Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
John Beebe is director of the Democratic Engagement Exchange at Toronto Metropolitan University. Meredith Preston-McGhie is secretary-general of the Global Centre for Pluralism. Samantha Reusch is executive director of Apathy is Boring. Ben Rowswell is convenor of the Circle for Democratic Solidarity.
As any young backpacker will tell you, when you look back at your country from abroad, you learn to understand it more deeply. That’s exactly what 25 practitioners of Canada’s democracy did in early October, when they gathered at the Athens Democracy Forum. The Canadian Democracy Delegation joined activists, journalists and diplomats of dozens of countries who gather annually to devise joint responses to the rising tide of authoritarianism.
The rapid dismantling of U.S. democracy has added a new urgency to these gatherings. The forces undermining democracies around the world are the same forces undermining America’s constitutional order: polarization, social-media-inspired hate, fraying social fabric and rising political violence.
This year’s discussions in Athens reminded us that while Canada is not immune to these trends, we are not condemned to fight them in isolation. We can learn from the tactics that turned back an authoritarian wave in Poland, drove a surge in youth political participation in Colombia, and reversed an attempted coup d’etat in South Korea.
Andrew Coyne: Canada has the form of democracy, but not the substance
In turn, Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans and Asians want to learn from Canada. In Athens, delegates were struck by our experiences with pluralism. The Canadian Democracy Delegation didn’t present a single narrative of our democracy, instead allowing many practitioners to present different visions and explore the tensions between them, including: how Canada still has work to do on building strong, fair and accountable institutions that foster trust while balancing the public interest with growth and prosperity; how the experiences and insights that refugees bring from advocating for democracy, civic space, pluralism and human rights in their countries of origin can strengthen civic organizing for all Canadians; and how Indigenous nations could exercise sovereignty in a pan-Canadian political space that extends across our shared land. For Canadians, democracy is at its best not when we eliminate the differences between us, but when we hold space for them.
The other activists also remarked on the openness Canadians show when debating our national identity. We don’t flatten the nation into a single undifferentiated “people” with a glorious and undisputed past. We examine the failings as well as the successes in our history, because that prevents any one group of Canadians from claiming ownership of our past and so dominating our future.
Through this exercise, some common themes emerged. Today’s authoritarians set one part of the population against the other until the hatred and fear of the other feel so great that some citizens acquiesce to the weakening of courts, legislatures and the rule of law itself. In these situations of hyperpolarization, citizens on one side of the political divide relinquish their own rights as long as this gives their side the upper hand over the other. There is an alternative to this zero-sum dynamic, and it sits with pluralist democratic practices.
Opinion: In this age of authoritarians, a global democracy movement is taking shape
This is a moment for civic leadership. We need to focus not only on preserving democratic institutions but on engaging the citizens whose attitudes and beliefs ultimately determine the strength of courts, legislatures and electoral management bodies. The battleground between democracy and authoritarianism now lies at the level of individual citizens themselves.
This is why the defence of democracy ultimately lies with civic leaders, rather than politicians. Their work weaves the social bonds among neighbours, between citizens, that is essential to the health of the institutions of government. Because they have no partisan agenda, civic leaders can look at the democratic system as a whole and flag the weaknesses they find.
We can strengthen Canadian democracy by bolstering civic leaders. We must support and value this work at home through strong investment and recognition of the critical role of civil society in preventing these global trends from taking root in Canada. In turn, this will develop Canada’s capacity to take on a leadership role in the defence of democracy abroad.
The new authoritarians have joined forces to help one another. But the new democracy movements are doing the same. We can strengthen Canada’s democracy by engaging them, to build the civic leadership needed for citizens to prevail over those who would divide and dominate us.