Troubling Trends in Canadian Democracy
by Feo Snagovsky, Policy Options, December 2, 2022
As the rebranded Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act was tabled recently, many observers were keenly watching whether it would keep what many people see as its more blatantly unconstitutional provisions. Not only did it keep them by arguing Alberta could refuse to enforce federal laws, it doubled down: under its provisions, cabinet would have the authority to unilaterally amend provincial legislation. These powers move dangerously close to rule-by-decree in a system where cabinet is effectively an expression of the premier’s will.
This article is not about those provisions, however dangerous they are for democracy. This article is about why we should care whether our political representatives pass legislation that violates the rule of law or gives the executive branch unprecedented emergency powers as a matter of course. Commentators, politicians and political scientists have assumed for too long that the answers to these kinds of questions are self-evident. However, it has become increasingly clear over the last decade that we need to go back to first principles in our defence of democracy.
Democratic institutions matter because they place checks and balances—some may call them “gates”—on the exercise of political power. We can look at two recent events as a guide, though in the context of the 24-hour news cycle, they seem like ancient history. After weeks of chaos and turmoil, Liz Truss resigned as prime minister of the United Kingdom, while a calm and orderly coronation saw Xi Jinping solidify a historic third term as the leader of China’s Communist Party and thus of the country.
Both events remind us how a successful political system should work, but not in the way you might first think. Xi is set to become China’s longest-serving leader since Mao Zedong after systematically securing an ever-greater hold on power, which allowed him to break with precedent to obtain his third term. By contrast, Truss became the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister after a disastrous term of less than 50 days in office. Her leadership became unsustainable after a poorly advised overhaul of the tax system. By the end of her short mandate, polls showed her to be the least-popular leader in British history.
At first glance, this contrast makes China appear to be a beacon of stability in an uncertain world, just as it makes the UK seem like a dumpster fire inside of a train wreck. In reality, the latter shows how democratic institutions are supposed to function. In other words, this is a feature, not a bug, of a healthy system of governance.
Truss did not walk back her reforms and ultimately resign because she thought those were the right things to do from a moral perspective; rather, Britain’s democratic institutions left her little alternative. This is how democracy is supposed to work—our institutions, or “gates,” constrain the exercise of political power. The Truss example demonstrates their value as the ultimate safety valve: the ability to replace our political leadership altogether.
These kinds of limits don’t exist in places such as China and Russia, where Xi and Vladimir Putin face no real checks on their decision-making power. Both leaders can effectively do what they want, without worrying much about the consequences. For evidence, we need look no further than Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine: after thousands of military and civilian casualties, a botched conscription drive and staggering evidence of war crimes, Putin’s stranglehold on power is still remarkable because he controls all of the institutions—media, opposition, civil society—that could conceivably challenge him.
All of this should give pause to leaders, including those in Canada, who are playing fast and loose with how they talk about our own democratic and economic institutions. Two in particular—Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith—come to mind. Both came to power nodding to conspiracy theorists, such as those who see the World Economic Forum as a shadowy puppet-master of world governments.
Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, has proposed eliminating or reducing the power of “gatekeepers” such as regulators and other agencies in politics and finance; city planners in Toronto; local politicians in Vancouver for allegedly blocking new housing development; and Justin Trudeau for his energy policy. He uses “gatekeepers” as an amorphous term that seems to refer to anyone who places restrictions—sensible or not—on what people and leaders can and cannot do.
Smith, the new premier of Alberta, has now introduced a sovereignty act that says Alberta can refuse to enforce federal law while giving cabinet the power to unilaterally change legislation. If passed, this would be a stunning abdication of democratic oversight, effectively granting the premier and cabinet standing emergency powers as a matter of course.
Unfortunately, the damage will already have been done either way. This is because the Overton window—the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time—has moved for a segment of the electorate to include ignoring the Constitution and bypassing legislative oversight. There is not a long way to go between ignoring these kinds of safeguards and ignoring others, such as restrictions on freedom of expression that limit civil society’s ability to keep the government accountable, or the scope of what constitutes an “emergency” which allows cabinet to change laws as they see fit.
Unreliable, bias-confirming and emotionally charged content is shaping the public sphere.
Ignoring democratic institutions such as the Constitution and the legislature is not sustainable in a (small-l) liberal democracy such as Canada. In liberal democracies, citizens elect representatives to govern, but also constrain them to act within certain boundaries—such as the rule of law, as well as with respect for certain fundamental rights and freedoms. This approach stands in contrast to so-called “illiberal democracies” such as Hungary, where rights and freedoms are conditional on their popularity at any given time. This includes curtailing the operations of pro-democracy organizations and opposition parties, controlling the media and stifling dissent. Pushing the limits of these boundaries is not sustainable for a liberal democracy. Eventually, something has to give. Either the actors stop pushing, or democratic backsliding takes place.
To be clear, we should want our governments to change from time to time. The impulse to “throw the rascals out” is one of the things that keeps democracy going. Indeed, the current parties in government in Canada and Alberta have both made more than their fair share of mistakes, and it’s in everybody’s best interest for other parties to have a chance at governing after them. But Canada’s underlying democratic institutions—such as the rule of law, federalism and the Constitution—protect everyone. It is short-sighted for politicians to campaign against them for immediate political gain, let alone set us up for a constitutional crisis to score points with one’s voter base.
Some readers will likely think it alarmist to believe that a country such as Canada could ever slide away from democracy. However, we need look only as far as our neighbours to the south, or other advanced democracies such as France, Italy and Poland, to see the path for success available to politicians who campaign against liberal democracy. It is impossible to know for sure how US history might have played out if folks there had begun a serious conversation about whether democracy was immune to challenge in the wake of the Tea Party’s emergence. If we wait for a similar milestone in Canada, it may already be too late.
We should all want the gatekeepers to change from time to time. But we really need to keep the gates.
Feo Snagovsky is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Alberta.
Crisis of knowledge
by Taylor Owen, The Globe and Mail, October 20, 2023
On October 5 I decided to take a break from X, formerly Twitter. This was not easy. For more than a decade, it has been my own gateway to information about the world, as well as the subject of my professional research on our media and technology ecosystem. Starting from the Arab Spring protests, I learned about a long series of conflicts through the lens of my Twitter feed, where I followed journalists, scholars and citizens living through the events to which I was glued.
But the platform is now broken. Where it once filtered valuable information about the world in a timely manner—albeit imperfectly—it is now calibrated to anger and extremes under the ownership of a spiteful billionaire clearly caught in an ideological rabbit hole. And so, over the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend, I did not even learn of the horrific Hamas attacks in Israel until almost a day after, when I turned on the radio. And in the days since, I have consumed information about the war the old-fashioned way: through journalism filtered not through increasingly narrow social-media algorithms, but by my own choice of what to listen to, read and watch. This change of context has proved revealing.
It is clear that traditional media still has a profound ability to shape the global understanding of events, and that the way wars are framed can have profound implications. Is mainstream Western journalism contributing to a moral equivalency between acts of war? Are news media outlets contributing to a military rather than political solution set? Whose voices are being amplified, and why?
Those questions are rightly being asked. But it is also clear that social media, AI and our broken information ecosystem are also having a profound effect on how we come to understand, feel about and respond to this conflict.
Platforms have gotten out of the business of news and the prioritization of reliable information. For years, social media companies have incentivized publishers to share content on their platforms, normalizing them as a news source for citizens. But now, Meta is downgrading the ranking of news on their platforms, and in countries such as Canada it has even cut off users’ ability to link to journalism entirely on Facebook and Instagram, in protest of regulatory efforts. At the same time, the rise of TikTok’s powerful algorithmic feed has led Meta, Twitter and YouTube to move away from user-informed content feeds (based on whom we choose to follow) to feeds pulling content from across the entire platforms dictated by what they believe will keep us most engaged and entertained. During a war, this means being served content that plays to our ideological and emotional biases—material that either confirms our beliefs or enrages us, and little in between.
Civic and election integrity teams once tasked with responding to disinformation, hate speech and violence have been decimated.
This is just the next phase in design and policy decisions that platforms have long been undertaking that have made their products more dangerous. Free-speech absolutists have succeeded in diminishing and in some cases removing even modest content-moderation rules, and civic and election integrity teams once tasked with responding to disinformation, hate speech and violence have been decimated. Tools that allow researchers to better understand the platforms have been turned off. Blue checkmarks, long a sign of credibility on Twitter, can now be purchased for fake legitimacy and amplification; bad actors are gaming the algorithms so that they serve up their harmful and extreme content at the expense of the moderation, responsibility and reliable information that these moments demand.
In short, the guardrails are gone—and the result has been an information ecosystem that is deeply vulnerable to being weaponized against us. Just this past week, for example, according to research conducted by Reset and highlighted by the EU, we have seen a surge in antisemitic hate speech on X, and anti-Muslim posts are being pushed by a wide range of political actors, including the US far right and Indian disinformation campaigns. The result is a spiral of escalation, with both sides using the incentives and vulnerabilities of our media ecosystem to one-up the demonization of the other.
Compounding these issues is content generated by AI, to which platforms are highly susceptible. X is now filled with posts that are designed, written and promoted using tools such as ChatGPT, and as a result, users are losing the ability to know what is real. When our minds are flooded with AI content that is purpose-built for the incentives of our platforms, we are outsourcing our understanding of the world, including of complicated events in Israel and Gaza, to the design of our communication infrastructure. The result is an epistemological crisis in how we know war. A combination of unreliable, bias-confirming and emotionally charged content is shaping the character of the public sphere and how we understand the world.
The best chance we have to fix this problem may be as simple as regulation. The EU’s Digital Services Act has recently come into effect and is getting its first test case with this conflict. EU Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton has sent official notices to both TikTok and X that their platforms are being misused to spread content that is illegal in the EU. In response, the platforms will need to show how they are responding to user complaints, conduct risk assessments on their products, and demonstrate the measures they are taking to mitigate them. This kind of product-safety legislation is coming soon in Britain and is likely to be enacted in Canada. Within three days of the letter, TikTok had removed more than 500,000 posts and 8,000 livestreams of content depicting violence and atrocities—a drop in the bucket, but a meaningful effort nonetheless.
Both traditional and social media have in the past been valuable, if imperfect, windows into conflicts such as this. But it feels like our current moment is particularly perilous. The institutions of journalism are in decline, and the social platforms that some believed might replace them are broken—and so we are experiencing the worst of both worlds, leaving too many of us anxious, listless and ungrounded. The need to reimagine an information ecosystem calibrated to reliable content about the world could not feel more urgent. At the very least, we would be wise to spend less time on X.
Taylor Owen is the director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University.
Private Interests Undermine Democracy
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Paul Salvatori,
Broadview, April 24, 2020
Noam Chomsky is a political philosopher, linguist, activist and among the world’s leading intellectuals. He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and rose to prominence in the field of linguistics shortly after. Chomsky’s political activism intensified in the 1960s, when he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. He has since remained a vocal opponent of concentrated power in America and abroad. He’s taken aim at news media that prioritize the concerns of corporate elites; right-wing governments that favour private over public interests; and, more recently, the destructive politics of US president Donald Trump. Chomsky, 91, is currently professor laureate at the University of Arizona. He spoke with Paul Salvatori about the precarious state of global democracy.
Paul Salvatori: How is humanity doing at the moment?
Noam Chomsky: It’s right at the brink of self-destruction. We are facing a situation that has never arisen in human history. There are several converging threats to survival. One is the increasing risk of nuclear war. We’ve been living with it for 75 years, and it’s kind of a miracle we’ve escaped. Then there is the threat of environmental catastrophe. Many countries are doing at least something to try to deal with it. The United States, distinct from the entire world, is racing toward the precipice with dedication and commitment. And there aren’t many years ahead to make a decision about whether we’ll survive this.
Salvatori: How are these two threats related to the health of global democracy?
Chomsky: We’re seeing a deterioration of democratic systems. And there’s a reason democracy is the one hope that we have. Democracy means people are able to influence political choices. We’re essentially doomed if that disappears.
Salvatori: In Canada and the United States, we often hear political parties praise democracy, yet their members are expected to abide by the party leadership rather than their own conscience. Are political parties good for democracy?
Chomsky: It depends what they are. The Republican Party today is off the spectrum. It’s supporting environmental catastrophe. It’s leading the way to increasing the threat of nuclear war and the threat to democracy. It’s trying to minimize democracy in every possible way, and for good reason. The leaders know it’s a minority party that has some structural advantages that enable them to keep going. But they do whatever they can to block segments of the population from voting and undermining their power. On the other hand, I think there are movements trying to increase democracy. [Senator and former presidential hopeful] Bernie Sanders in the United States, for example, has been able to energize a mass popular movement, dedicated to functioning not just for electoral politics but ongoing, serious activism.
Salvatori: It’s bizarre that a democratic nation like the United States would elect someone like Trump to be its leader. On the other hand, critics of Trump argue he represents or is symptomatic of mass disillusionment with political institutions.
Chomsky: That’s true, but it’s much more general. Around the world, there are popular uprisings, protests, anger. Each place has its own particular reasons, but there are some common features. A major one is the neoliberal assault on the population, which took off under [former US president] Ronald Reagan and [former UK prime minister] Margaret Thatcher.
Neoliberalism has had the predictable effect of concentrating wealth very narrowly. So in the United States, for example, about 0.1 per cent of the population has over 20 per cent of the wealth. This is terrain that can be exploited by demagogues. They succeed, unfortunately, by turning not against the source of inequality but against vulnerable groups: immigrants, African-Americans, Muslims. Trump is one demagogue, but you see others like him elsewhere. [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi in India. [President] Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. There are progressive forces organizing too, but not with the same amount of power.
Salvatori: These movements seem to be very successful at weakening certain societal bonds. The world feels less trusting and cohesive somehow.
Chomsky: Well, one of the explicit goals of the neoliberal project is to atomize people. Thatcher put it very clearly: there is no society, just individuals. So throw people into the market and they’ll have to survive as best they can. But no support systems.
Salvatori: The neoliberal idea that “the more you privatize society, the more all benefit” seems to be gaining popularity with governments internationally. Do you see this kind of trickle-down economics as morally problematic?
Chomsky: The quasi-religious view that markets know best is full of hypocrisy. And within societies governed by it, there’s a strong tendency toward undermining competition. It’s extreme in the United States, where you see the decline of quality services, invention, entrepreneurial innovation and productivity. It’s a reflection of the private monopolization of society.
Salvatori: Should there not be greater concern, on the part of governments, about how this deference to the market might lead to financial crises like it did in 2008?
Chomsky: The market-loving government reacts in a systematic way to financial crises resulting from the malfeasance of financial institutions. So, for example, in 2008 the American Congress passed legislation to bail out the financial institutions that were responsible for the housing crisis and also to provide some assistance to people who were the victims—those thrown out of their homes, with lost possessions and so on. But after president Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he decided to implement only the first plank of the legislation, leaving the victims to fend for themselves. That was a kick in the face to Americans.
So throw people into the market and they’ll have to survive as best they can. But no support systems.
Salvatori: Then there’s the Republican denialism about global warming. How did we get here?
Chomsky: At present, a small percentage of the Republican Party think that global warming’s a serious problem. Now, if we ask a simple question, “When did the Republican Party turn to denial of global warming?” you find an interesting story. Go back to 2008, when John McCain ran for the presidency on the Republican ticket. At the time, there was a program to do something about carbon emissions. It wasn’t much, but still, it was something the Republican Congress was considering to mitigate the effects of global warming. Enter [American energy moguls] the Koch brothers. They realized they’d better do something or it would compromise the profits of the energy industry. So they launched a massive lobbying campaign—bribing Congress, senators, intimidating others, creating fake popular organizations, banging on people’s doors. As a result, the Republicans turned on a dime. They moved from recognizing that global warming is a problem to total denialism. You’d be challenged to find an iota of principle in the party leadership. Try—it’s really hard.
Salvatori: It’s clear you believe democracy is in peril but not a lost cause. What does genuine democracy look like?
Chomsky: It’s a system in which informed people get together, decide on policies, decide how they’re going to be implemented, then proceed. Actually, a pretty good measure of how democracy is functioning is people’s attitudes toward taxes. If you had a system like what I described, on tax day people would celebrate: “We’ve got together, we decided what we wanted to do, we’ve decided how to fund it. Now we’re doing it.” Suppose you go to the opposite extreme— total dictatorship. People have nothing to do with policy, no decision-making power. Then tax day is one of mourning. Where are we on the spectrum?
Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, community worker, artist and producer of The Dark Room podcast.
____________________________________________
