1. Our Canadian Westminster system.
2. Poor Israel doesn't have a sane voting system. Israel has proportional representation. With hard irony, Israel mirrors Germany of the 1930s. Historians will have a serious point to make when they argue proportional representation bears responsibility for Israel's too incendiary response to the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023. Israel is a global pariah. For now.
3. How an old liberal democracy like Canada has coped with tyrannies.
3A. Contemporary Canadian Tyrannies.
4. Federations are fragile constructions (alliances).
5. Learning to love the Senate, and senators (and Canada).
1. Our system.
If you see something you like about Canada in Bill Browder’s Freezing Order, you might want to applaud the way Canada passed the Magnitsky Act.
(The Magnitsky Act allows Canada to sanction foreign nationals “responsible for gross violations of internationally recognized human rights and to make related amendments to the Special Economic Measures Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.”)
From Bill Browder’s Freezing Order: “. . . on October 4 [2017] The Canadian House of Commons voted 277 – 0 to pass their own version of the Magnitsky Act. It passed the Canadian Senate unanimously on October 17, and was signed into law the next day” (265).
The Senate voted unanimously in support of this bill.
So? Does anyone care?
What does the Senate mean to Canadians?
What does the Senate do for Canadians?
The Westminster system, Canadian style, has two chambers – and neither is terribly lordly.
In Freezing Order Browder refers to them: the House of Commons and the Senate. Both houses passed the Magnitsky bill into law. The elected and appointed houses agreed. Unanimously. Their agreement is reassuring, because, really, the cultures of the two chambers couldn’t be more unalike.
Canadians and Canadian pundits relentlessly focus on the sayings and doings of politicians in the House of Commons. And from time to time because we’re tightwads and often goaded to outrage by the Globe and Mail, we cast a suspicious, miserly eye on the expenses of the Governor General. In any event, we all know the House of Commons is a raucous place. Democracy is messy. The electorate and editorials opine furiously and sometime unhappily on parliamentary (HoC) raucousness.
What counteracts raucousness? Sobriety, of course.
In our upper chamber, Canadians have sobriety. We have given our appointed senators a quiet space for sober second thoughts.
Who among us wouldn’t love such a space? If you’re inclined to raucousness, wouldn't you like a designated "chamber" where you might think your good thoughts, and think them in your soberest moments. (Was the sober reference a dig at John MacDonald?) Anyway, as to the issue: Canadians are fortunate. Our politicians have reserved a special room for thought – a place where appointed mavens consider a bill’s ramifications and possible unfairnesses. If senators deem recalibration is necessary, they will throw shade at the House, maybe even try to kill a bill.
You don’t like the Senate of Canada. Like John Lennon, you imagine perfect. C’mon. This time the Stones have it. You get what you need.
2. Poor Israel doesn't have our FPTP voting system. Israel has proportional representation. Contemprary Israel mirrors Germany of the 1930s.
Recently, some voters in some liberal democratic countries are leaning so far to the right, they’re smothering democratic inclusion – and liberalism (individual human rights).
Take unitary Israel, for instance. After a passel of elections (five in four years), Israel has settled on a right-wing coalition. Power to the far right. Is that really what most Israeli voters want? Power to the far right?
Stop right there. You don’t understand. What the majority of the country wants is immaterial. Under Israel's proportional representative political system, extreme nationalism is what enough Israeli voters want.
In 2022, Israeli voters legitimized the tyranny of the minority. Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-centrist Likud party formed a ruling coalition with Itamar Ben-Gvir’s extreme nationalist Otzma Yehudit party. To be prosaic: Israeli centrists and Arabs were likely evacuating – in every sense of the word. Suffrage, human rights, civil rights, justice, and personal economies hung/hang in the balance.
You may know, as I do, more than a few Canadian Jews who remain unmoved by the Israeli coalition and Israel’s contemporary political landscape, even though it echoes pre-World War 2 Germany, whereby an elected but raging, ragtag, nationalist element of the German population held the key to power.
Volumes have been written about 1930s Germany. For late-bloomers, of which I’m one, Babylon Berlin is the series to watch. The setting is Germany, at the end of Weimar. The democratic republic has many small voting blocs (sub-national, proportional culture clubs) – e.g., communists, opportunist manufacturers, crime syndicates, Kaiser-lovers, and Nazi scapegoaters. The German blocs are unyielding, power-hungry, and usually nativist; alliances among them are tenuous, if alliances exist at all. You watch the series develop and shudder at the foreshadowing. You know it’s going to be bad. For Jews and homosexuals and Sally Bowles, bad doesn't even begin to cover it.
When the people have fears for their safety, proportional representation throws not just Israel but also most of Europe into turmoil. The rise of the AFD hard right, (growing ever more powerful), threatens German liberal democracy, reminiscent of fascism of the1930s. President Emmanuel Macron called a snap parliamentary election (Sun, Jun 30–Sun, Jul 7, 2024); Macron challenges voters to stand with centrists against the hard right and the hard left. Soon, we shall see what kind of a country France is. Most obviously in turmoil, however, is Israel. Israel's current governing mess (even as it fights the Middle-East war) is simply confounding.
Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir stand as a totem of danger. Proportional representation always teeters on the dangerous. For small-l liberals, the wrong proportion always seems to have too much say. The left wants prop rep but inevitably it's the right that benefits.
In Canada, the dominant party of the right and the dominant party of the left take careful aim at the dominant centrists –– so, with Greens, Communists, and various whotnots added to the electoral mix, we already have an unoffical type of proportional representation.
To note: At times, the rhetoric of the left and right chimes together, making the left's Jagmeet Singh sound very often like the right's Pierre Poilievre. Coalitions are not without surprises. If Erin O'Toole had led his party to a minority government in the last federal election (2021), one would not have been surprised to see Singh make an agreement with O'Toole and the CPC, similar to the agreement Singh has made with Trudeau and the LPC.
Netflix photo, Babylon Berlin
3. How our old liberal democracy Canada has coped with major and minor tyrannies.
After Upper and Lower Canada turned into the United Province of Canada, two electoral issues proved contentious. The first issue, “responsible government,” positing that the cabinet is responsible to the elected assembly and not a British appointed lieutenant governor, ruffled the feathers of the Château Clique and the Family Compact, who clung to power.
The second issue lathered up the people. The second issue was about voting. How was the united province of Canada going to determine the ruling culture? Proportional representation? Equal votes for each side, French and English? That clearly wouldn’t work. Paralysis would be certain. Coalitions are especially fragile when each party wants to achieve different goals, and achive them via different languages, different religions.
The Canadian cry, from different corners at different times, was for majority rule, or representation by population – rep by pop. Critical mass was the issue. In the earliest days, the French-speaking population was dominant. The French wanted rep by pop. Then the English-speaking population grew. And the English wanted rep by pop.
Majority rule in a democracy works for you if your leaders are in charge of the hegemony (dominant culture club). If your leaders aren’t setting the manners of the critical mass, majority rule has pretty obvious drawbacks. Not long ago, an atheist among a Christian majority could not speak freely. In nineteenth-century Canada, the epithet heathen or pagan or savage was the height of insult – the epithet reflected the classic Christian European condescension toward Indigenous culture clubs, whose populations European diseases had decimated. First Nations, Inuit and Métis did not have the political clout to complain. Majority colonial rule was that tyrannical.
But to the settlers, after corrupt tinpot English governance, majority rule seemed the way to go. Writ large, the whole rep by pop controversy,1841 – 1867, laid the ground for another deal, which, on paper, was designed to please at least two significant masses of stakeholders.
In1867 the English got a province (jurisdiction) within a nation. The French got the same. Women got ignored. First Nations, in disarray, got shafted. But out of the confusion, and under the auspices of Queen Victoria, three British North American provinces turned themselves into a federation with responsible government and majority rule under the British North America Act. Welcome, the Dominion of Canada. The Centre for Constitutional Studies Centre d’etudes constitutionelles at the University of Alberta has an excellent explanatory site, which includes definitions for key terms. In Canada voters elect seats. The leader of the party with the most seats is the prime minister – the tyranny of the majority. . . .Stay tuned for the rest of the story.
3A. Voting against tyranny
Some Anglophone dissenters argue we in Canada have tyranny of the minority – the Francophone minority has too much to say in national affairs.
But of course the Anglo tune about a minority culture club doesn’t play well everywhere. French-speaking communities, settling the northern part of the continent long before the Anglo-Americans arrived, explode at the effrontery. Many expletives point to the perfidy of les mauvais anglais and their critical mass of national voters.
That’s not all. As dependents (colonies) of the East, the West joined the Canadian federation (1905); Alberta and Saskatchewan didn’t gain full provincial status until 1929-1930. The prairies have always complained about having to bow to the tyranny of the much more populous East.
In its turn, central Canada can’t believe a haystack minority out West has enough resources to make a financial dent in the national scene. (The Maritimes are generally solid, thoughtful, university-loving folk, and no one quite understands British Columbia, but BC doesn’t care.)
Drilling further into tyrannies – provincial this time –, Alberta and Saskatchewan’s urban centres (where the predominant number of voters live) claim to be relentlessly blindsided by the too numerous legislative seats of the rural minority population. Rural MLAs punch above their mass. Of the genus lunkhead, Danielle Smith calls herself a “Wild-Rose Conservative.” Many Albertans – especially rural voters – will follow her lead simply to avoid voting for any urban governance that smacks of socialism. (Canadian socialism comes in the form of the taxpayers’ collective hand, reaching out to give temporary aid to those who need it. For instance, farmers get agricultural subsidies, but I do digress.)
First Nations, Inuit and Métis are fed up with settlers and their two-founding-nations’ claptrap.
Yet they too have their own tyrannies to sort out. Should Indigenous communities have elected or inherited chiefs? Citizens of Saskatchewan's Thunderchild Nation, for instance, believe chiefs should be elected. When it comes to the final governing authority, the tyranny of the elected versus the tyranny of the traditional is not an easy problem for Indigenous culture clubs to sort out, especially under the watchful eye of a national government.
In a whisk, a Martian observer fixed on Canada can see this: every single citizen, coast to coast to coast, and depending on where they live, will face off at election time with some sort of tyranny, either of the majority or the minority. Tyrannies don't get along well enough for us to count on them to form either the expected or the stable coalition governments.
4. Federations are fragile constructions (alliances).
Full disclosure: I often agree with leftie Max Fawcett – just not on electoral reform. Fawcett wants Canada to have offical proportional representation. I hope that never happens. No matter the system, prop rep will be complicated in ways we're not used to. Moreover, a plethora of new “identity” parties/voices could blow this country apart. We already cope with all kinds of tyrannies, be they regional, majority or minority. No matter how a proportional voting system is conceived of, prop rep. will create new voting blocs to tyrannize us. Fracturing Canada into more voting blocs could blow our fragile federation into smithereens.
And, lest we forget, there is the common Canadian manner. Over one-and-a-half centuries, Canadians have been reared to want peace, order and good government. Delightful, polite souls, we’re too frugal to enjoy endless elections, which proportional democracies suffer through. Nor do we warm up to minority governments (you don’t have a majority and so what gives you the right to do . . . whatever it is you want to do). Even diehard left-leaning ideologues don’t like coalitions and agreements with centrists. What part of your platform are you selling off to join in with the other? It's not Gorilla glue that binds togther a federal state. It's wallpaper paste.
Take the European Union. A recent federation. Considering the history of the twentieth century, the EU is a remarkable achievement. And then take Brexit. For English communities like Stoke-on-Trent, cultural/regional differences among federated European states seemed just too much tyranny to bear. The potters voted to leave the EU without so much as a backward glance at the Sorbonne or Stuttgart. The UK got what it wanted (or what the employers of Cambridge Analytica wanted. That’s another story.) And Brexit has turned out to be what many predicted it would be; a bad idea.
Sub-national twenty-first-century culture clubs tend to be nativist and separatist – not always, but often. WEXIT (the Maverick Party's western Canadian separatist movement) is naïve but tantalizing to the disaffected. For Canada, proportional rep would be counterproductive (even more naïve), because WEXITers would gain a legitimate voice in parliament. We have the Bloc Québécois. That's quite enough.
What matters is the general fairness of the game in a federal system.
Boris Johnson, Brexit cartoon, credit: Marian Kamensky
How can Canada mitigate the tyranny of FPTP majority rule without fragmenting the country into pieces? How can we have strong leadership and yet heed the desires and goals of sub-national identities and marginalized persons?
5. Learning to love the Canadian Senate, and senators (and Canada).
The Role of the Senate
Thanks to the “Fathers” of Confederation, Canada has a Senate. Too many of us diss the Senate – dissing everything Canadian is rather a painful cultural habit. We're quite a repressed people. And, as mentioned, frugal. Boy are we frugal. Spending money on “useless” appointed toffs raises our collective hackles. The genius Hannah Arendt can be our guide. Arendt believed the the body politic would not (and should not) put up with useless wealthy people. Highly paid Canadian senators better have a purpose. And a good one.
They do.
If proportional representation and inclusion appeal to you, you ought to value what the Senate does, what it’s supposed to do, and what it can continue to do in levelling the playing field without, one believes, adding more confusion to governance by electing the senators. The country would not benefit from having opposition parties controlling Senate and House. Two relentlessly quarrelling elected bodies, cum US, is a cautionary tale. To have a place for sober second thought, wise guidance, ear-to-the-ground awareness, and policy oversight – well, that seems just about right. There is and always has been modern purpose in an appointed senate. [The Canadian Senate was] “created to counterbalance representation by population in the House of Commons.” These days “the Senate has evolved from defending regional interests to [also] giving voice to underrepresented groups.”
To face the trials of the day, flexible governance goes head-to-head with political stability. Canada wants both: flexibility and stability.
For all its raucousness, the House of Commons gives us stability. The Senate of Canada serves our need for flexibility. Electoral reform in the senate has been moving apace, with changes getting underway, almost stealthily, right under our noses. Evolution of the Senate to reach the state of quiet independence (removing itself from rabid, partisan party politics) has been slow, but recently sweet. In the twenty-first century, newly appointed senators have no noted political affiliation. "All new Senators [2021] were recommended by the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, and chosen using the merit-based process open to all Canadians. This process ensures Senators are independent, reflect Canada’s diversity, and are able to tackle the broad range of challenges and opportunities facing the country." Quite the grand mission. How sobering is that?
What might come next? Of course, I would prefer the committee to appoint a senator for two four-year terms, instead of making a senator retire at age seventy-five, which smacks of ageism. Our current ambassador to the United Nations was born in 1948, and he’s going strong.
Should the Canadian Constitution guarantee one appointed Indigenous senator from each province and territory, adding thirteen new members to the prestigious red chamber, that might be a form of proportional representation one could put one’s back into. The moral rightness of Indigenous inclusion versus the significant expense of adding senators would make for a very Canadian debate.
But, for goodness sakes, let us save ourselves from the likes of Max Fawcett and his view on electoral reform and his advocacy of an official system of proportional representation. We have tyrannies aplenty in this country. The Mona Lisa doesn't need to have paint thrown in her face to make those of us who care, care more about climate change. We don't need eighty-four candidates on a ballot, smashing our norms, to make us feel the love for proportional representation if we already feel it, which I hope we do not. Killing off platform politics in favour of (vague) grievance populism invites anarchy and the eventual dissolution of a cohesive liberal democracy.
Senate oversight of the House (as now it stands) offers Canada a better solution for handling our county's increasing diversity than a smug rebel committee's blowing the current system into fragments.
Let us give our nod of appreciation to the sober Senators who occupy the Red Chamber.
Many European countries frequently have coalition governments due to their proportional representation electoral systems. Canada, even though it's a federation, is better governed.
1. Germany, unitary state, republic: Coalition governments are common, with parties like the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Social Democratic Party (SPD), and Free Democratic Party (FDP) often forming alliances. The most recent coalition includes the SPD, the Greens, and the Free Democrats (FDP). The rise of the hard right (FDP) is a worry. "There has never been a three-party coalition in Germany before. In past decades, Germany has almost always been governed by an alliance of two political parties. Before the handover of power, the government was formed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) from Bavaria – united in the Bundestag as the so-called 'Union' – along with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). However, the outcome of the federal parliamentary elections prevented the formation of a conventional two-party coalition of this kind, giving rise to the new alliance of three parties." Germany is in a bit of a mess. The tri-coaltion government puts Germany close to political paralysis. Germany is an economic powerhouse but, politically, it's a Fisher Price toy. Since February, 2022, Olaf Scholz has acted over cautiously. With WW2 military restrictions in place and a chancellor nervous about facing left-right criticism for overturning them, Germany has been a snail, stuck in the mud, unable to move quickly to give full-throated support for and significant military weaponry to Ukraine.
2. Netherlands, decentralized unitary state, constitutional monarchy: Dutch politics almost always result in coalition governments. Recent coalitions have included combinations of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the Labour Party (PvdA), and the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). THE HAGUE, March, 2024. Netherlands (AP) — Geert Wilders, whose anti-Islam, anti-immigration rhetoric swept him to a stunning victory in the November election, immediately admitted he didn't have the support of his prospective coalition partners to become the next Dutch prime minister. The Netherlands was without a governing coalition for six months. Prop rep at its finest.
3. Italy, unitary republic: Italy frequently has coalition governments due to its fragmented party system. Recent governments have included coalitions between the Five Star Movement (M5S), the Democratic Party (PD), and other smaller parties. Why does Italy have so many governments?
4. Belgium, unitary state, constitutional monarchy: Belgium often has complex coalitions due to its linguistic and regional divisions. Recent coalitions have included parties like the Flemish Christian Democrats (CD&V), the Francophone Socialist Party (PS), and the Flemish Liberals and Democrats (Open VLD). I don't understand Belgium.
5. Sweden, unitary state, constitutional monarchy, unicameral house: Coalition governments are common in Sweden, with parties such as the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and the Centre Party forming recent alliances. Uneasy Sweden.
6. Denmark, unitary state, constitutional monarchy: Denmark also frequently sees coalition governments. Recent coalitions have included the Liberal Party (Venstre), the Conservative People's Party, and the Danish People's Party. Glorious Denmark, unlike its neighbours, keeps the far right at bay.
7. Israel, unitary state, republic. As mentioned.
Conclusion. To a greater or lesser degree, the aforementioned countries demonstrate the fragility of liberal democracies, particularly when strongmen like Putin not only promise the moon to their aggrieved citizens but also troll Europe with miles of disinformation. As herders, humans are always flirting with their powerful leaders. We want our leaders to have the powers of Zeus and Thor. Lightening bolts should strike down our enemies. DC and Marvel make billions from our desire to follow a magical, apotheosized leader.
So, some Europeans and North American Americans can't help themselves: They are attracted to a type of strongman fascism (the strongman will keep our culture clubs "traditional," running on oil and gas, and completely clear of colourful immigrants). The contemporary nativist mood among voters in political systems with proportional representation gongs out a red alert. Unitary states have a much easier time than federal states at achieving workable coalitions and yet Europe is on tenterhooks, worrying about the influence of Putin. Unitary states with proportional representation suffer from the whims of their most extreme and moodiest citizens. Full circle: See Israel.
Canada should take heed, and hold fast.
We want to bind this terrific country together. And as long as there is a Canadian senate, capable of sober second-thought, the kids are all right.
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