A Brief History of Democracy

Monday, November 22, 2010

Le Québec pourrait devenir le berceau de la démocratie en Amérique du Nord

En Chine, les mots « crise » et « opportunité » s’écrivent de la même manière. Il semble que le fait d’être en période de crise ou en période d’opportunité dépende de l’interprétation des événements.

Chose certaine, nos institutions politiques québécoises sont régulièrement ébranlées par les scandales.  Dans un sondage effectué dernièrement par Angus Reid – La Presse, trois Québécois sur quatre croient que les institutions québécoises sont corrompues.

Nous ne sommes pas les seuls à subir de gros problèmes de  gouvernance.  Aux États-Unis, un échec du système politique a eu pour effet de plonger le monde dans une récession globale due à l’absence de régulation adéquate de leurs marchés financiers.  Au Canada, le premier ministre a du demandé au gouverneur général afin de proroger le parlement pour éviter le renversement de son gouvernement. Quant au Royaume-Uni, un scandale concernant l’utilisation frauduleuse des fonds publics par certains membres de la Chambre des Lords a eu pour effet une révision du système électoral. Grosso modo ces pays d’origine britannique sont aussi secoués par des crises de confiance envers leurs institutions politiques.

Dans chaque cas, les désirs de la majorité sont opposés à la volonté d’une minorité forte, fortunée et efficace, ce qui contribue à remettre en question la légitimé du système de gouvernance. Au fond, ces pays bafouent le qualificatif « démocratique » apposé à leur régime politique, c.-à-d. la majorité des citoyens exerce le pouvoir politique par le biais de la représentation élue.  

Au contraire, le système électoral britannique ne vise pas à faire respecter la volonté populaire aux élections puisqu’il transfert le pouvoir de la majorité à une oligarchie menée par des politiciens de carrière.

Cette situation autorise implicitement le premier ministre du Québec de refuser carrément de tenir une enquête publique sur les liens du domaine de la construction, le financement des partis politiques et le crime organisé.

La réponse appropriée de la part de la population québécoise est de faire ce que la classe politique a refusé de faire depuis le départ de René Levesque, soit la démocratisation des institutions politiques.  En effet, le monde est devenu trop complexe pour qu’une société soit dirigée par seulement « deux mains sur le volant », et comme nous pouvons le constater, le processus qui nous a mené là est truffé de corruption, collusion et copinage.

L’opportunité qui se présente aux Québécois découle du fait que notre système électoral est complètement en panne.  Insatisfait des efforts de notre Directeur général des élections du Québec (DGÉQ), Marcel Blanchet, de redessiner une carte électorale plausible et juste, le premier ministre Jean Charest a décidé de suspendre les pouvoirs du DGÉQ.  Par conséquent, le Québec n’a pas un système électoral en vigueur qui respecte ses lois propres.

Au début de l’année prochaine, les membres de l’Assemblée nationale devront trancher sur une façon de sortir de l’impasse quant à la carte électorale, rendue caduque à cause des changements démographiques. Au lieu de privilégier la continuité avec notre passé, en instaurant un système politique qui est conçu pour contourner la volonté populaire, le temps est arrivé pour le Québec d’être en rupture avec son passé colonial, et ce système qui est un vestige de l’Empire britannique.

Les Québécois doivent exiger que leurs politiciens instaurent un système électoral démocratique. Il faut commencer à la base de notre société et ses institutions politiques pour construire une société où chaque personne est égale devant la loi et ses applications.  Après tout, c’est le Québec qui a donné au Canada ses lois au niveau des limites des dons aux partis politiques afin de baisser influence indue de l’argent au processus électoral.

Le temps est propice pour que le Québec fasse quelque chose d’extraordinaire en devenant le premier état en Amérique du Nord à choisir la démocratie réelle et vivante comme principe prépondérant quant à son organisation et fonctionnement.       

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

That's What You Don't Get Mr. Charest: We Know that We Don't Live in a Democracy

Faced with the unprecedented appearance of an on-line petition that demands his resignation as Premier of Quebec, which has attracted more than 100,000 signatures in less than 48 hours, Jean Charest tried to minimize the turn of events by saying that we live in a democracy and that it is normal for people to disagree.

The guy just doesn't get it. He thinks that because he won an election that uses a medieval electoral system that allows him to form a majority government with the support of less than 25% of the electorate that this gives him the divine right to rule with democratic legitimacy to boot.

In reality, the vast majority of the population wants a public inquiry into the construction industry and its ties to organized crime and the finances of Quebec's political parties. Charest is steadfast in his refusal. He tells us that we should content ourselves with a police investigation, and we've had enough.

The petition puts it on the line. Respect the desire of the majority and give us what we want or find yourself another job.

What is in play is the nature of our political institutions. The question is clear. Do we live in a democracy where the majority hold and exercise political power or are we governed by an oligarchy headed by a professional politician? In this instance, the dispute concerns the basic distribution of power in a society: who governs on whose behalf.

In his efforts to frame this dispute within a democratic framework, Charest engages in the big lie. He tries to pass off the present form of governance as being democratic. In fact, it is the desire of the people for democratic rule that brings them into conflict with the oligarchy. Something will have to give. It will be interesting to see how this fundamental clash of power will be resolved.

In the meantime, I invite you to become acquainted with the thoughts of John Dunn, one of the world's leading democratic theorists.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Democracy groups take aim at Canada’s electoral system

Reprinted from the Toronto Star.

November 13, 2010

Joanna Smith

OTTAWA—Democracy groups who have long complained about the way Canada unfairly favours the major political parties now hope that reviving a court challenge will force — or shame — governments into overhauling the electoral system.

“Our voting system creates a large risk of the most anti-democratic of all outcomes, which is a majority government that got the minority of public votes,” said Green Leader Elizabeth May. May was granted the right to intervene in a case before the Quebec Court of Appeal that argues the current electoral system in that province violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The voting system used to elect representatives at all levels of government nationwide is known as “first past the post,” which means that whoever receives the highest number of votes in a particular riding wins the seat and all other ballots cast for other candidates are essentially discounted.

Given that it is the party with the highest number of seats — not the largest share of the popular vote — that forms the government, this winner-takes-all approach to electing individual legislators is often criticized for overrepresenting established or regional parties at the expense of smaller ones.

That leads to results like the Green party winning no seats in the last federal election despite having 937,613 votes, whereas the Bloc Québécois got 49 seats with 1.4 million votes.

A Quebec group called the Association pour la revendication des droits démocratiques took the complaint a big step further by arguing before the provincial Superior Court that first-past-the-post violates the constitutional rights of those who cast their votes for the losing candidates because they are not reflected in the final results.

The Charter of Rights – both the Canadian and the one for Quebec – guarantees everyone of age the right to vote, but the plaintiffs argued that first-past-the-post violates those rights by rendering so many votes meaningless.

The plaintiffs asked the court to declare the system unconstitutional and then give the Quebec government some time to develop some unspecified new way to vote that would better provide citizens with proportional representation.

The Superior Court judge rejected the request to rule on the electoral system in 2009, arguing Charter rights had not been violated and, in any case, the question was essentially political.

The provincial appeals court has agreed to hear arguments in February.

Those involved believe a favourable ruling would pave the way to overhauling the system, but acknowledge it would be only the first step.

“The application does not ask the court to tell the government what to do,” said John Deverell, a member of the national council at Fair Vote Canada, which has also been granted intervener status in the case. “It asks the court to tell the government it can’t keep doing what it’s doing now.”

May believes it would then be best for the government to hold public consultations, such as the Royal Commission that New Zealand held on its road to proportional representation, and then perhaps put the question to voters in a referendum.

Constitutional scholar Peter Russell agrees with that approach, saying that more than a court ruling would be needed to bring legitimacy to a new system.

“I don’t think the court should actually fix it and mandate a new electoral system,” said Russell, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. “I really think that has to be done politically, but what a court could do is provide a kind of wake-up call decision to say that the guarantee that every citizen has the right to vote in federal and provincial elections is greatly diminished when so many citizens’ votes count for so very little.”

Monday, November 8, 2010

The Dream Team Is Now in Place

Today was a great day. By granting intervener status to Elizabeth May and Fair Vote Canada, the judge has given Peter Rosenthal the opportunity to present his written arguments on behalf of the two parties. Moreover, Peter will also have the opportunity to address his oral arguments to the panel of three judges that will hear our appeal.

With Julius Grey representing us, we have someone who obtained a landmark decision from the Supreme Court in an important democratic rights case (Libman). Likewise, Peter obtained a game changing decision from the same court that has become the foundation of our case (Figueroa). It would be difficult to imagine a more competent legal team to argue what could be a historic case.

Previously, electoral system experts Denis Pilon and Henry Milner gave expert witness testimony that clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of the first-past-the-post (FPTP)system. Add to that, the expert testimony of mathematician Stephane Rouillon who showed how from an objective measurement framework, Quebec's use of FPTP has led to some of the worst distortions of the popular vote in the developed world.

Finally, the manner in which the political context has changed over the last two years, a scandal concerning political partisanship in the nomination of judges and the Premier's suspension of the powers of Quebec's Director General of Elections, gives us an additional moral force in presenting our motion to have the system that allows for such abuse of political power to be declared unconstitutional.

If this is case is winnable, and there is just one way to find out, we now have everything in place to obtain a favorable decision.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Quebec's Smaller Parties Unite to Oppose the Despot

An improbable coalition came together in Quebec's National Assembly to oppose the adoption of the legislature introduced by the Quebec Liberals that would suspend the powers of the Director General of Elections. Members of the right of center Democratic Action Party of Quebec joined with the single deputy from the left wing Solidarity Quebec and two independents to denounce the actions of the Charest government and to demand that a proportional voting system be adopted as had been promised by the Liberals.

As could be expected, the Minister responsible for the file played to the plight of the voters in the outlying regions and accused the coalition of committing treason towards these regions. Extremely harsh words but we need to remember that there is a by-election at the end of the month in one of the ridings that is set to disappear from the electoral map proposed by the Director General of Elections.

What will be interesting to see is how the opposition party, the Parti Quebecois, will react. They have a good chance to win the seat that is now being contested. However, it was Rene Levesque, the spiritual founder of the party, that brought forward the legislation to create the institution of the Director General of Elections in order to put to an end the practice of political parties gerrymandering the electoral map. To support the Liberals motion would be, in effect, a rebuke of the Levesque heritage.

It remains to be seen if the legislation will be adopted, and if so will it be simply a majority vote with support from only the Liberals. In this case, considering that the Liberals owe their majority government to the systemic discrimination inherent to the first-past-the-post voting method. -- in reality, they have the support of less than one of four eligible voters -- the suspension of the Director General of Election's powers is a jest fitting a banana republic.

In any case, this is a very interesting political context that has developed as we head to the Quebec Appeal Court to ask that the present voting system be declared null and void.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Charest Holds Quebec's Regional Voters Hostage

The primary reason to get rid of the first-past-the-post voting system is that it is fundamentally unfair. Only the votes that give the winning candidate the number of votes necessary to edge past his or her nearest rival are significant with regard to representation. All other votes, including the votes cast for the winning candidate over and above what is required to declare victory, have no impact whatsoever on the composition of the legislature. As a result, most of the votes are wasted.

Even a child can understand that there is something fundamentally unfair with an electoral process that denies effective representation to the majority of voters by allowing the winner of the electoral contest to take the seat with less than 50% of the vote. How is it that someone can claim victory when the majority of electors voted against his or her candidacy?

Multiply this method across a large number of electoral districts and some serious distortions of the popular vote will occur: a party with less than 50% of the popular vote gets more 50% of the seats and forms a majority government, other parties receive less seats than their share of the popular vote warrants, smaller parties get no seats, and occasionally the party that came in second with regard to the popular vote goes on to form a majority government.

Notwithstanding this argument, there is a second reason to change the voting system here in Quebec. In short, the changing distribution of the population in Quebec -- there is a exodus from the outlying regions to the urban sprawl around Montreal -- means that to maintain the same number of ridings in the periphery without adding a significant number of seats to the electoral map will violate the principle of the equality of votes. In other words, the weight of a vote cast in a large sparsely populated riding can be two or three times the weight of a vote cast in an urban riding.

This dilemma can be avoided entirely by abandoning the exclusive use of single member districts. Once multimember districts are introduced those living in regions where the population is in decline can be compensated by having their votes used in electing representatives from a large multimember district. This is the case in the proposed mixed member model for Quebec that reduces the number of single member districts from 125 to 75 and uses the remaining 50 seats form a single multimember district in which all the votes cast in the province will be used to distribute the seats proportionally amongst the political parties.

This is a simple and elegant solution to the problem; however, there is a catch. Majority governments will become much more rare and, as a result, the quid pro quo between a political party and its financial contributors will be difficult to maintain. Simply put, without the ability of making good on promised interventions into the market, political parties will be less apt to attract donations from the business sector. For political parties that have a considerable advantage because they can outspend their opponents during electoral campaigns, this is not an attractive scenario. So, as is the case with the Quebec Liberal Party, the use of multimember districts must be avoided at all costs.

In fact, what Jean Charest is doing in Quebec is to play off the plight of those living in the outlying regions against the democratic principle of voter parity. For instance, given the constitutional limits with regard to undue dilution of the vote (the number of voters in a riding shall be no more, or no less than a 25% deviation from the provincial average unless there are exceptional circumstances), Quebec's Director General of Elections (DGE) made the reasonable choice by transferring three ridings away from the less populated regions and placed them where the population warrants. However, Charest is trying to pass himself off as the protector of the regions when unilaterally suspending Quebec's electoral laws and throwing out the DGE's proposed electoral map without having obtained the approbation of the legislature.

He hinted that when he finally introduces a new law that the number of seats would be increased, but the public has yet to be told that for those ridings in the outlying regions to remain, the average number of electors per riding must drop considerably so that the contested ridings remain within the 25% deviation limit. To do so, it will be necessary to add 26 additional ridings to the existing 125 seats for the redrawing of the electoral map at hand, with more seats to be added to the electoral map in the future as the demographic trends in Quebec continue.

Essentially, Charest is prepared to go through with this ill advised process so that he can save the first-past-the-past method and preserve the quid pro quo relationship with Quebec's business sector. As far as the well known discriminatory practices inherent to the system, Charest is more than prepared to let them continue as long as he can cling to power.

What we need in Quebec is a not so quiet revolution or an enlightened decision from the Courts to have the first-past-the-post method declared null and void.