I keep thinking about the idea of a “Rest from democracy” and how seductive that idea feels. I used to love elections, now the thought of one fills me with dread.
I miss the days when the NDP represented the progressive left with out of control spending on labor rights, ecology and throttling business; the LPC had a modicum of fiscal responsibility but generally centrists views stealing planks from the left and right when it was politically advantageous; and the CPC wanted smaller government, stronger military, and promoted family values and law and order. Now the LPC is left of the NDP and the CPC represents the working class and the NDP is just a lap dog to the LPC. WTF?
Democracy depends on an educated and engaged populace - which is why there's a push to stifle public education and amplify media brainwashing.
This piece got me thinking Churchill's comment about democracy. I've never come across a reason to disagree with it.
It turns out it wasn't original. Here's an excerpt from his speech to British Parliament in 1947:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."
" where I was once excited about election campaigns, lately they mostly fill me with dread." I blame that entirely on the quality of leadership we have currently at all political levels, and could not agree with it more. Politics has gone from "Front Page Challenge" to the "Hollywood Squares".
Take a look at any country in the worlds that isn't a democracy and ask yourself if you'd want to live there permanently. Then, do the most basic thing in participation and hold your nose and vote. But vote...while you still can.
I always think that if I take a rest from democracy, the bad guys win.
I don't know who the bad guys are, but they do...
And on an side note, the only one I have not read is the Letto book. My father moved from Newfoundland to Canada in 1948, so I have had some interest in it.
This is a fine piece of writing, and it is done in a wonderfully readable style; moreover, it is a reminder that history may, indeed, have some lessons and can provide some perspective.
I only hope that historical study in our schools includes this kind of regional knowledge – which includes the challenges, the hopes, and yes the travails, that contributed to welding the country together, and that did not all occur in the Toronto-Montreal (“Laurentian”) axis.
Many thanks for the abridged history lesson, I knew nothing about the 'Commission of Government' era. And thanks for the book links - to that I have to add one of my favorite books, The Danger Tree by David McFarlane. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/944036, a family history that rolls up a good bit of the island history as it goes. It's fabulous, I've bought many of them over the years!
There is, of course, a difference between giving political squabbling a rest and giving democracy a rest. Britain did not cease to be a democracy during WW2, despite the fact that membership in Churchill's coalition cabinet owed nothing to party affiliation and everything to competence. In a time of national emergency, any man who didn't get things moving in his department could expect to be quickly replaced by someone more able, an assessment that made not the least appeal to political considerations.
As for the envy of Mussolini that's presumably intended to shock us, in 1933 this would clearly have been inspired by his success in getting trains to run on time--in short, by his economic and administrative competence--not by any particular admiration for what we subsequently came to know of fascism.
Thank you. I was unaware of this history., but it tracks.
The 1933 Amulree Report would seem to suggest several parallels with our situation today.
1. Out of touch wealthy elites running a 'representative' government that largely ruled over an largely illiterate, unsophisticated working class, and kept them in their place with a token public dole.
2. Economic strife, massive government debt, civil unrest, and open pining from supposed representatives of the people for an end to democracy, and a strongman (like Mussolini) to rule over them under a fascistic model.
3. The concentration of power to a small group of unelected wealthy men, coupled with the movement toward the abolishment of representative government.
4. The move toward anarchy only stemmed by a world war, and an empire who swooped in to consolidate the wayward colony to join the nearby larger colony (Canada) before another empire (USA) scooped it up for its resource and strategic wealth.
Today, we see elements of #1, #2, and #3 already occuring in Canada.
Power is consolidated in the Canadian PMO with a small group of unelected elites, and the Cabinet Ministers, MPs, Senators, and the Judiciary are de facto trained seals at best, and complete nullities otherwise. Youth, academia, and union activists pine for fascism, even when they don't understand what it means, accusing current opposition MP's of being fascists for criticizing our current 'Dear Leader'and his pack of trained seal MPs and 'independent' senators. A pandemic even gave the Dear Leader and his unelected elites in the PMO the chance to test drive fascism.
What remains is how #4 plays out. The world is indeed, again, alas, at the precipice of world war, though most of the Canadian population (and its 'leadership') are either unaware of it, or believe it will not affect us because 'the Americans will protect us'. Perhaps the USA will be the 'saviour empire' who step in to clean up our mess. Perhaps. There are other empires elsewhere in the world that have been operating in Canada with essential impunity. Those empires might have other designs on our strategic and resource wealth. What's crazy is that many Canadians would apparently be happiest if anyone but the Americans gradually, then suddenly, took over the remnants of what we still, for the moment, refer to as Canada. What is it they say about a frog in a boiling pot of water?
Even if the Americans turn out to be the empire who steps in, they're not exactly an inspiring democracy any longer, though I'd argue they're the best of the current choices on offer.
Now to figure out how to get my adult sons and nearly adult daughter to read this piece and understand it. I'm not optimistic.
Don’t confuse elections with democracy. It’s elections that have lead to the party politics that is destroying democracy.
This is exactly the point behind a random lottery to appoint political representatives rather than electing them.
Undemocratic? “Rule by the people” is the very definition of democratic!
Randomly selecting representatives can provide a statistically valid result for population representation (the whole point behind elections). There’s no need for anybody to know anything about them beforehand (as if that helps much anyway with elections as we have them now.).
Of course competence still matters, but I disagree strongly that elections provide any increase in competence vs. random selection.
As P.J. O’Rourke liked to say “You could pick any bunch of names from the phone book and it wouldn’t be any worse than the politicians we elect …”
This isn’t a new or fantastical idea. Appointment by lot is what was used in ancient Athens. You know, the place that coined the word “democracy”.
The idea is also regaining acceptance today. It’s called sortition now. There’s a lengthy Wikipedia article on it. You can also look up Brett Hennig on YouTube if you’d rather watch and listen.
Do yourself (and the country) a favour and look into it.
I question how feasible this is - though I suppose in a way it's more honest as it acknowledges that the people who don't move out of the office between politicians are the real people who hold power. My initial thought was that I know a lot of people who don't know up from down and believe fantastical things without critical thought. While politicians aren't immune from that, I can say with certainty that the types of decisions I would have made 20 years ago are very different than the types of decisions I would make now. (Time has a way of teaching even the same person additional things. And knowledge then improves the ability to make decisions.) I feel like elections balance things out to the average of what "most people" want rather than having someone randomly being rolled in to the political system who is an extremist and doesn't actually represent the views of their neighbors. (Though I suppose the argument could be made that elections don't necessarily prevent that either.)
I really would love to see the whole party whip style of politics be gone and allow the elected politicians to actually represent the people who voted for them. I think the party whip system is the bigger issue in a lot of cases - where a politician has to vote party lines or risk getting kicked out of the party, no matter what their electorate has communicated.
No doubt some education/age filtering would be necessary, and it’s possible that an extremist or two would get in, but not statistically probable that there would be enough to be a problem. And there would be enough older ones to give the younger ones some guidance and sober thought.
Certainly there operational details to work through, like how would executive (cabinet) positions be chosen? Or maybe ministries would be run by very small committees or a triumvirate.
The point is, whatever downsides there might be are dramatically outweighed by the upsides of avoiding the problems we have now.
I wonder how Newfoundland would have turned out if the Americans had taken over? I'd be willing to guess it wouldn't be any worse than how Canada has run things.
I deleted my comment as it was crude and did not convey my thoughts as well as it did my current mood. Your many friends were correct to not refer to the province in that manner.
Good analysis. I am a Newfoundlander, and it is important to not forget this moment in our history--even though I, like you, am dreading our upcoming Federal elections.
The current malaise is due to a lack of democracy, not too much of it. We're watching the end of what Kevin Carmichael calls "the end of the Gen-X economic consensus", and what others call neoliberalism.
The idea that "Mr Market" manages the economy under the watchful eye of expert central bankers and economists necessarily means that democratic politics doesn't have anything to say about political economy. Canada's laws promote monopolization, thereby empowering executives to set the terms and conditions of commerce. There's nothing for politics to do but cut taxes. Don't like high prices? Too bad, mister. That's just The Market at work. Don't like the interest rates? Too bad, central bank independence is important because.... well, it's important, isn't it?
The dissonance is on full display with the federal Liberals. They want to do good things, but they don't believe politics should interfere with markets. So they do weird 4D chess moves with half baked subsidies and tax nudges. Can't spend money on things because some naive economists with broken models don't like deficits. Complain about how voters don't understand how COMPLICATED the world is.
So politics becomes a game of empty culture war issues. Poilievre railing against the WEF while supporting their economic ideas. Trudeau going to the mat on a carbon tax that doesn't do anything. Singh complaining about notions of corrupt developers but is unable to articulate an alternative vision. The Green Party falling apart over nonsense that has nothing to do with environmentalism.
We need to dump the Gen X economic consensus, and put democratic politics back in control. All the populist movements worldwide talk about "taking back control". That's the key to a healthy democracy. We are a self-governing people who have tied our own hands with rules and ideas created by nerds who have contempt for democracy. It's time to embrace populism. Make democracy great again. Serve the people.
We saw how Trump's election made the Democrats govern better. Joe Biden has accomplished more progressive policy in two years than Obama did in eight. Poilievre's rise in the polls has actually made the Liberals govern better. Populism works.
JW, your penultimate sentence is, "Poilievre's rise in the polls has actually made the Liberals govern better."
I just don't get your conclusion in that sentence. I wish that I did but I don't; in fact, I think that the opposite occurred and whether that opposite was or was not directly related PP is, to me, uncertain at this point.
Remember in the summer when Trudeau said that housing wasn't a federal responsibility? After a few bad polls, they're suddenly all in on getting housing going and clamping down on student visa abuse. They went from "this is not our problem" to "we're doing lots of stuff quickly". That's a good thing.
The Prime Face Painter and his sneak of weasels have created the problems of housing (just one of the problems they created) through flooding the money supply, interest rates, sky high immigration, etc., etc. And they have announced that they are GOING TO cap student visas, only student visas; they have not announced much else and that is simply putting more lipstick on the pig; it is not really DOING anything. So, govern better? Nope, it is all theater.
As for populism, well, that is more complicated and we will see.
I can tell that you are a glass half full sort of individual whereas I am not.
In fact, I am normally a glass is partly full and is continually being refreshed type of guy but in this case I am a glass is partly full and is being continually drained fellow. In other words, I see absolutely nothing that causes me to have any optimism about the current administration. Anything they do the first slander and abuse folks who propose things other than what their ideology is and then, finding that they must do that thing that they slandered and opposed, they do the minimal amount; doing it badly and with ill grace and minimal movement, all so they can maintain their ideological purity.
As for PP and his acolytes, well, I have no basis for any expectation. Certainly, I hope they will do better, much better but, as I say, I have no basis for expectation, just the hope that one has for any potential new administration.
I miss the days when the NDP represented the progressive left with out of control spending on labor rights, ecology and throttling business; the LPC had a modicum of fiscal responsibility but generally centrists views stealing planks from the left and right when it was politically advantageous; and the CPC wanted smaller government, stronger military, and promoted family values and law and order. Now the LPC is left of the NDP and the CPC represents the working class and the NDP is just a lap dog to the LPC. WTF?
Thanks for an excellent piece!
Democracy depends on an educated and engaged populace - which is why there's a push to stifle public education and amplify media brainwashing.
This piece got me thinking Churchill's comment about democracy. I've never come across a reason to disagree with it.
It turns out it wasn't original. Here's an excerpt from his speech to British Parliament in 1947:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."
" where I was once excited about election campaigns, lately they mostly fill me with dread." I blame that entirely on the quality of leadership we have currently at all political levels, and could not agree with it more. Politics has gone from "Front Page Challenge" to the "Hollywood Squares".
Take a look at any country in the worlds that isn't a democracy and ask yourself if you'd want to live there permanently. Then, do the most basic thing in participation and hold your nose and vote. But vote...while you still can.
I always think that if I take a rest from democracy, the bad guys win.
I don't know who the bad guys are, but they do...
And on an side note, the only one I have not read is the Letto book. My father moved from Newfoundland to Canada in 1948, so I have had some interest in it.
This is a fine piece of writing, and it is done in a wonderfully readable style; moreover, it is a reminder that history may, indeed, have some lessons and can provide some perspective.
I only hope that historical study in our schools includes this kind of regional knowledge – which includes the challenges, the hopes, and yes the travails, that contributed to welding the country together, and that did not all occur in the Toronto-Montreal (“Laurentian”) axis.
Many thanks for the abridged history lesson, I knew nothing about the 'Commission of Government' era. And thanks for the book links - to that I have to add one of my favorite books, The Danger Tree by David McFarlane. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/944036, a family history that rolls up a good bit of the island history as it goes. It's fabulous, I've bought many of them over the years!
There is, of course, a difference between giving political squabbling a rest and giving democracy a rest. Britain did not cease to be a democracy during WW2, despite the fact that membership in Churchill's coalition cabinet owed nothing to party affiliation and everything to competence. In a time of national emergency, any man who didn't get things moving in his department could expect to be quickly replaced by someone more able, an assessment that made not the least appeal to political considerations.
As for the envy of Mussolini that's presumably intended to shock us, in 1933 this would clearly have been inspired by his success in getting trains to run on time--in short, by his economic and administrative competence--not by any particular admiration for what we subsequently came to know of fascism.
Otherwise, a very interesting piece.
Thank you. I was unaware of this history., but it tracks.
The 1933 Amulree Report would seem to suggest several parallels with our situation today.
1. Out of touch wealthy elites running a 'representative' government that largely ruled over an largely illiterate, unsophisticated working class, and kept them in their place with a token public dole.
2. Economic strife, massive government debt, civil unrest, and open pining from supposed representatives of the people for an end to democracy, and a strongman (like Mussolini) to rule over them under a fascistic model.
3. The concentration of power to a small group of unelected wealthy men, coupled with the movement toward the abolishment of representative government.
4. The move toward anarchy only stemmed by a world war, and an empire who swooped in to consolidate the wayward colony to join the nearby larger colony (Canada) before another empire (USA) scooped it up for its resource and strategic wealth.
Today, we see elements of #1, #2, and #3 already occuring in Canada.
Power is consolidated in the Canadian PMO with a small group of unelected elites, and the Cabinet Ministers, MPs, Senators, and the Judiciary are de facto trained seals at best, and complete nullities otherwise. Youth, academia, and union activists pine for fascism, even when they don't understand what it means, accusing current opposition MP's of being fascists for criticizing our current 'Dear Leader'and his pack of trained seal MPs and 'independent' senators. A pandemic even gave the Dear Leader and his unelected elites in the PMO the chance to test drive fascism.
What remains is how #4 plays out. The world is indeed, again, alas, at the precipice of world war, though most of the Canadian population (and its 'leadership') are either unaware of it, or believe it will not affect us because 'the Americans will protect us'. Perhaps the USA will be the 'saviour empire' who step in to clean up our mess. Perhaps. There are other empires elsewhere in the world that have been operating in Canada with essential impunity. Those empires might have other designs on our strategic and resource wealth. What's crazy is that many Canadians would apparently be happiest if anyone but the Americans gradually, then suddenly, took over the remnants of what we still, for the moment, refer to as Canada. What is it they say about a frog in a boiling pot of water?
Even if the Americans turn out to be the empire who steps in, they're not exactly an inspiring democracy any longer, though I'd argue they're the best of the current choices on offer.
Now to figure out how to get my adult sons and nearly adult daughter to read this piece and understand it. I'm not optimistic.
Don’t confuse elections with democracy. It’s elections that have lead to the party politics that is destroying democracy.
This is exactly the point behind a random lottery to appoint political representatives rather than electing them.
Undemocratic? “Rule by the people” is the very definition of democratic!
Randomly selecting representatives can provide a statistically valid result for population representation (the whole point behind elections). There’s no need for anybody to know anything about them beforehand (as if that helps much anyway with elections as we have them now.).
Of course competence still matters, but I disagree strongly that elections provide any increase in competence vs. random selection.
As P.J. O’Rourke liked to say “You could pick any bunch of names from the phone book and it wouldn’t be any worse than the politicians we elect …”
This isn’t a new or fantastical idea. Appointment by lot is what was used in ancient Athens. You know, the place that coined the word “democracy”.
The idea is also regaining acceptance today. It’s called sortition now. There’s a lengthy Wikipedia article on it. You can also look up Brett Hennig on YouTube if you’d rather watch and listen.
Do yourself (and the country) a favour and look into it.
I question how feasible this is - though I suppose in a way it's more honest as it acknowledges that the people who don't move out of the office between politicians are the real people who hold power. My initial thought was that I know a lot of people who don't know up from down and believe fantastical things without critical thought. While politicians aren't immune from that, I can say with certainty that the types of decisions I would have made 20 years ago are very different than the types of decisions I would make now. (Time has a way of teaching even the same person additional things. And knowledge then improves the ability to make decisions.) I feel like elections balance things out to the average of what "most people" want rather than having someone randomly being rolled in to the political system who is an extremist and doesn't actually represent the views of their neighbors. (Though I suppose the argument could be made that elections don't necessarily prevent that either.)
I really would love to see the whole party whip style of politics be gone and allow the elected politicians to actually represent the people who voted for them. I think the party whip system is the bigger issue in a lot of cases - where a politician has to vote party lines or risk getting kicked out of the party, no matter what their electorate has communicated.
No doubt some education/age filtering would be necessary, and it’s possible that an extremist or two would get in, but not statistically probable that there would be enough to be a problem. And there would be enough older ones to give the younger ones some guidance and sober thought.
Certainly there operational details to work through, like how would executive (cabinet) positions be chosen? Or maybe ministries would be run by very small committees or a triumvirate.
The point is, whatever downsides there might be are dramatically outweighed by the upsides of avoiding the problems we have now.
I wonder how Newfoundland would have turned out if the Americans had taken over? I'd be willing to guess it wouldn't be any worse than how Canada has run things.
I've never been to Newfoundland. I have many friends who have visited, none of them ever used the term s**thole to describe it.
I deleted my comment as it was crude and did not convey my thoughts as well as it did my current mood. Your many friends were correct to not refer to the province in that manner.
Enjoyed this. I especially recommend Linden MacIntyre’s “The Wake: The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami.”
Wow, thank you! I didn't know this about the history of Newfoundland and it's very interesting. What a great, thought-provoking, piece.
Good analysis. I am a Newfoundlander, and it is important to not forget this moment in our history--even though I, like you, am dreading our upcoming Federal elections.
We don't want rid of Democracy. But what we have put up with lately (10 years or so) is'nt working
The current malaise is due to a lack of democracy, not too much of it. We're watching the end of what Kevin Carmichael calls "the end of the Gen-X economic consensus", and what others call neoliberalism.
The idea that "Mr Market" manages the economy under the watchful eye of expert central bankers and economists necessarily means that democratic politics doesn't have anything to say about political economy. Canada's laws promote monopolization, thereby empowering executives to set the terms and conditions of commerce. There's nothing for politics to do but cut taxes. Don't like high prices? Too bad, mister. That's just The Market at work. Don't like the interest rates? Too bad, central bank independence is important because.... well, it's important, isn't it?
The dissonance is on full display with the federal Liberals. They want to do good things, but they don't believe politics should interfere with markets. So they do weird 4D chess moves with half baked subsidies and tax nudges. Can't spend money on things because some naive economists with broken models don't like deficits. Complain about how voters don't understand how COMPLICATED the world is.
So politics becomes a game of empty culture war issues. Poilievre railing against the WEF while supporting their economic ideas. Trudeau going to the mat on a carbon tax that doesn't do anything. Singh complaining about notions of corrupt developers but is unable to articulate an alternative vision. The Green Party falling apart over nonsense that has nothing to do with environmentalism.
We need to dump the Gen X economic consensus, and put democratic politics back in control. All the populist movements worldwide talk about "taking back control". That's the key to a healthy democracy. We are a self-governing people who have tied our own hands with rules and ideas created by nerds who have contempt for democracy. It's time to embrace populism. Make democracy great again. Serve the people.
We saw how Trump's election made the Democrats govern better. Joe Biden has accomplished more progressive policy in two years than Obama did in eight. Poilievre's rise in the polls has actually made the Liberals govern better. Populism works.
JW, your penultimate sentence is, "Poilievre's rise in the polls has actually made the Liberals govern better."
I just don't get your conclusion in that sentence. I wish that I did but I don't; in fact, I think that the opposite occurred and whether that opposite was or was not directly related PP is, to me, uncertain at this point.
Remember in the summer when Trudeau said that housing wasn't a federal responsibility? After a few bad polls, they're suddenly all in on getting housing going and clamping down on student visa abuse. They went from "this is not our problem" to "we're doing lots of stuff quickly". That's a good thing.
Wellllll.......
The Prime Face Painter and his sneak of weasels have created the problems of housing (just one of the problems they created) through flooding the money supply, interest rates, sky high immigration, etc., etc. And they have announced that they are GOING TO cap student visas, only student visas; they have not announced much else and that is simply putting more lipstick on the pig; it is not really DOING anything. So, govern better? Nope, it is all theater.
As for populism, well, that is more complicated and we will see.
I'm not so cynical. It's a vast improvement over "we're definitely not going to do anything about problems". Doing popular things is good.
To start as I did above, welllll.......
I can tell that you are a glass half full sort of individual whereas I am not.
In fact, I am normally a glass is partly full and is continually being refreshed type of guy but in this case I am a glass is partly full and is being continually drained fellow. In other words, I see absolutely nothing that causes me to have any optimism about the current administration. Anything they do the first slander and abuse folks who propose things other than what their ideology is and then, finding that they must do that thing that they slandered and opposed, they do the minimal amount; doing it badly and with ill grace and minimal movement, all so they can maintain their ideological purity.
As for PP and his acolytes, well, I have no basis for any expectation. Certainly, I hope they will do better, much better but, as I say, I have no basis for expectation, just the hope that one has for any potential new administration.