‘It always gives you more than one opportunity to prevail’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM - 4 Comments

Stephane Dion accepts the 2011 Couchiching Award for Leadership in Public Policy.

Reading Couchiching President Gwen Burrows’s good-news letter, the first thought that crossed my mind was how fortunate we are, in a democracy such as Canada, to be allowed to fight for our convictions, safe from any political system threat to our freedom and wellbeing.

How fortunate to be free to accept an award from an independent and non-partisan institution, an institution shaped by a diversity of people – Liberals like me, but also others – Conservatives, New Democrats, Greens…!  Men and women who might not have voted for me or supported my policies, but who give me credit for having fought for my ideas, my ideals and my fellow human beings. It is institutions like this that make Canada a better democracy.

Democracy.  That is the theme that underlies my address today.  You have been kind enough to say that I have showed leadership.  What I know for sure is that whatever leadership I might have shown was inspired by the democratic ideal, an ideal that pushed me to fight for a united Canada, a better Canada. 

Power to the people

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 1:50 PM - 2 Comments

In light of events in British Columbia and Wisconsin, Greg Fingas defends direct democracy initiatives.

The leading example is of course California, whose combination of conflicting citizen initiatives and political gridlock has made it virtually impossible to make reasonable budgetary decisions or carry out any long-term planning. And direct democratic processes shouldn’t serve as the only outlet for citizen involvement between elections. Indeed, both of the above examples could have been avoided if the governments involved had consulted with residents to determine whether their policy choices were even faintly defensible.

But there’s always some risk that a government that believes itself to be four years away from any accountability might push far beyond the limits of reasonable political choice. And some mechanism for citizens to take back our representative authority in case of emergency might work wonders to reduce the danger of overreach in the future.

Governments must adapt to Internet, not other way around

By Peter Nowak - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 11 Comments

Photo by Jeremy Brooks c/o Flickr Creative Commons

When the Cold War ended just over twenty years ago, it was convenient to think of it as democracy’s final triumph over tyranny, autocracy and every other form of government. With communism defeated, it seemed pretty obvious that the system left standing was the best one – the one we were always destined for and the one that every country should strive for.

It would be foolish, however, to think that the way we govern ourselves has stopped evolving. Our current system of democracy is by no means the be all and the end all of human governance. The same way that the printing press and a newly educated population forced the evolution of monarchies into republics centuries ago, so too is the internet now forcing governments of all stripes to grow, adapt and change. As people become further connected with advanced technologies, this movement will only accelerate.

But before things get better, they will get worse. The riots in London are only the tip of this iceberg. The internet has furthered the collective education and consciousness of the public and given us access, literally, to a world of information. It has never been easier for the average person to see just how much of the world’s increasing wealth they’re missing out on, or how much their particular government is screwing them. This, as much as anything, can explain the unrest and riots, which seem to be happening in both developed and developing countries with a growing frequency.

Democracy has been on a downward spiral in many developed nations for decades, with voter turnouts hitting new lows – excepting periodic uptick aberrations – in each successive election (the recent election in Canada saw only 61% of voters turn up, slightly higher than the record low set in 2008). The decline shows more people are either losing faith in the system, or they are fine with the status quo and simply can’t be bothered with it.

Whatever the case, with their mandates shrinking, governments are feeling less beholden to the public and are acting more boldly. Whether it’s stripping away civil rights, detaining people without due process or negotiating legislation and treaties in secret, our democratically elected governments are behaving more and more like the communists they defeated not so long ago.

But democracy is alive and well on the internet. Indeed, it’s the de facto model that almost every online operation works on; topics trend on Twitter depending on how many people are discussing them, news stories get assigned, ranked and displayed based on similar factors (as opposed to chosen by human editors, like they were in the past) and websites show up in Google searches based on how many links they have pointing to them. Online, the good and popular rises to the top – whether it’s YouTube videos, Apple apps, Amazon books or Digg stories – while the bad or unpopular is ignored or voted down.

Moreover, online democracy is exerting itself as its own form of court system, which some might call vigilantism. When Sony recently sued a hacker who had cracked the PlayStation 3, other hackers took down the company’s online video game network for a month. Conversely, when Microsoft welcomed the hacking of its Kinect games system, it earned kudos and thanks from the online community. The underlying notion behind both being that cracking devices is necessary to learn and thus propel innovation forward. Anyone who stands in the way of that, the online community has ruled, is being a bad netizen.

This is because from its very beginnings, the internet has been based on the principles of openness and community. The technical protocols on which it runs were made available for free, as was the first web browser. The fundamental principles of the internet, therefore, are the same as democracy – each user is entitled to freedom and openness, so long as they don’t harm anyone else. Those that do harm in the eyes of the collective are punished, one way or another.

Governments, whether they’re in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada or China, are beginning to understand this and are now trying to extend their reach and control into the online world through various forms of censorship or control (China is obviously further ahead). It’s a struggle they are not likely to win because laws and enforcement take time, despite diminishing democratic controls, whereas new technological circumventions move at lightning speed. The continued survival and success of The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing site that authorities have been trying to shut down for the better part of a decade, is just one example of this. Simply put, laws will never catch up to technology.

Indeed, the inverse is more likely. The principles of openness and freedom cultivated on the internet, which has coincidentally been part of mainstream culture since the end of the Cold War, are more likely to bleed into the real world – literally, through riots. Governments will inevitably have no choice but to acquiesce and adapt to what are ultimately basic human desires: to be open and free. Otherwise, as advanced technologies make living in a virtual online world more realistic and palatable, people will inevitably abandon the real world and move into the ether permanently, leaving governments with no one to govern.

The lost art of door-knocking

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 3 Comments

Andrew Steele notes new findings in electoral science.

Professors at Yale University studied the impact of three forms of voter communications by campaigns on improved turnout. They used a 30,000 person sample in 1998 for elections in New Haven, Connecticut. The findings are stark: Telephone canvassing has no significant impact on improving voter turnout. Direct mail has only a small impact on improving turnout. The method of communication that most improves turnout — and is the method that can best win your election — is face-to-face canvassing by volunteers.

The team at Yale hypothesizes that the drop in turnout since the 1960s in American politics is due to the decline in political activism and thus a decline in volunteers to knock on doors.

The trouble with too much democracy

By Andrew Potter - Friday, August 5, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 30 Comments

Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

The most telling moment of the recent standoff over talks to raise the American government’s debt ceiling came on July 22, when President Barack Obama called a press conference to announce that House Speaker John Boehner had backed out of the negotiations. “I’ve been left at the altar twice now,” Obama pouted. In case the image of the President as a jilted lover was not clear to everyone watching, he added that he had spent the previous day waiting for Boehner to return his phone calls.

The whole affair has left a lot of Americans in a state of bipartisan disgust, with citizens from all points on the political compass cursing out their elected representatives. Yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to many people that there is something structurally flawed with a system that allows the head of just one legislative house to treat the supposed leader of the free world as his last choice for the senior prom. If there’s anything that needs cursing out it isn’t the elected politicians, but the constitution of the United States.

America is a mess. The economy isn’t growing, the job market is a wasteland, its infrastructure is crumbling. On any number of measures, from education to health care to technological innovation, the country is getting beat by up-and-comers in Asia, Scandinavia, and South America. But the real threat to America right now is not economic decline or technological stagnation—those are just the knock-on effects of a much deeper rot.

Continue…

What do we need to know?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 12 Comments

Colin Horgan explores the question of public life and personal health.

Privacy is an important consideration, says Asselin. “Unless something’s very meaningful in terms of disease or condition, I don’t think people should have the obligation to tell everyone about everything,” he said.

Meisel says it raises questions of the public’s reach into the private lives of those who serve their communities. “My guess with the media now being so invasive, we’re in danger of really depriving politicians of so much privacy that some people who could make a great contribution in politics won’t enter politics because they don’t want to expose themselves to that.”

This question came up yesterday on the specific of what type of cancer Jack Layton is now dealing with (it was later reported that doctors don’t yet know). There’s certainly a case to be made that the public isn’t necessarily entitled to much more than the basic information about the health issue and whether the politician will be remaining in his elected position. In batting the issue around yesterday on Twitter, I did wonder whether a prime minister might be expected to be more thorough in disclosure and explanation.

Long forgotten

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 11:01 AM - 6 Comments

Christopher Moore reviews John Ralston Saul’s Lafontaine & Baldwin.

On this central question of parliamentary accountability, we today live once again in something like pre-1848 conditions. What Canadian party leader ever cedes power because his or her caucus is changing its mind? Today we accept that any party leader who wins a majority has, not constant accountability, but a four-year free hand, during which any caucus member who doubts or disagrees will be put out of caucus and probably out of politics. We have replaced LaFontaine and Baldwin’s hard-won achievement of leadership accountability with the perverse idea that legislators are once more accountable to leaders, rather than the other way around…

When the country doesn’t take parliamentary accountability seriously, that is, we should not be surprised that our historians do not trouble themselves to write about its origins. Why should we take the events of 1848 seriously when everything about our politics suggests we have actually regressed to a lower standard of parliamentary practice?

Violence, rhetoric and rhetorical violence

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 25, 2011 at 1:07 PM - 4 Comments

Charles P. Pierce considers rhetoric and violence in American politics. (This was first published before the horror in Norway.)

We are political animals. It is a truth as old as Aristotle, who attributed our political nature to the fact that, unlike any of the other animals that travel in herds, we are able to speak. We can ignore the politics central to all our various interactions, or we can pretend that actions, good and bad, are apolitical, but politics is there, binding us up, regardless of how fervently we deny it, which we do, and take refuge then in fragmentation rather than confront what we may have in common with other people — strange people, crazy people, violent people — who share with us the politics of our common humanity. And we have chosen fragmentation as our comfortable, counterfeit heritage… Continue…

In praise of uncertainty

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 15, 2011 at 4:30 PM - 21 Comments

Amy Langstaff considers talking point culture.

In many cases, as Wallace suggests, our response to feeling confused and overwhelmed is to seek out the safety of stable positions — and, I would add, stable ways of stating those positions. We put on a carapace of freeze-dried arguments and talking points. We curl, woodlouse-like, into a posture that will protect us from the vulnerability of not knowing what to say next and the pain of sometimes not knowing how to defend the ideas (however inarticulate) that we love and even live by…

The temptation to shatter this rhetorical armour is strong not necessarily because it is urgent to defeat the other person in argument, but because it is galling to look into the face of another — a marvelous primate endowed with 100-billion neurons — to watch their mouth open, and to listen as a half-remembered editorial or some other unreconstructed bit of flotsam tumbles forth. It is an affront not only to oneself but to “the ongoing human interaction.”

‘The lodestar is human dignity’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 2 Comments

Jason Kenney talks about faith and politics with the National Catholic Register.

I guess the big question is how your religious faith and your politics relate. Is there a connection?

Well, I believe in a pluralistic, liberal democracy. Everyone comes into the public square with certain core convictions, a certain worldview that’s informed by most deeply held convictions about the ultimate questions. For me, that view is partly formed by my Catholic faith. I think it’s important in a liberal democracy that people of faith not be excluded from participating in democratic debate, but it’s also important they not impose a kind of narrow, sectarian agenda, but rather to advance the common good in a way that brings others along.

For me, the lodestar is human dignity, the inviolable nature of human dignity. This is a principle which obviously is deeply grounded in Catholic social thought, but it is also one that has universal social application.

Different system, same problems

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 2:23 PM - 12 Comments

This lament for their current situation and call for congressional reform in the United States, written by former congressman Mickey Edwards, reads a lot like many of the laments for our current situation and calls for parliamentary reform here.

If we really want change—change that will yield a Congress that is more representative and more functional, change that can be replicated in state and local governments—we need to rethink the party-driven structures we have so casually accepted for decades. This change would produce another important effect: it would strengthen Congress’s ability to discharge its constitutional role … In a democracy that is open to intelligent and civil debate about competing ideas rather than programmed for automatic opposition to another party’s proposals, we might yet find ourselves able to manage the task of self-government. Our current political dysfunction is not inevitable; it results from deliberate decisions that have backfired and left us mired in the trenches of hyper-partisan warfare. Political parties will not disappear; as a free people, we will continue to honor freedom of association. The goal is not to destroy parties but to transcend them; to welcome their contributions but end their dominance; and to take back from these private clubs control of our own elections and our own Congress.

‘If this is how the game is being played, we better figure that out’

By Erica Alini - Friday, July 8, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 81 Comments

The Hill Times talks to Bob Rae.

You said on Tuesday that the Liberals have to be in a position to respond to attacks and that you can’t leave your leader exposed to artillery fire. What’s the plan for preventing that?
“Well, I don’t think it’s a matter of preventing it. I mean, the fact is the Conservatives have demonstrated a determination to do it. It shouldn’t take us two elections to figure this out—that when there are attacks that are made, they should be responded to in an effective way and that means that the party itself has to be turned into a very focused political organization. It also means that everything we do in Parliament and elsewhere sort of has to be connected to that. Financially, we need to reorient our budget so that we’re focused on building up a capacity to respond as well as obviously raising more money and spending it in a more focused way.”

Attack ads in between elections is a recent phenomenon in Canadian politics. How important are they and how does this change Canadian politics?
“I think it’s a mistake to think that you can make up for a lot of lost ground in the 35 days of an election campaign. The fact is that we’re in a mode that has to be seen as a ‘permanent campaign’ and that’s the way in which we have to structure our responses.”

The organized grassroots

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 2:18 PM - 12 Comments

Tony Keller profiles Nick Kouvalis, political strategist behind Rob Ford and the founder of Respect for Taxpayers.

Respect for Taxpayers is one more step toward a politics of permanent election, in which elected officials are constantly pressured, attacked or influenced by opponents who don’t sit next to them or across the aisle at city hall, at Queen’s Park or in Parliament. It’s also a move away from parties as the sole vehicles for politics, to a politics that is more and more outside of the legislature, in what 19th-century British parliamentary reformers called “out of doors.” Unlike those in the early 19th century, who were on the outside because they didn’t have the vote, today’s out-of-doors groups are there by choice. It’s easier on the outside—you can spend as much as you like, and your fundraisers don’t have to wear straitjackets. Going direct to voters may even deliver greater influence.

Revolution delayed?

By Ruth Sherlock - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

George Henton

The Egyptian revolution took the world by storm. As images of the mass protests beamed into homes around the globe, millions looked on, captivated by what people power could accomplish. Feb. 11, the night beleaguered president Hosni Mubarak resigned, will forever remain an iconic moment, with its scenes from Cairo’s Tahrir Square of Egyptians celebrating new-found freedom and the end of 30 years of autocratic rule. For many of the protesters who had spent years risking their lives by planning revolution in a tightly controlled state, and then 18 days battling against tear gas, bullets, and brutality in a popular uprising, that evening in Tahrir Square was the closing chapter. As influential blogger and activist Wael Ghonim tweeted, “Mission accomplished.”

The Egyptian military stepped in to fill the leadership vacuum. To shouts of “the people and the army are one,” it quickly suspended some provisions of the unpopular constitution. On March 19, a set of constitutional amendments that paved the way for elections was overwhelmingly approved in a referendum that drew record numbers of voters. The military’s 18-member ruling council has set a firm end date for its leadership: parliamentary elections in September will permit legislative powers to be transferred to a civilian government, while executive powers will be handed over after a presidential election in November. This was to be the road map to the “new Egypt.”

But more than a hundred days on, the revolution appears to be faltering. The ideals that drove the revolt still exist, in continuing calls for reform and institutional change. But in the aftermath of the uprising, the most populous country of the Arab world is also struggling to maintain law and order, wrestling with a dying economy, facing continued protests and strikes—and battling to keep the lid on boiling religious divisions. During those heady days in Tahrir Square, Muslims and Christians appeared to have found a new unity. But no longer: the last four months have witnessed continued outbreaks of sectarian violence.

Continue…

On bullcrap (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 3 Comments

Andrew Ferguson reads 21 of Newt Gingrich’s books.

The ghosts for that first book served him unevenly. They got him in metaphor trouble from the first sentence. “We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures,” he wrote. This crossroads, it transpired, faced an open window. That would be the window of vulnerability, which is widening. Three paragraphs later, the crossroads, perhaps swiveling on a Lazy Susan, is suddenly facing another window, also open. The important point, Gingrich writes, is that this window of opportunity is about to slam shut. And if it does? “We stand on the brink of a world of violence almost beyond our imagination.”

… As a result, he wrote in “To Save America,” “we stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.” “America today,” he announced in “Real Change,” “is at an extraordinary crossroads.” In a revised edition of “Winning the Future,” he phrased our predicament like this: “America is the most energetic, resourceful and innovative nation in the history of mankind. But we are at a crossroads.” Moreover, he said in “Saving Lives and Saving Money,” “we find ourselves at a crossroads.”

… just when my stack had dwindled to nothing and I felt the thrill of liberation, the mail arrived with my preordered copy of Gingrich’s latest book, “A Nation Like No Other.” I thumbed through it. “The election of 2012,” Gingrich writes, “will bring us to an historic crossroads.”

On bullcrap

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 1:58 PM - 6 Comments

On the occasion of British Labour leader Ed Miliband achieving a state of talking point perfection, Charlton Brooker mourns the loss of both humanity and sanity.

You might say it symbolises everything that’s wrong with everything. The modern world suffers from a cavernous reality deficit. You know it, I know it. Even “they” know it. Reciting the same line over and over like a Countryfile presenter practising a piece to camera, Miliband must have felt twice as mad as Green. Two men locked in a shared hallucination while the camera rolled.

It’s no surprise that politicians gabble pre-scripted taglines in order to dodge awkward questions and avoid having off-the-cuff comments inflated into a full-blown gaffe. And it’s no surprise the media routinely colludes in this surreal pantomime. But it’s only when you stand back and watch the rushes that you see how crazy the situation has become. Honestly, it gives you vertigo.

Not much of a spectator sport

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 27, 2011 at 3:11 PM - 0 Comments

Kathleen Petty signs off as host of CBC Radio’s The House with a few final thoughts.

Hugh Segal, with whom I spoke at the beginning of the show, once wrote an editorial in support of a set of rules we implemented on this program: no more personal attacks, people talking over each other, politicians being allowed to freely throw around talking points unchallenged. That set of guiding principles meant MP panels were few and far between. We reached out more often to individual federal politicians, but we interviewed fewer of them. In part, because fewer of them were willing to agree to in-depth, one-on-one interviews. We wanted more policy discussions instead of political discussions…

I didn’t think we were really asking for much. If, in response to a question, a politician hesitated, even a little, I was reasonably confident that the answer required some thought, instead of tired talking points that require none. That in Ottawa is a victory. And that is, in my view, a problem. We talk AT each other, not WITH each other. We keep score, assign penalties, and generally treat politics as a sport. But as sports go, politics might be a great a game for participants, but not spectators or listeners. I sense a great disconnect. Why don’t Canadians vote? Perhaps, because we’re not treating them as participants – but as spectators.

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 9:31 AM - 18 Comments

Ethics commissioner Mary Dawson wonders whether we might need a code of conduct for MPs.

Dawson said she regularly gets complaints from people who think politicians are abusing their positions or behaving inappropriately.

“Misleading statements, personal attacks and the like that come with the partisan nature of political life are often distasteful to many Canadians,” Dawson wrote in her reports on both the Conflict of Interest Code for MPs and the Conflict of Interest Code Act. ”Some assume that this sort of behaviour must be covered by one or another of the various accountability regimes in force. In fact, there is no comprehensive regime that governs political conduct in general.”

Rights and democracy

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 3:33 PM - 41 Comments

Speaking at this weekend’s Conservative convention, Jason Kenney explains the Conservative ethos.

“We don’t depend on the bloated bureaucracies of the nanny state; we thrive on our freedom and are upheld by the law,” he said. “We don’t assume that history began in the Summer of Love; we honour a tradition reaching back to the Magna Carta … Our adversaries were focused on the obsessions of the chattering classes – like Taliban prisoners – rather than the practical bread-and-butter concerns of hard-working families.”

Though neither are as old as the Magna Carta (established in 1215), both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948) and the Geneva Conventions (agreed to in 1949) predate the Summer of Love (1967).

Article 39 of the Magna Carta is translated as follows. Continue…

The House: Considering reform

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 12 Comments

Last month, Mark Jarvis wrote here about potential parliamentary reforms as part of our series on the House. Shortly thereafter he asked if I had any thoughts on what he’d written and eventually I got around to writing something down. In the interests of continuing the discussion, here is the email I sent to him last week.

Let me state from the outset that I am not a professional constitutional scholar. Or even an amateur constitutional scholar. I am merely paid to put on a suit most week days and spend inordinate amounts of time watching politicians more closely than is probably advisable.

My woeful inadequacies thus acknowledged from the outset, I will happily offer a few thoughts.

Continue…

The middle

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 59 Comments

Doug Saunders considers the decline of centrist parties in the Western world.

The big-tent parties functioned, during their glory years in the postwar decades, as the paternal overlords of protected, closed national economies, engaging in brokerage politics whereby the fruits of growth could be spread out among clients and beneficiaries on the left and right. The big political parties were like family heirlooms, their loyalties kept for life and passed on between generations – badges of personal identity, like Ford and Chevy, Coke and Pepsi, Apple and Microsoft. Membership had its benefits.

But then, in the 2000s, there was what Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Paris’s Institute of Political Studies who analyzed dozens of elections, calls a “generational rupture”: Suddenly, he says, voters no longer see parties as badges of loyalty or symbols of lifelong personal identity, but as consumer products, as tools that can be used to address specific concerns.

The post-partisan nation

By Erica Alini - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 3:20 PM - 12 Comments

JJ McCullough argues against a simple left-right political debate

Polls routinely show that the majority of voters in this country do not understand the meanings of even the most basic ideological terms. A 2004 poll, for example, had 50% of the public unable to answer whether the Canadian Alliance was to the left or right of the NDP … People vote for who they think will do the best job in the context of the moment. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that.

It's their parties

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 11 Comments

Alison Loat talks to Steve Paikin about Samara’s latest report.

A nation divisible

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 91 Comments

The Vancouver Sun publishes some of the demographic findings of an election day poll conducted by Ipsos Reid.

Attended church/temple at least weekly
Conservative 50% 
NDP 24%
Liberal 18%

Attended church/temple monthly or less
NDP 37%
Conservative 35%
Liberal 16%