The federal Liberals like to claim they’re commitment to being more open and democratic. But how can we tell if they actually are? (Image by Liberal Party of Canada)
At the very least, you’ve got to admire the federal government’s open government team’s chutzpah. Despite the Trudeau administration’s utterly unsurprising failure to keep its election promises to be open by default and reform our electoral system, late last month the team enthusiastically asked civil society members for feedback on its draft open government commitments.
Those commitments include a promise to review the Access to Information Act, which has already been extensively reviewed since it was passed in 1982. The government also states it will implement activities to “strengthen democracy in Canada.” But those activities remain unidentified.
Such non-reforms are as expected as they are frustrating. And I’m sure I’m not the only transparency advocate who felt that way. That said, I do appreciate the approach the open government team has taken during this consultation process, providing us with an opportunity to comment on its proposals via Google Docs. As a result, I thought it might be helpful to share what I think are the two things the Trudeau administration would have to do to demonstrate it was serious about being more open and democratic:
1. Reduce the number of secret spaces in government
It is not an understatement to say we are blind to much of what our sitting government does. Right now, we have no right to know what happens in its cabinet, the government’s top decision-making body. We have no right to know what happens in its cabinet ministers’ offices. And we have no right to know what recommendations are being made to those ministers by government employees. In short, we have no right to know why our government makes the decisions it makes. We only know what our government decides to tell us. Moreover, our right to know what our government knows about corporations, federal-provincial affairs, international affairs, defence and law enforcement is often limited. All this is odd for a supposed democracy. So, if the government wanted to be more open, it would do something about this.
2. Reduce the government’s power to do whatever it wants
Party discipline is the practice whereby all representatives from the same party vote together in Parliament. In combination with cabinet solidarity, it means a government with a majority of MPs in the House of Commons can often do whatever it wants. And, because our first-past-the-post voting system almost always produces such majorities, that’s usually the rule rather than the exception. This has the affect of making government resistant to public, press and opposition opinion between elections. Again, this is odd for a supposed democracy. As such, if the Trudeau administration wanted to be more democratic, it would do something about this too.
That said, these are hard things for any government to do because it means giving up control. And that’s even more difficult now because the informed, rational and empathetic decision-making that’s supposed to be the foundation of democracy is being undermined. But part of the reason for that is people don’t feel they have any control over an economic and political system that seems rigged against them. That’s why the work of the open government team is so important. I just wish the Trudeau administration would recognize that.
Corporate-structured political parties will never be democratic because to do so would violate the most essential mandate, i.e. ‘keep stock prices high’, period. We need to remove political parties from our governance system. We’ve strayed very far from anything looking and acting like a democracy because of dysfunctional governance and dysfunctional electoral processes. We end up with fascists with the keys to our armory, and the bombing Libya in consequence. We have a moral duty to control our country in a humane way, and we have chosen ‘democracy’ as the vehicle to achieve this outcome in a sustainable way. Now we must forge a ‘system’ that achieves the desired outcome-i.e. a functional and sustainable democracy. Preferably without calling 60% of the population into the street because they absolutely can not tolerate the outcome of the present system of governance. How does that disruption achieve better economic performance or increase the ‘thriving’ of people living in these territories? It does not. And so it is a failure. Knowing the problem is half of the solution.