Andrew Coyne is a columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is the author of a new book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, from which this essay has been adapted.
Whatever their opinion of the result, Canadians might take some satisfaction from the recent election, if only for what did not happen. The paper balloting process once again worked without a hitch. No one challenged the legitimacy of the result. The victors did not vow revenge upon their enemies. Democracy may be in decline or in retreat elsewhere, notably in the United States, but in Canada it remains, as we perceive it, in relatively good health, a model for others to follow.
We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as one of the world’s great democracies. Didn’t the Economist Intelligence Unit, in its latest annual Democracy Index, rank us 14th among the world‘s democracies, one of only 25 “full democracies” around the world? Didn’t Freedom House rank us fifth in its annual Freedom in the World report, with a score of 39 out of 40 for “political rights”?
And it’s true: By many of the usual measures Canada is indeed an exemplary democracy. Our elections are free, in the sense that no adult citizen is prevented from voting or standing for office, and fair, in the sense that all ballots cast are counted accurately. Elections take place without significant voter intimidation or fraud. Power transfers peacefully. Corruption, if not unknown, is at least contained.
But this is setting the bar awfully low. The types of metrics that go into the EIU or Freedom House indices ought to be regarded as a bare minimum; that our elections are not actually fixed is hardly something to brag about. If the question is whether we observe the basic procedural formalities of democracy, Canada scores rather well. Measured in more substantive terms, however – whether elections are truly fair for all, whether Parliament genuinely holds government to account – things look very different.
Put simply, we do not live in the system we think we do. We have the form of a democracy but not the substance; the rituals but not the reality. Because we preserve the forms and rituals, people find it hard to accept how far the substance has been eaten away. But at some point the facts become unanswerable. Far from a democratic example to the world, our parliamentary system is in a state of advanced disrepair – so advanced it is debatable whether it should still be called a democracy.
The plain truth is that none of the institutions of our democracy work as intended, or as we imagine they do, or as they used to, or as they do elsewhere. Some are best described as having ceased to work at all. The rot has set in at every level, from the corrupt and chaotic process by which the parties choose their candidates and leaders, to the sordid fraternity hazings that are modern election campaigns, to the random distortions in representation imposed by our electoral system, to the many dysfunctions of our increasingly irrelevant House of Commons, to the almost total concentration of power in the office of the prime minister. While any one of these on its own might not trouble us unduly, their accumulated weight should.
The effect has been to invert all of the institutional relationships characteristic of a properly functioning parliamentary democracy. The government does not answer to the Commons so much as the Commons answers to the government; party leaders are not accountable to the members of Parliament in their caucus, but rather caucus is accountable to the leader; the prime minister is no longer a member of Cabinet so much as Cabinet has become an extension of the prime minister. And so on.
No democracy is perfect; people in every country complain about the faults in theirs. But ours compares unfavourably in many respects, from the strictness of our system of party discipline, to the deviations we permit from the principle of one person, one vote, to the powers and prerogatives of our prime ministers and beyond. We should likewise steer clear of the lazy assumption that “it’s always been this way.” It hasn’t. It’s worse now; clearly, markedly worse.
I suppose the best way to answer the question ”is Canada’s democracy in crisis?” is to ask: What would a democracy that was not in crisis look like?
Without idealizing, we could probably get some consensus for the following:
• At regular intervals the people choose from among their number individuals to represent them in Parliament.
• Elections are contested by candidates selected by their fellow party members in competitive local nomination races, who compete for voters’ support on the basis of their differing philosophies of government.
• Everyone gets a vote and every vote counts equally.
• Voters are free to mark their ballot for the party and candidate of their choice.
• The majority rules.
• Members of Parliament, once elected, propose, debate, scrutinize and vote on bills, mind the public’s money, and generally hold the government to account.
• The prime minister makes decisions and runs the government with the help and advice of cabinet.
• The government must at all times hold the “confidence,” or support, of the House.
That is how our system is supposed to work. But that is not how our system actually works. If our democracy were only deficient in one or another item on that list you might say it was unsatisfactory, but not “in crisis.” What makes the situation critical is that none of them apply.
Let’s follow the process from start to finish.
Candidates, as a rule, are not nominated by a vote of the existing party members in a given riding. Rather, candidates stage little putsches, stacking meetings with busloads of new recruits whose memberships may well have been purchased for them. Alternatively they are simply appointed, de facto or de jure, by the party leader.
So no, candidates in our elections are not typically selected by local party members in competitive nomination races.
How is the leader chosen? By the same mad process of mass membership sales to people with no history of involvement in the party and no intention of participating in it further. Which leaves the leader, by happy coincidence, accountable to no one.
The candidates, once chosen, are exposed to those wretched spasms of malevolence we call elections. Aspiring MPs may have thoughts on the issues of the day, but it doesn’t really matter what they think because all policy is set by the parties, which is to say by the party leaders. And it doesn’t matter where the parties or the leaders stand because at any given time they tend to stand for the same thing, and because whatever they stand for today, they will stand for the reverse tomorrow.
Recent Canadian elections have set new standards for dishonesty: not just the usual calculated ambiguity, but flat-out lies. Parties routinely campaign on one thing and do the precise opposite once in power; they flip-flop not only on minor details but on the central planks of their platforms.
So no, elections are not contests between candidates on the basis of their differing philosophies of government.
At length the votes are counted and we find we have elected a Parliament that looks nothing like what we voted for, with a distribution of seats that bears no resemblance to the actual division of opinion in the country.
It is a system in which the winning candidate in a riding will often be the choice of fewer than one-third of the voters, leaving the majority unrepresented; in which a party may win a majority of the seats with less than 40 per cent of the vote – less, sometimes, than their nearest rival; in which voters are routinely told that they cannot vote for the party they prefer, but must vote for some other party they dislike in order to keep yet another party they detest from being elected.
It is a system in which parties that can concentrate their vote geographically are massively favoured over those whose support is more evenly distributed; in which many ridings or even whole regions are considered such foregone conclusions that the parties hardly bother to campaign there. Liberals in the West and rural Canada, like Conservatives in Quebec and our major cities, are greatly underrepresented, distorting our perception of the country and needlessly aggravating regional tensions.
Results are further distorted by the vast disparities in the numbers of voters per riding. In effect, the votes of some citizens are worth five times, or 10 times, or 20 times as much as another’s, depending on which party they were cast for and in which riding.
So no, ours is not a system in which every vote counts equally. Neither is it one in which voters are free to support the party of their choice. And certainly it is not a system of majority rule. It might better be described, rather, as “institutionalized minority rule.”
At any rate, a “majority” of what? Turnout in recent federal elections has fallen to near 60 per cent; at the provincial level it is now common to see turnouts of less than 50 per cent; municipally, you’re lucky to get 40 per cent. Combine falling turnout with false majorities, and governments are routinely elected with as little as 20 per cent of the voting-age population.
So no, the people of Canada do not choose who will govern them. A small and unrepresentative fraction of the people do.
Nevertheless, the election over with, we send our representatives off to Parliament … where they might as well have stayed home for all the difference most of them make.
What do we elect MPs to do? Debate? The arguments are rote; attendance is sparse; no one’s mind is changed. That’s when debate is permitted, and not, as happens dozens of times every session, curtailed by “time allocation.”
Propose legislation? In a typical year, only a handful of private members’ bills pass into law.
Examine legislation? Not when dozens of laws of vastly differing purpose can be bundled together into huge omnibus bills, hundreds of pages long, leaving scant hours to study any individual initiative.
Vote on the important questions of the day? Canada has, experts agree, among the strictest systems of party discipline in the democratic world. MPs cannot ask questions in the House, or make routine members’ statements, without the permission of party officials – and when they do, are confined to reading out lines written for them by party communications staff.
The consensus on this is depressingly broad: members of Parliament have little responsibility left to them but to stand up and sit down when they are told.
They no longer have any real power, either to represent their constituencies or to hold governments to account. Government backbenchers long ago gave up trying, although once it was expected of them.
Opposition MPs, meanwhile, find their daily existence is a constant exercise in futility. They can’t get their questions answered, can’t get the documents they demand, can’t trust the figures in them if they do. Committees have become farces: stonewalled by government members, unable to compel witnesses to appear, often meeting behind closed doors.
And on those rare, rare occasions when a government is finally being held to account, when it really starts to feel the heat, usually in a minority Parliament, it prorogues – sometimes for months at a time.
So no, MPs do not, in any meaningful sense, perform any of the responsibilities commonly ascribed to them. Parliament is no longer the place where important matters are debated, decided or even announced. It has become a largely ceremonial body, a glorified electoral college, its role confined to manufacturing a majority out of the increasingly fragmented results of our elections.
Even the confidence convention, the bedrock requirement that a government must command the confidence of the House at all times, is under assault. Heading for certain defeat in a confidence vote in 2008, Stephen Harper simply prorogued. Having arguably lost a confidence vote in 2005, Paul Martin stalled for nine days, until, with the help of a timely floor-crosser, he was able to win a do-over. More recently, Justin Trudeau also prorogued to avoid a confidence vote, emulating in 2025 what he had denounced in 2008.
It’s only a convention, after all. Like ministerial responsibility, Cabinet solidarity, and others, it binds prime ministers for as long as they feel like being bound by it. When they no longer do, it doesn’t.
This is the critical dilemma facing us. In other countries, executive power is subject to various checks and balances, whether in the formalized separation of powers that an American president must negotiate, or the multiparty coalitions that are the norm in Europe. Our system has no such checks and balances; the few that were in place, the conventional constraints of parliamentary democracy and cabinet government, have withered on the vine.
Prime ministers in any Westminster system have always been powerful, but ours have amassed powers that are quite without parallel – because of the powers themselves, but also because so many of them are entirely the prime minister’s personal prerogative, without supervision or constraint of any kind.
These include the vast array of appointments at the prime minister’s command, from the governor-general to the Senate to the Supreme Court to every senior post in the bureaucracy. And, of course, the Cabinet at its recent high of 39 ministers, the largest in the democratic world, by far. Throw in the many parliamentary secretaries and committee chairs – the prime minister appoints all of them, too – and just about every member of caucus is in line for some sort of reward, or thinks he is.
But what is that reward, in the end? Cabinet ministers themselves have largely been reduced to courtiers. As their numbers have multiplied, their value, individually and collectively, has diminished; and as their value has diminished, fewer people of substance have stepped forward to take the job. Cabinet ministers are now tightly controlled by the Prime Minister’s Office, in a way that previous generations of ministers, or ministers in other countries, would find intolerable.
And that’s just the start. The prime minister alone decides when Parliament should be prorogued, and when it should be recalled, and when it should be dissolved in favour of fresh elections. Coupled with the power to declare any vote a matter of confidence, on any grounds, the prime minister has a metaphoric gun to the heads of individual members, on either side of the House, who might be tempted to defeat a government bill. The prime minister likewise decides which bills (other than private members’ bills) to introduce and when, how much debate should be permitted on a bill, which bills might be combined with others into omnibus bills, who sits on committees and what business they will take up and when, etc.
Yet for all the concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office, it is at the same time draining power to the courts, to the bureaucracy, to the provinces, even to the Senate. Reforms instituted by Justin Trudeau, dismantling the party system in the upper house and requiring that Senate appointments be “merit-based,” may have taken some of the partisanship and patronage out of that chamber, but at the cost of inflating senators’ sense of self-importance. Senators may not have a mandate from the people but they can now tell themselves they have a higher mandate – a mandate of virtue. The risk of confrontation with the Commons, especially in the event of a Conservative government, has grown accordingly.
There are, in short, legitimate and illegitimate constraints on executive power. The less the government is constrained by legitimate means, the more encumbered it finds itself by illegitimate ones. The more powerful prime ministers have become within the precincts of Parliament Hill, the less their writ extends anywhere outside it.
To recap, a party, having been subjugated to the personal ambitions of a leader and his coterie of advisers – with the help of thousands of new members of dubious provenance – by a combination of false promises, venomous attack ads, and fortuitous media blunders, succeeds in stampeding a little over one-third of the electorate into supporting it, which when processed through vote splits and other tricks of the first-past-the-post electoral system, is magically transformed into a majority. The prime minister, thus elected, rules with something approaching dictatorial powers until such time as he desires to repeat the process.
So we have a crisis on our hands. More than a crisis of legitimacy, it is an existential crisis. With so few real responsibilities, Parliament is fast becoming irrelevant. And with so few Canadians bothering to take part in national elections it is debatable who Parliament is even answerable to, or what it represents. The very notion of Canadians as a single self-governing people is dissolving before our eyes.
We are caught in a number of vicious circles. The more our democracy is degraded, the less shocking each new abuse becomes. The longer it goes on, the less anyone is conscious of what we have lost, or cares about what remains. The less legitimate the federal government becomes, the more the provinces are emboldened to fill the void, and the more hesitant the federal government becomes to confront them. The more cynical and fatalistic people become about Canadian politics, the less likely they are to vote, or to pay attention, and the worse all these other ills become.
Consider the events of the last few months. The former prime minister, after months of pressure from his own party members, was forced to resign in January. He remained in office, however, pending the choice of a new leader, as did his government, though all three major opposition parties had announced they would vote no confidence in it at the first opportunity. They could not do so, however, because, on the day he announced his resignation, the prime minister also prorogued Parliament for three months. In fact Parliament never did return; instead, the new prime minister called an election. It will be late May before it resumes sitting.
In the middle of one of the gravest political crises of our lifetimes, we have been left without representation for nearly six months. And no one seems to miss it. Could there be a more telling sign of Parliament’s irrelevance?
Once, we might have been able to ignore how bad things have got, how far removed we are from a fully functioning democracy. After all, Canada has been able to get by pretty well without it. We remain one of the richest, freest, fairest, most blessed places on Earth.
But the world is about to become a much more difficult and dangerous place. The territory to which we lay claim, so vast that we cannot begin to defend it, is no longer something we can assume that others will respect. Russia is eyeing our North hungrily, as is China. Once, we might have counted on the United States to come to our defence; now we cannot be sure it would not join in the plunder.
We will have to make huge increases in military spending just to meet our current NATO obligations, with the prospect of more increases to come. That will put more pressure on public finances, already straitened by the soaring costs of health care and starved of revenues by sluggish economic growth – possibly even a recession.
Now factor in growing strains on national unity, not only from Quebec but also Alberta. And the possibility of NATO becoming involved in a war in Europe. And the probability of another pandemic. And climate change. And and and.
Welcome to the age of crisis. We‘ve had a lovely run of things these past 150-odd years, but our luck may be about to run out. In this dangerous new world, the old model, where power was held close to the centre, will no longer suffice. The challenges that confront us will inevitably require our citizens to make sacrifices for the greater good, of a kind they are unaccustomed to making. Persuading them to do so will not be easy. Rather than issue edicts from on high, our leaders will have to marshal popular support for their decisions, in a way they have rarely had to do before.
Parliament can be that rallying point, but only if all of our people, no matter what part of the country they live in, feel it is their Parliament – that when Parliament is debating a matter, the whole nation is. They will need to believe that their members of Parliament truly represent them, that the government truly answers to Parliament, that elections are truly reflective of public opinion. They will need to see that the political parties, in a moment of crisis, are capable of working together in the national interest.
In other words, we will need a system radically different from the one we have now.
Imagine: What if we had a Parliament that mattered? What if we had elections that mattered? What if the candidates in each riding really were the choices of their communities as represented by their local riding associations? What if MPs had greater independence to represent their constituents in Parliament? What if leaders had to answer to their caucus, and governments had to answer to the House? What if Cabinet government were a reality and not a polite fiction?
What if parties had to battle for votes in every part of the country, in every riding in the country? What if all of us were represented in Parliament, and not that diminishing fraction of the voters in each riding that happen to support the winning party? What if 90 per cent or more of the electorate showed up to vote, instead of 60 per cent or less? What if governments really represented a majority of the voters, and not the fraction of a fraction that now passes for a mandate?
These are not idle questions. They do not describe some unattainable ideal, but democracy as it exists in other countries, and has in this country at other times. We do not have to accept the current degraded state of our democratic institutions as inevitable. Neither do we have to accept it in our politics.
But here you run into a seemingly insoluble dilemma: the system can only be changed by those who were elected under the existing system. The prime minister’s powers cannot be reduced without the prime minister’s consent. MPs dare not bring their leader to heel so long as they are under the leader’s heel. Before you can regulate the parties’ chaotic internal elections, the parties would have to enact the regulations. Reform of our electoral system requires the approval of those who benefit from the status quo. And so on.
Is there any hope of breaking out of this? Probably not. But maybe. Any system seems unreformable until it is reformed. Revolutions always begin with a first step, a first breach in the unbreachable wall. Change just one thing, and you make it possible, at least, to turn one of those vicious circles into a virtuous circle.
Or maybe the system will reach a point, beset by one or more of the multiple crises I’ve described, where it cracks under the strain – where the crisis of Canadian democracy, long apprehended, becomes real. Deadlocked, lacking legitimacy in one part of the country or the other, fearing the Americans might take advantage of our divisions, some future Parliament might decide on a radical shift of strategy; some grand coalition might emerge, some hitherto unexpected alignment of the parties, left and right, government and opposition, that would make sweeping democratic reform possible. The same approach, if memory serves, was responsible for our founding.