How do we make Canada's national government more democratic?

Allan 

Here’s the real problem - on a map

The dark green countries are the most democratic ones. So that’s Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, New Zealand…..

…and Canada.

Democracy Index

Measure of the state of democracy in 167 countries The Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index map for 2019 [1] Full democracies 9.01–10 8.01–9 Flawed democracies 7.01–8 6.01–7 Hybrid regimes 5.01–6 4.01–5 Authoritarian regimes 3.01–4 2.01–3 0–2 No data ? The Democracy Index is an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a UK -based company. It intends to measure the state of democracy in 167 countries, of which 166 are sovereign states and 164 are UN member states . The index was first published in 2006, with updates for 2008, 2010 and later years. The index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories, measuring pluralism , civil liberties and political culture . In addition to a numeric score and a ranking, the index categorises each country in one of four regime types: full democracies , flawed democracies , hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes . Method As described in the report, [2] the democracy index is a weighted average based on the answers of 60 questions, each one with either two or three permitted alternative answers. Most answers are experts' assessments. Some answers are provided by public-opinion surveys from the respective countries. In the case of countries for which survey results are missing, survey results for similar countries, and expert assessments are used in order to fill in gaps. The questions are grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. Each answer is converted to a score, either 0 or 1, or for the three-answer questions, 0, 0.5 or 1. With the exceptions mentioned below, within each category, the scores are added, multiplied by ten, and divided by the total number of questions within the category. There are a few modifying dependencies, which are explained much more precisely than the main rule procedures. In a few cases, an answer yielding zero for one question voids another question; e.g. if the elections for the national legislature and head of government are not considered free (question 1), then the next question, " Are elections... fair? ", is not considered, but automatically scored zero. Likewise, there are a few questions considered so important that a low score on them yields a penalty on the total score sum for their respective categories, namely: "Whether national elections are free and fair"; "The security of voters "; "The influence of foreign powers on government"; "The capability of the civil servants to implement policies". The five category indices, which are listed in the report, are then averaged to find the Democracy Index for a given country. Finally, the Democracy Index, rounded to two decimals , decides the regime type classification of the country. The report discusses other indices of democracy, as defined, e.g. by Freedom House , and argues for some of the choices made by the team from the Economist Intelligence Unit . In this comparis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

Last year, Canada ranked 5th ,one one-hundredth of a point behind New Zealand and 0.6 points behind #1 Norway

And all the countries ahead of it have much smaller populations. And much smaller areas.

And its rating is getting better year by year.

Now, does that mean it’s perfect? Of course not.

Buy that does mean that we had better be damn careful before we start fiddling with things .

One of the things Canada doesn’t do well with is a string of minority governments. Few countries do (see Italy). In effect, one of the biggest vulnerabilities of Canadian democracy is that if a party really wanted to force election after election in a minority situation, there’s pretty much nothing that could be done. Germany does have a mechanism for dealing with it - the President, and only the president, can call a new general election.

But with majorities always looming, minority governments generally have an incentive to keep everyone happy to avoid another election that could either wipe them out or return them to power.

One of the issues with a proportional representation system or a ranked voting system is that you will just get constant minority governments. That incentivizes small parties to either ask for extreme terms to provide support (like the Greens did in British Columbia) or to crash the government to make a point (like the Social Credit did to Joe Clark) as it turned out, at the next election, those parties maintained some of their support, but were crushed at the polls anyway.

Let’s face it. The main criticism of democracy in Canada right now is that people don’t like Justin Trudeau for undefined reasons. Okay, the defined reason is that Pierre Trudeau is his dad, but whatever. Democracy is working here so let’s not try to “optimize” it without thinking of the long term effects.

Steven Haddock

3rd generation (or so) Canadian & lifelong resident; political science major