Defending Democracy in Canada

If we don't take steps to defend democracy in Canada we may face a huge struggle to salvage it in the future.   There's a price to be paid for inaction.

Look at the United States of America for example.   Democracy there has been supplanted by plutocracy.   Democratic power has been "captured" by corporatism and harnessed into the service of the oligarchs, the richest of the rich.   This did not happen overnight.  It was set in motion three decades ago and has progressed ever since.  In its wake America's middle class has been dismembered and vast wealth has been transferred out of blue and white collar working Americans' pockets into the offshore accounts of the richest of the rich.

Many of those who thirty years ago would have been securely middle class have now fallen into or stand at the brink of poverty.  They comprise a new class, the "precariat," now stripped of their last vestiges of economic and political power.  Read the remarks made by then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan here.  All of this has been aided and abetted by a neo-confederate Supreme Court.

As CitiBank proclaimed in 2005, the world has been restructured, divided into two camps - the Plutonomy, and the rest.

Inequality - of income, wealth and opportunity - has now reached truly alarming levels within the U.S., the harbinger of an emergent new state of economic and political feudalism.   Social mobility in the United States has fallen below that of old European states.

As goes America, so goes Canada - eventually.  The American people did not defend their democracy.   They enabled it to be stolen from them.  Their road back will probably require some sort of unrest, uprising or possibly even revolt.   Those who have made off with working class America's economic and political powers, their wealth, will not be handing it back without a fight. 

We have an opportunity to learn from their blunders, to carve a path that restores and defends democracy in Canada.   There are those within our political parties, particularly the Conservatives and Liberals, who would see the American condition visited on Canadians.   That much was driven home when Iggy hosted his "Thinker's Conference" that was heavily dominated by CEOs and management consultants.  FinMin Flaherty holds a retreat for these same types every summer.

If we are going to stop this we have to reinstate progressivism, something today's Liberal Party has treated like a disease.  If that means we have to ditch the Liberal Party, even with the anything-but-progressive Trudeau the Lesser at the helm, fine.

The road to restoring progressivism in Canada is straightforward and marked with signposts along the way.   You'll know a progressive leader when you see one.   They're that easy to spot.  A progressive leader will have policies designed to bolster Canadian democracy, to rebuild it.

A progressive leader will make a priority of dismantling Canada's corporate media cartel, a powerful anti-democratic force.   Democracy, to flourish, depends on the broadest-possible ownership of our media outlets to afford the Canadian public access to the broadest possible range of information and views.   From that you encourage an informed electorate capable of understanding issues, weighing options and forming meaningful opinions.  First and foremost, mandated divestiture of mass-media concentration.  Better we have one hundred, independent outlets than three hundred all repeating the same thing.

Second, a progressive leader will move to redress Canada's own creeping inequality problems.  As Stiglitz demonstrates in The Price of Inequality, governments, not the markets, are the principle forces driving inequality.   Governments, therefore, must redress what they have done.   Canada must not be allowed to become the next plutocracy.

Tax policy, subsidies and the wrongful provision of natural capital free of charge must be addressed.   And from those reforms, funds must be invested in restoring equality of opportunity through improvements in health care, education and the social safety net.

Third, a progressive leader will slowly rebuild public support for the role of posterity as a factor in government planning and policy.  Our grandparents built a wonderful country for us.  It is our duty, in turn, to leave the best possible country for our grandchildren.  When we make decisions we have to start asking how they will impact the public thirty or forty years from now.  We have to find a balance between our interests, comforts and wants and their needs down the road.

These are three key factors I need in a leader of a party I can support.   This is the very sort of leader we must find.