Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Crisis in Canadian democracy

In his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul gave the Church's blessing to the democratic system. The Church, he said, values democracy to the extent that "it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility of both electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate" (n. 46).

However, the pope goes on to talk of "a crisis within democracies." They "seem at times to have lost the ability to make decisions aimed at the common good" (n. 47).

In Canada today, there are at least two sources of this crisis. One is the power of major global financial players to dictate policies to elected governments because of their ability to move capital freely around the world. The other is the tendency, especially in Western nations, to see objective moral values as incompatible with democracy.

Populists have put forward many proposals to give the populace greater control over their elected representatives. These include an elected Senate, free votes on most issues in the House of Commons, fixed terms of office, referenda on major issues and some form of proportional representation in Parliament. Most, if not all, of these ideas are worthy of implementation. But they are na‹ve proposals because they do not attack the sources of the crisis in democracy.

Democratic nations need to be freed from the hegemony of global financiers. One proposal for doing this is the so-called Tobin tax, named after James Tobin, a retired Princeton economist who urged imposing a very small tax - less than one per cent - on money exchanged from one currency to another. This tax would have little effect on transfers of currency for legitimate reasons. What it would do is throw sand in the wheels of financiers who move billions of dollars from one currency to another in hope of turning a quick profit. Governments would thus be freer to set domestic policies which meet the needs of their own people, without having to be concerned about the reaction of currency speculators.

The drawback of the Tobin tax is that it needs fairly wide agreement among the world's nations to be implemented. This is a hurdle, though not an insurmountable one. However, countries can also unilaterally implement some form of capital controls that would, say force speculators to keep their money in a country's currency for six months or a year before moving it out.

In a similar vein, Canada could benefit from a ban on contributions to political parties by corporations and unions. This would make parties less beholden to special interests and would make elections centre more on debates among candidates and leaders than around TV advertising.

Such reforms would give governments more freedom to set policy based on the common good and would encourage voters to make choices based on issues, rather than images, at election time.

The second source of our democracy's crisis - the tendency to view moral values as just a matter of one's personal taste - is not so easily overcome. The short answer is that it can only be overcome with education and moral conversion by large numbers of individuals.

However, a fuller answer acknowledges that the prevailing secular relativism is not an accident. Relativism holds sway because the leaders of our judiciary, media elite and educational establishment are largely unswerving proponents of a world without objective moral norms.

If there is a shift in who obtains these positions of leadership - if our media, for example, become imbued with the notion that a good society includes the right to life and the right to be raised in a traditional family then the notion of objective morality may again become central in Western society. Democracy will be on a solid foundation and we will have a much greater reason to hope that all human rights will receive respect.

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