Blog: Articles filed under democracy

This Monday, May 2, Canada had its 41st federal election, resulting in a Conservative majority government led by Stephen Harper. The results are somewhat surprising: though a Conservative government was likely, a majority was by no means a certainty. Perhaps the most interesting result of this election, however, is the effect it had on our other political parties. The NDP are now, for the first time ever, the Official Opposition Party in the House of Commons. They pretty much dominated Quebec, and they won 102 seats in the House. The Liberals were decimated, dropping from 77 seats to 34 (close to the same number the NDP had in the previous Parliament). Similarly, the Bloc Québécois went from 47 seats to 4. And for the first time ever, a Green Party candidate was elected—none other than the leader, Elizabeth May herself.

So our election is filled with many historical firsts for Canadian politics, and our political landscape has changed dramatically. For a graphical idea of how much changed in this election, just take a look at these two maps of Canada depicting the results by riding: 2008 election and 2011 election. (These are from the respective Wikipedia articles on the election.) CBC also has a great interactive map up on their Canada Votes 2011 site. Stephen Harper finally has a majority government after five years, which means he no longer has to court votes from across the floor to pass all that fun legislation he’s been drafting. However, the NDP are going to bring a whole new dynamic to the Official Opposition: not only are they quite strong in terms of number of seats as an opposition party, but they have all these new members from ridings in Quebec that have traditionally voted Bloc. In that sense, not only has the party risen in power, but it is not the same NDP any more. Similarly, with the Liberals devastated and Ignatieff’s resignation, we will see new potential leaders emerge and watch the Liberal party attempt, once again, to recover and regroup.

We’re in for interesting times ahead.

This post, incidentally, is not so much political analysis as it is political reaction. It’s a letter to my future self, a way of recording my thoughts following this election so, in five years or a decade, I will know how I felt and what I said. If you are looking for political analysis, there are much better places to find it.

Democracy in Shambles

I am disappointed that we elected a Conservative majority government. I am extremely disappointed that Stephen Harper remains Prime Minister. I am saddened and dismayed that we re-elected the man whose previous government was found in contempt of Parliament for the first time in the history of the Commonwealth.

“Contempt of Parliament” sounds very fancy, and it might be tempting to dismiss it as political brinksmanship on the part of the opposition parties. Who cares that the Conservative government was found in contempt? This was Harper’s line throughout the election; he consistently repeated that “Canadians don’t want an election.” Elections are apparently too expensive (that money would be better spent on fighter jets!). And after all, why should we bother Canadians with the expense and effort of an election? Democracy would work fine without them, right?

Look, I‘m willing to admit that elections are expensive and that plenty of Canadians will tell you they didn’t want one. (And I know plenty did. These kinds of binaries are tiresome.) It does not matter, because elections are essential to the functioning of our democracy. It is ironic yet egregious that Harper is condemning elections in our country while congratulating those countries attempting to hold their own for the first times in decades, or ever. We are not special. We do not get a “get out of elections free” card because we are older or smarter or better than those countries. If we want to stay a democracy, we have to vote.

The past decade has been somewhat atypical, as I understand, when it comes to elections and governments, and this has led to a somewhat skewed view of our parliamentary system. I won’t touch on the issues of proroguing Parliament or forming a coalition government (both of which are completely legitimate, incidentally). We’ve had three minority governments (one Liberal, two Conservative) in succession. The first minority government emerged after the 2004 federal election, which the Governor General called at the request of Prime Minister Paul Martin. It fell in late 2005 to a motion of no confidence and caused a winter election, which the Conservatives won. In 2008, Stephen Harper bypassed his own fixed-date election law and asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament, resulting in another federal election and another Conservative minority. Finally, in March of this year, the government fell to another motion of no confidence.

So in the past ten years, we have had four elections, which might seem excessive. Two of them were triggered by motions of no confidence. Yet in Canadian Parliamentary history, the government has only fallen to a motion of no confidence only six times (including this most recent incident). Hence, these elections are not just a product of opposition parties attempting to get into power by repeatedly triggering elections. When the government falls owing to a motion of no confidence, we should pay attention, and we should not balk at the resulting election.

Furthermore, this recent motion of no confidence was the first of its kind ever passed. Stephen Harper has the dubious distinction of entering the history books as the first Prime Minister of Canada whose government was found in contempt of Parliament. What does that mean? In this case, it means the government did not disclose documents requested by Parliament and did not, in the opinion of the committee that investigated, provide a satisfactory reason for that failure. It is a dramatic example of why I dislike Harper and why I dislike the Harper government: they do not respect our Parlimentary system; they do not respect democracy; and therefore, they do not respect Canada or Canadians.

If you‘re wondering why I am getting so technical here, I will confide a secret: I am not a political junkie, I’m a Parliamentary junkie. I love the technical, constitutional nitty-gritty of what makes our democracy tick, and I find our Parliamentary system fascinating and far more interesting than other democratic systems, such as the congressional one in the United States. I don’t expect everyone to share my love for learning more about how Parliament functions, but I do think it’s important for everyone to know a little bit about it. What I‘m trying to say is this: we should not make light of what happened in March, and we should not regard this recent election as unnecessary, regardless of the fact that it resulted in an even stronger government for Harper.

So What’s With that Majority Anyway?

Despite being found in contempt of Parliament, the Conservatives managed to gain enough seats to form a majority. Go figure. We could blame those who didn’t vote, or those who voted NDP instead of Liberal (or vice versa) and thus “split the vote” among the opposition parties, but those avenues are both red herrings.

Voting is important, as it is one of the strongest forms of participation in our democracy, and I am saddened if you were eligible to vote but did not. You still have a right to complain (though perhaps not quite so loud), but I hope next time you consider exercising your right, a right most people in the world do not have.

Nor do I blame those who “split the vote.” Both Ignatieff and Layton enjoyed claiming that the choice in the election was a binary one: Conservatives or their own respective party. I dislike that rhetoric, and I refuse to embrace it, though I am not surprised by it. The sudden and surprising surge in NDP support only demonstrates that it is possible to campaign as “third option” and suddenly become the option. Even if every Liberal seat suddenly became NDP orange, it still would not be enough—such are the mathematics of majority.

So no, I do not blame those who abstained or those who voted red instead of orange or orange instead of red. I blame those who voted blue. I realize some of you have your reasons—maybe all your other candidates sucked, maybe you truly believe the Conservatives are our One True Hope for the economy or jobs or the state of our national bubblegum reserve. Ultimately, however, you who voted Conservatives are accountable for what the Conservative government does over the next four years. I hope they do you proud.

Let’s Just Fix the System, Shall We?

Twitter was full of sage advice on election night, and a great many people were shouting for electoral reform. It’s probably not surprising that the people in the losing camps want to blame the system and call it broken. And when the governing party garners only 40 per cent of the popular vote, the hue and cry gets even louder. Yet I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of proportional representation or any other electoral reform just yet.

After all, the Conservatives did not gain a majority of the popular vote, but they did gain a plurality, and under proportional representation, we would likely just get another Conservative minority government. I am intrigued by proportional representation, but I do not know enough about it yet to promulgate an informed opinion. And that’s really a topic for a separate post.

Electoral reform is definitely worth the discussion, even if I don’t think it’s likely to happen any time soon. However, it is not a magical panacea for our Parliamentary woes. What would really help is if we got some new leaders. I am not sorry to see Ignatieff go, and I will be happy the day Harper steps down (except, perhaps, if he gets replaced by someone like Jason Kenney or, heaven forfend, John Baird!).

But What Do I Really Think?

On Monday night, I was tweeting about the election results, and one of my tweets read, “We are. So screwed. That is all.” This was hyperbole, a product of election-night fervour, and while my feelings about the newer, stronger Harper government are not optimistic, I don’t think we’ve quite entered “apocalyptic hellscape mode” yet.

(Yet.)

It is good to have a majority government again. I actually rather like minorities, because they force parties to work together—except when they don’t. And our parties have all been rather dysfunctional of late, both within and with each other. Minority governments might be cool products of parliamentary politics, but they can also be frustrating when it comes to passing legislation, which is, at the end of the day, what our government has to do to govern our country.

So it is good to have a majority government after five years and three minority ones. It sucks that it is a Conservative majority; I would have much preferred and NDP or Liberal government, to be sure, though I do not particularly favour either of those parties. We have to work with what we’ve got, though.

Copyright is one of my interests, and our existing legislation is old and obsolete. Two copyright bills have died as a result of the last two elections. The most recent, Bill C-32, was actually not that bad. It had some worrying attitudes toward digital locks, but it was a big improvement over Bill C-61, and I was hopeful it could be improved further. We need to update our copyright legislation; entire formats have risen and fallen in the time since we last did so!

So any government passing copyright law might be a good thing, even a Conservative one. Both Michael Geist and Peter Nowak have written good, thoughtful posts on what the future might hold for Canadian tech and telecommunications now that the Conservatives have a majority. It’s a pretty mixed bag.

Still, that is just the tip of the majority iceberg. Even if Harper magically mirrors all my positions on copyright, I can’t forgive him for:

• being found in contempt;
• trashing the long-form census (which still bewilders me);
• failing not only to reform the Senate (a goal I support, though I understand the difficulty he faces) but going ahead and appointing more than 30 senators, which is not cheap;
• being anti-science;
• claiming an “abortion debate” is “not a priority of the people” but not disavowing a rabidly anti-choice Conservative candidate, Brad Trost (who won his seat), when Trost told some of his supporters that abortion was the reason the government had cut funding to Planned Parenthood;
• and, in fact, treating women and women’s advocacy groups rather poorly in general;
• not to mention his neglect of First Nations people and communitites (because, you know, access to clean water is a privilege!),
• his abandonment of Africa;
• did I mention his government was found in contempt of Parliament?

I do not respect Stephen Harper. I will not vote for the Conservative party while he is its leader. And I am worried about our country as long as he is Prime Minister. I am glad he chose to rebrand the “government of Canada” to the “Harper government.” It just emphasizes his association with the mis-steps and mis-deeds of his governments and his MPs. It attests to his ego and his preference for power and privilege over the goals he professes, like the economy and “working” Canadians.

I do not know if I will look back at this in five or ten years with pride or with haughty derision and regret. (If it is the latter, then you are a jerk, future-me.) That’s why I wrote this, so that even if my attitudes and ideology may change over time, I will know where I stood in May 2011. Somehow, I doubt I will be much changed when it comes to these topics. For the next four years, the government of Canada—sorry, the Harper government—will only continue to alienate me and those like me, those who find that none of the current mainstream parties particularly suit them. All I can hope is that, by 2015, Canada’s shifting political landscape will produce a niche for me.

The next election is, by Harper’s law, four years away. Yet those of us unhappy with Monday night’s results must not be silent. We cannot afford to lapse into apathy or defeat now, of all times, even with a Conservative majority strong and secure. Now, more than ever, we must be watchful. We must write, and speak, and protest when necessary. We must make our voices heard, so that the media, the opposition parties, and the rest of the country remembers that a majority might rule in Parliament, but the rights of minorities are still important, and democracy is something that must be preserved and practised, not taken for granted.

Last summer, the government of Canada held an open consultation on the issue of copyright reform. The result: over 8,300 submissions, over 6,000 of which expressed opposition to another copyright reform bill similar to Bill C-61. You can read my submission here.

It turns out that I and anyone else who submitted to the consultation, wrote a letter to his or her MP, showed up for a meeting or rally, or participated in the Facebook groups or online discourse, have done this all for nothing. We’ve been wasting our time. Because we‘re about to do this all over again.

What’s sad is that it didn’t have to be this way. Tony Clement is the Industry Minister now, and his attitude toward copyright reform is more sensible than Jim Prentice’s. Apparently he was open to a different approach than the one Bill C-61 took—and considering how unacceptable Bill C-61 was, I’ll take that. Alas, it looks like Mr. Clement and his fellow cabinet minister, James Moore have differing opinions. So Grandfather Harper intervened.

The result will apparently be a “Canadian DMCA” that is, as Cory Doctorow puts it, a “goddamned disaster.” While I don’t know if the new bill will truly live up to such rhetoric, I’m certain that a repeat of Bill C-61 is something Canadians neither want nor need. Not only does it mean that the copyright consultation was a huge waste of government time and taxpayer money, but it means the government refuses to listen to the people who elected it. Again.

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to see a trend: proguing Parliament, denying access to the Afghan detainee documents, ignoring the results of a national copyright consultation … time and again, the Harper government had demonstrated that it is unwilling to listen to the public and prefers secrecy over transparency.

Michael Geist calls on us to “write a paper letter to your Member of Parliament” to express our dissatisfaction with this turn of events. I might have done that last year, but now my idealism is beginning to crack and peel. My MP is a member of the NDP! What change will he be able to effect? Even if the NDP hadn’t expressed support for fair copyright reform, they’d probably oppose the Conservatives out of political need anyway. But as long as the Harper government remains in power, the opposition parties will always be on the defensive.

Despite their sabre-rattling, do any of our opposition leaders really want an election? I don’t blame them for wanting to wait and see—none of our leaders impress me right now; my strategy at this point is pretty much, “don’t vote Conservative.” It’s not that I’m gung ho to see another Liberal regime … we just don’t really have many other options. Michael Ignatieff was in Thunder Bay yesterday to announce universal broadband access to all Canadians—especially rural Canadians—as part of the Liberal platform. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s a wonderful idea and fully support it—but it’s just an idea right now. They’ve been talking about improving broadband access for years. I’ll believe it when I see it happen.

What I do believe is that a “Canadian DMCA” of any kind is a bad idea. However, it looks like as long as Harper is in the driver’s seat—with Moore riding shotgun—that will be the only option on the table. And to that I say: I‘m done.

You win, Mr. Harper. Please, do continue to prorogue Parliament and bully your MPs. Please, do continue to flout the democratic principles upon which our country was founded and reshape Canada into your perfect little principality. I will meekly go back to my books, stick my head in the sand, and exude the level of apathy stereotypical of my demographic.

Wake me up when there’s an election.

The war drums are sounding once again, and another election looms. The Liberals, led by the accomplished but detached Michael Ignatieff, are channelling Twisted Sister and are calling Prime Minister Harper out. But Harper says that Canadians don’t want an election.

So what?

I don’t want to take yucky-tasting medicine, but I do it anyway so I get better. I don’t want to pay more than $1 per litre of gas, but I do it anyway so my car will run. I don’t want an election, but we should have one anyway so Parliament will actually do something. The whining electorate complaining about our frequent elections miss one important fact: we’re part of the problem. We may not want another election, but at this point, we need one.

Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect $200

Much of the resistance to another election is purely about timing: there’s a sentiment that we just had an election, and it’s “too soon” for another. At first glance, this reasoning seems sound: the parties have not changed much in a year, and aside from one new leader—who, let’s face it, really isn’t that different from the old leader so far—it’s the same old faces and names. Why would an election this fall have a very different result from last fall? We’d just waste more time and money only to end up in the exact some spot.

The apparent futility of an election does not negate the necessity for one. Parliament will dissolve when it shows it has lost confidence in the government. Elections are a mechanism whereby Canadians voice their confidence in those parties; as the past few years have shown, confidence about all the major parties is low. Only 59.1% of the electorate voted; coupled with their shaky minority government, this barely gives the Conservatives a mandate to govern. The repetitive generation of a minority government doesn’t mean we should give up on holding elections—that’s absurd. It means that the political parties have to change the way they campaign and govern. If Harper wants to stop going to the polls every year, he has to either win a majority or govern well enough to keep the confidence of Parliament. The onus is on him to perform well.

Post and Propter, Meet Ergo and Hoc

Minister of Transport and Infrastructure John Baird says that “Ignatieff is just asking for an election for reasons of political opportunism,” and that’s probably true. It’s also beside the point.

What Baird’s misdirection obscures is the simple fact that this election has been coming ever since the Governor General prorogued Parliament last December deflated the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition juggernaught. The Liberal party has always intended to topple the current government, even before Ignatieff became the leader. As much as Ignatieff may want power for himself, he’s carrying out a party strategy that’s a year or more in the making. None of this is news.

What I do find interesting are the actions of NDP leader Jack Layton, who has announced his willingness to prostitute his party to Harper. This is the same Jack Layton who said he was going to work with the Liberals last year in a coalition government, the same Jack Layton who likes to give speeches about how the Conservatives have failed Canadians and we need a “third option.” And now, even as Ignatieff switches from sabre-rattling to sabre-sharpening, Layton’s trying to the brakes on this election and give Harper one more chance. That’s political opportunism. Despite any misgivings about Ignatieff’s suitability as a leader, at least he’s firm in his resolve to put an end to our playground Parliament.

You Are Our Only Hope

Yes, you, the eligible Canadian voter. Last year we went to the polls—well, 59 per cent of us did—and collectively decided to elect a minority Conservative government. Again. Yes, if we do have a fall election, it means that the Conservatives have failed twice to promote a working Parliament—regardless of their lofty goals or attempts to stabilize the economy.

This is our chance to change that. And if you don’t want to be back here in October 2010, once again trying to decide among Mikey, Jackie, Stevie, or even Lizzie, then you have a responsibility to yourself and to Canada to actually do something.

I‘m not telling you for whom to vote. As my attitude suggests, I won’t be voting for my Conservative candidate, and it wouldn’t be my first choice for the rest of you. But at this point, even a Conservative majority would be give our Parliament a chance to actually pass legislation and make policy for awhile. It may not be the legislation and policy that I want, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take—that’s the compromise of living in a democracy. Nevertheless, it is important that you do vote, that you cast off your apathy this once. Regardless of whether you vote or not, if you pay taxes, you pay for these elections and you pay the salaries of our MPs. Isn’t it about time they actually earn their keep?

We got us into this mess. And let’s face it: our politicians aren’t doing much in the way of getting us out of it, so it’s up to us to put a working government in power.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out today, so while I was downloading the torrent, I remembered I had yet to watch Michael Moore’s free film Slacker Uprising chronicling his campaign to get slackers to vote in the 2004 American presidential election.

The film was interesting. Whatever you think of Michael Moore’s position or techniques, he’s certainly passionate about what he’s doing. And democracy may not be the most perfect system of government, but it seems to be the best one we’ve tried so far. Democracy is all about getting the people to vote, and Michael Moore was encouraging people to vote. As Martha Stewart might say, “That’s a good thing.”

Tomorrow is Election Day here in Canada. If you are a Canadian citizen and 18 years of age or older, you can vote. If you aren’t sure how to do this, go to the Elections Canada website. If you can vote, you should vote. Even if you’re going to vote Conservative (I’m not), I want you to go and vote. We live in a democracy; it is your duty as a citizen to participate in the democratic process by voting for your representative in the next government.

You don’t need to be a political junkie to vote. I wish that everyone could be an informed voter, but that isn’t a requirement either. Just go to your polling station tomorrow and vote. There’s still time to research party platforms if you really want to be informed. Otherwise, just mark a name on the ballot.

If you don’t vote, then what right do you have to complain when someone you dislike comes into power? You didn’t do anything to even try to stop it from happening. If you don’t vote, then what right do you have to complain when the government cancels a program from which you benefit or introduces legislation that affects your family? Some people don’t vote because they’re apathetic—I find this particularly true of my peers. Like it or not, however, as long as you live in Canada, the actions of the government are going to have an impact on you. If you don’t vote, you’re sending the message that you don’t care about living in a democracy.

It doesn’t take up your whole day. It doesn’t even take up an hour. If you have already voted, then good job. You’ve done your duty. You can go home, sit on the couch, and watch TV until the next election rolls around—I won’t bother you. If you haven’t voted yet, then tomorrow, go to your polling station with the proper identification, get a ballot, and make your mark. That’s all you have to do.