In recent years democracy in Canada and the United States has been significantly undermined by a lack of transparency and an increasing trend of ideological pettiness. This has polarized voters and created an atmosphere of political cynicism in which the deliberative process necessary to run a democratic society has given away to whatever power can be grabbed from moment to moment. If these trends are not reversed then democracy in Canada and the United States itself will become increasingly less relevant, because everyone will either be too defeated, or too indifferent, to care.
The Conservative Party of Canada and its leader, Stephen Harper, formed a minority government in 2006 with a mandate towards accountability and transparency in Ottawa. Four years later, the Prime Minister has twice prorogued Parliament to avoid public debate. The first was on December 2, 2008 to avoid a coalition of the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois formed to defeat the government in a non-confidence motion. The second prorogation occurred on December 30, 2009 to avoid public scrutiny over the treatment of prisoners of war in Afghanistan. This summer, Minister of Industry Tony Clement announced the government would scrap the mandatory long form census and replace it with a voluntary short form census. According to Statistics Canada, the new census will only have 70 per cent compliance compared with nearly 100 per cent for the mandatory long form. This undermines the integrity of the data, the uses for which are diverse and multi-faceted. The provinces use population statistics provided by the census to determine education funding, and also by non-profits when they apply for federal funding. The Conservatives have essentially undermined one of the most reliable, accessible, and vital forms of public information.
The government continually silences its critics. Veteran Ombudsman Pat Strogan will not have his term renewed simply for criticizing the handling of disability treatment by Veteran Affairs Canada. He now joins Paul Kennedy at the RCMP complaints commission, Peter Tinsley at the Military Police Complaints Commission, and Linda Keen at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, who have all been silenced by the government for simply criticizing it, even though these offices exist to provide oversight. These moves would be unnecessary for a government that respects transparency, openness, and accountability. However, the Conservatives govern based on the idea that public access to information is a privilege rather than a right. The government’s current stance on democracy gives us the worst of both worlds: weak regulatory bodies combined with the public perception that since they exist they must be doing their jobs.
In the United States, where public servants pride themselves on working with a spirit of transparency, political dealings are equally opaque and disjointed. In the Senate – the upper house of the nation’s legislature – democracy is routinely undermined by a severe lack of transparency. Earlier this year, the Senate voted down a proposal by House majority leader Harry Reid to have bills posted online for public access prior to consideration in the house, just months after they shot down a proposal to have the Federal Reserve’s audit papers made public. Today, there still doesn’t exist a reliable mechanism to track how taxpayer dollars are being spent, nor how individual Senators are handling their office expense accounts. Comparatively, problems of transparency in Canada involve the government skirting around accountability, while in the United States, the lack of transparency is more institutional and a function of the problematic way that government is organized.
Perhaps more consequentially, a stubborn commitment to ideology obstructs legislative efficiency and undermines the democratic process in the United States. Consider, for instance, the recent health care bill, which, save for Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning, the entire Republican contingent in the house voted No on. The sensible conservative argument against the bill – that a combination of open-market competition and tax credits would more adequately serve public needs – was abandoned in favour of vitriolic, strident partisanship, couched most notably in statements decrying Obama’s plan as “socialist.” Obama’s proposed economic stimulus faced the same narrow, unreasoned ideological opposition. Earlier this year, Evan Bayh, a veteran Democrat from Indiana, chose not to seek re-election, saying that: “There is too much partisanship and not enough progress-too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.”
The implications of narrow ideological politics are far-reaching and troubling, especially considering that the Obama administration has major short term goals – educational reform, withdrawal from Iraq – that will require a very involved, deliberative democracy. If upcoming public debate is going to be littered with the same poor quality party-line rhetoric, you can expect decision-making to be slowed and progress, ultimately, to be hindered.
The Conservatives and Republicans clearly believe the legislative process is not only an inconvenience, but something that can be exploited or dismissed. When one states that “government is broken” one is speaking of government as an abstract entity that is somehow not affected by the people inside or outside of it. This is precisely what the political right wants. By removing ourselves from the responsibility we have to fix the democratic process, we are only helping those who seek to break it further.
