What’s Wrong With Everything
On Canadian Democracy
Jonathan Manthorpe
Cormorant Books, 204 pp.
Here’s a question. Given everything the two countries have in common, why isn’t Canada Argentina?
They’re both geographically vast. Argentina extends from the Andes mountains across the Pampas grasslands to the Atlantic forest. They’re both extraordinarily rich in natural resources and their agri-businesses are essential to the world. They are the second largest economies on their respective continents, and 100 years ago Argentina and Canada had the same per capita GDP. Argentina is a soccer powerhouse, Canada dominates international hockey, and both countries have their national pride.
But Argentina has long been an economic disaster and a political nightmare. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times. It has lurched from the left-wing authoritarianism of the Peron decades to the even more brutal right-wing fascism of the Junta and its Dirty War, and now to whatever Javier Milei is on about. (Social credit, possibly.)
Canada, by comparison, is an unexciting tableau of political and economic stability, a place where there are no runs on the bank, no coups d’état, and no riots in the streets unless a hockey championship is involved. The secret to this stability is that everyone in Canada is encouraged to speak up, all the time, about how they don’t like how they’re being governed.
Keep this in mind as Jonathan Manthorpe leads us through his unsentimental report card on Canada and its prospects. He examines the structure of Canadian democracy in nine chapters, every one of which is knowledgeable, persuasive, and demoralizing. If we don’t attend to matters right now, Manthorpe warns, leaning on the klaxon, Canada is Argentina waiting to happen.
Slim and readable, the book should be handed out to anyone applying to emigrate here. You really want to get in the midst of this?
Manthorpe is an old hand, as they used to say in the journalism trade. China correspondent, Africa correspondent, European bureau chief, national political reporter, all of which provided the salary and worldly experience to write well-received books (Forbidden Nation, Claws of the Panda) on top of his day job. That sort of career is all but impossible now, which is a shame.
Okay, what’s so wrong with Canada that we best snap out of our complacency?
The crucial thing about our representative democracy, Manthorpe insists, is that it’s misrepresentative. The first-past-the-post electoral system skews the outcome, so the governments we get at the municipal level, the provincial level, and the federal level, are a triple distortion of the country’s political will. We have a democracy that is un-democratic.
On top of that, riding by riding the people we elect through this system have next to no agency. They are camouflage for the concentration of authority in the office of the Prime Minister, the Premier, or the party leader. Backbenchers or cabinet ministers, they take their orders from above, belittled by the very power structure they bought into.
The country, Manthorpe despairs, is poorly governed no matter who is in power, because its structures of governance are askew. And because it is poorly governed it is a country of lousy productivity and economic stagnation. Its economy is just a bunch of monopolies in a trench coat. Government has so discredited itself that distrust in government now extends to civic institutions. Social cohesion deteriorates. Prosperity and stability are being undermined right before our eyes.
This is the thinking person’s version of “Canada is broken.”
Sure, the Commons is a circus and the Senate is a “waste of time and money,” and the division of powers between the provinces and the federal government is poorly drawn and counter-productive. But the bone in the throat of Canadian democracy, Manthorpe laments, is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
He believes the Charter was a wrong idea, because it strait jackets Parliament, which is supposed to be the author of the nation’s laws. The Charter presumes to tell our highest chambers of debate that some things are not to be debated. And when the will of Parliament abrades the Charter, the matter gets referred to the Supreme Court, nine unelected people in robes who were never supposed to be empowered to overrule the political will of a country’s government.
This crappy, dysfunctional political apparatus leads to crappy, dysfunctional political outcomes. Health care is in crisis. Education is in crisis. Housing and groceries and cell phone fees are too expensive. Immigrants flood the six big cities, adding more and more strain to beleaguered hospitals, schools, and housing markets, when we really need them to spread out, to settle in places like Lloydminster and Cornerbrook. The whole place is coming apart.
If we’re going to stave off the catastrophes he sees coming, Manthorpe can see no way out except to do away with the first-past-the-post electoral system, reverse the centralization of authority in the PMO, reform the Senate, rewrite the constitution, rein in the Supreme Court, reconfigure not only provincial-federal relations but municipal-provincial relations, and while we’re at it break up the grocery, bank and telco oligopolies.
Here’s my bold prediction. That’s not going to happen. Any of it. And Manthorpe knows that too.
Housing. Immigration. Health care. These are pressing issues, but they are ultimately administrative problems that can be tackled in different ways by different governments with different policies. Not one of these problems is going to be helped by triggering a constitutional crisis over revoking the Charter of Rights. No government in its right mind is going to do that.
Manthorpe sees the political structure of Canada as a machine whose gears don’t mesh, an engine grinding against itself, a problem that can’t be fixed. He wishes it were otherwise, but with a shrug and a sigh he concedes there’s not much we can do about it. So, we’re doomed.
This is where he and I part company. The political structure of Canada is a wonderful example of an unending problem that doesn’t need to be fixed. For 157 years it has shown a spongy resilience. Its mis-matched parts means that everything must be negotiated, which means deal-making, power moves, one-upmanship, and comeuppance. But always negotiation. The political structure of Canada is one big shock absorber, a machine for muddling through.
Manthorpe is not a fan of muddling through. He is an advocate of putting things right. I get it, believe me. Muddling through is nerve wracking. It’s just one crisis postponed after another. Nothing gets resolved, everything gets deferred.
Lately, our muddling through has been put to the test. There are no runs on Canadian banks, but one of them just got fined $3 billion by the U.S. government because it was hospitable to drug cartel money. Meanwhile, the leader of the Official Opposition has made a point of trying to undermine trust in the central Bank. That’s the sort of thing that happens in Argentina.
As to riots in the streets, Canada is still trying to process the convoy occupation of Ottawa and the border blockades. That was an organized exercise of civil disobedience intended to discomfit the government, maybe unseat it. Aggressive, but non-violent. Not a march, an encampment. A blight on the neighborhood. A static riot.
If it had been people in poverty setting up a tent village on Parliament Hill to make a point, they would have been cleared out promptly without the need for any special police powers. The convoy was a vehicular encampment, a tractor-trailer park. The people in the truckers’ blockade were not dispossessed. They were angry for other reasons. Their plan was to provoke a crisis, and they got what they wanted.
We had to muddle our way through that one by invoking the Emergencies Act. At the time, it was the right thing to do. But we can’t keep invoking the Emergencies Act. Maybe Manthorpe is right. Maybe we’re running out of muddling room.
Nah. If there’s anything this thing we call Canada is really good at, it’s finding new ways to negotiate with itself, just when you thought that wasn’t possible anymore.
- The Hill TimesOctober 30, 2024.