded or put off; and matters of judgment are decided according to what will be acceptable to the majority of the voters.8 This attitude is not uncommon in totalitarian and fascist regimes, but probably a number of people in contempo...
