Most of the topics we've covered so far have been the concern of government. Now, as citizens, we need to talk about the form of our government.
Conventional wisdom tells us that 'democracy' began in the city states of ancient Greece, notably Athens. It seems they had a wonderful system in which citizens elected their rulers.
But only about 10% of the people in Athens were citizens, and they were all descended from invaders who conquered the original inhabitants about 1100 BC. The 90% of the population who were descended from the original inhabitants were slaves and, in the wonderful 'democracy' of ancient Greece, they had no rights at all.
Through most of history governments have been conquerors who took and held power by force of arms. After a while they were seen as legitimate and, in the past few hundred years, we have seen some progress toward real democracy.
Canada's government is an 1867 model, based on the British Westminster system which was state-of-the-art 150 years ago but is now generally considered to be obsolete.
We call it democracy because we elect our leaders but, because we use an obsolete system, we are still, often, ruled by minorities.
When governments took power by conquest the winners didn't have to listen to the losers. If they won the war they ruled, with no questions asked.
Our electoral system is based on the same idea, because we are one of relatively few countries in the modern world that still choose governments with 'first-past-the-post' or, as I call them, 'winner-take-all' elections.
This is a simplistic system in which the candidate who gets the most votes wins the seat and the party that wins the most seats controls the government. It sounds fair but, because there are more than two candidates in most ridings, we are frequently ruled by a party that more than half the country voted against.
Suppose we have an election with parties A, B and C. In one riding candidates for parties A and B each get 33% of the vote and party C's candidate gets 34%. He gets the seat, even though nearly two-thirds of his constituents voted against him.
If this happens in 34% of the ridings in the country, party C will form the government. If it happens in 51% of the ridings, party C will have a majority, and absolute power.
In 1980 the Liberal party won an absolute majority in Parliament with about 48% of the popular vote. In 1984 the PC's won an even bigger majority with just half the vote and in 1988 they held power with just 43% of the vote. In 1993 the Liberals got a majority with just over 41% of the vote and in 1997 they held it with 38% of the vote. In 2000 the Liberals got a majority with 40.8% of the vote and in 2004 they held power with 36.7% of the vote.
When we recall that Canada has one of the lowest voting participation rates in the world, the numbers are even more shocking. In 1997, for example, just 67% of qualified voters actually cast a ballot so the 37% vote that gave the Liberals power actually represented only about one-quarter of qualified voters.
One of the most common reasons people give for not voting is that they don't think their vote means anything. In too many cases, they are right.
Larry Gordon, executive director of Fair Vote Canada, an organization that asks for a new look at Canada's election laws, writes of what he calls a "phony majority" in which a minority of voters achieve majority power. Between 1980 and 2003, he says, Canadians held 64 provincial elections and in 37 of them -- nearly 60% of the total -- majority governments were elected by a minority of voters.[1]
Gordon writes that the Ontario provincial election of October 2003 elected one Liberal MPP for each 29,028 Liberal votes, one Conservative MPP for each 64,966 Conservative votes and one NDP MPP for each 94,390 NDP votes. The 126,651 people who voted Green did not elect one MPP between them.[2]
But even if most of the country voted against it, a government with a majority can do more or less at it pleases. Because power is concentrated in the cabinet and the Prime Minister chooses the cabinet, a Canadian Prime Minister with a majority has virtually absolute power.
In theory the Canadian Parliament is constrained by the Senate but, as Prime Minister Brian Mulroney proved in 1990, that is not necessarily so. When the Senate tried to block his new Goods and Services Tax, Mulroney appointed eight new senators to give him a majority. This is democracy?
Supporters of the winner-take-all system argue that it gives us strong governments, able to make real changes. Unfortunately, it also creates ideal conditions for the development of what psychologist Irving Janis called "groupthink."
This is the tendency for people in homogeneous and cohesive groups to agree with one another, especially when under pressure. Under some conditions such groups may consider themselves infallible, ignore the advice of experts and tend toward extreme decisions.
In a ground-breaking book Janis argued that groupthink played a major factor in Britain's attempt to appease Hitler before World War II, in the American failure to prepare for an attack on Pearl Harbor, in the invasion of North Korea that led to the Chinese entry into the Korean War, in the Vietnam war and in the American-backed attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.[3]
After the book was published Janis cited groupthink as a probable factor in the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and, since Janis died in 1990, others have cited groupthink as a factor in the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003. We might also consider it a factor in the Russian Communist Party's decision to destroy the peasants of the Ukraine by taking their seed grain -- thus causing the famine of 1931-2 in which seven and a half million people died -- in the Nazis' attempt to kill all the Jews in Europe and the Israeli war against Palestinians.
Groupthink is also suspect in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and in the fact that many Americans still support a war that most of the world sees as unjustified aggression and that appears likely to lead to decades of war and terrorism.
The winner-take-all system also makes it possible for a government to retain power by "gerrymandering" electoral districts -- redrawing boundaries to favor the party in power. If a geographical district is known to include a large number of supporters, for example, boundaries might be redrawn to give the ruling party a slight majority in several districts rather than a large majority in one.[4]
The winner-take-all system has obvious problems but most North Americans don't know about the alternatives -- the variety of "proportional representation" systems that have been adopted by dozens of countries including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Surinam, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Venezuela.
There are several different types of proportional representation systems but they are all intended to produce a government which represents the actual vote. If one party gets 37% of the vote, for example, that party would get 37% of the seats in Parliament.
In the simplest type of proportional representation election each party offers a list of candidates and, for example, if it wins 37 seats the first 37 people on the list get them. This works in Holland, where the whole country is treated as one riding. It would not work in Canada because each geographical region wants its own representative, but we could use a variation. Instead of 295 ridings across the country, for example, we could have only 60 and each one could send five members -- elected by a proportional system -- to parliament.
In the federal election of 1997 the Liberal party got 38% of the vote, Reform and Progressive Conservatives got 19% each and the Bloc Quebecois and New Democrats got 11% each.
With only 38% of the vote the liberals won 155 seats -- an absolute majority in the 301-seat house -- and they held absolute power. The 61.6% of Canadians who had voted against them were, for practical purposes, not represented in the government.
But suppose we had a simple form of proportional representation, with 60 ridings and five representatives for each of them. In such a system the same vote might have elected two liberals, one Reform and one Progressive Conservative in each riding, and the fifth seat would be won by either a New Democrat or the Bloc Quebecois. The riding would be much larger -- on average five times the size of existing ridings -- but most voters would have a member to represent their point of view. The Liberals would still form the government but they would be a minority, and would have to respect the views of others.[5]
Some politicians say that a minority government is weak but it is also democratic. If politicians were to work for the good of the country, rather than for the benefit of their own party and supporters, a minority government could work as well as a majority. Most politicians' real objection to a minority government is that it does not allow them to rape the country for the benefit of their party and their friends.
Liberals and Conservatives like the winner-take-all system because it virtually guarantees that one or the other party will hold power. When one holds power the other may promise to bring in proportional representation if we elect it, but does anyone trust a politician's promise?
It's going to be a long and hard fight to get any change but if we keep up the pressure, and if we elect enough candidates from splinter parties, we may be able to force the issue.
Then we will be able to choose one or another form of proportional representation and, if we demand that several parties be represented in the cabinet, we will have some protection against groupthink.
We might also consider a reverse poll tax on people who don't vote. In a democracy we could argue that it is a citizen's duty to vote, but it would not be practical to withdraw citizenship from people who don't vote. It would be practical offer a tax credit to people who do vote.
And while we're reforming our electoral system we need to consider redistribution, to give urban areas equal representation with rural areas. Because the population of urban areas is increasing and the population of rural areas decreasing, a single vote in a rural area may carry two or three times the weight of a vote in an urban area.
REPUBLIC vs MONARCHY
Whenever we talk about a change in the government someone suggests that we become a republic. That's especially popular among the kind of politicians who don't want anyone looking over their shoulders while they rob and betray us.
But there is a lot to be said for a monarchy and some of the wealthiest, best-developed and most democratic countries in the world -- including Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium as well as the UK -- retain it. Spain tried a republic but when dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975 the Spanish government invited the grandson of King Alfonso XIII -- who had been exiled in 1931 and who died ten years later -- to assume the throne as King Juan Carlos I. In 1978 a new constitution restored the monarchy.
In days of yore a monarch ruled but in the modern world he or she is a referee who keeps the politicians in line and focussed on their jobs. Politicians may not like this, but it's good for the country.
In some republics the president acts as a monarch while the Prime Minister rules, but a president is not a king. The advantage of a hereditary monarch is that he or she has been raised in the job, spends a lifetime training for it, has no politics, holds office for life and has no promotion to hope for.
A president, on the other hand, has to campaign for his job. When he gets it he will have political and possibly monetary debts to pay and, because he does not keep the job for life, he has to plan for his retirement.
Historians tell us that the Roman governor of a subject nation had to steal three fortunes while in office. He would need one to pay the people who got him the job, one to retire on and the third to bribe the judges who would try him for stealing the first two.
Aristotle said "when money has been spent to get office the purchaser may naturally be expected to fall into the habit of trying to make a profit on the transaction."[6]
A monarch has no need to steal and while some monarchs may be expensive, the average constitutional monarch is probably cheaper than the average president of a comparable country. When Queen Elizabeth travels she takes most of the first-class section of a commercial flight but President Bush has two custom-made 747's.[7]
Because a monarch has no politics the cost of security is relatively low. The assassin who kills a president may destroy a government but an attack on a constitutional monarch is an attack on the country, rather than the government of the day, and would cause anger but not political change. Four American presidents have been assassinated since the inauguration of George Washington in 1789, but the last time an English monarch was assassinated was in 1483. Queen Elizabeth II can walk among her people with little fear but President Bush must be surrounded by a small army when he appears in public.
If a president confers an honor or opens a public building that may be seen as a political statement, one way or another. An opponent of the president might refuse to accept an honor from him and a supporter might be honored for partisan reason but when a monarch performs a ceremonial function, there is no political or partisan overtone.
A monarch also provides continuity of government, because the crown has unquestioned access to all government secrets. When the government of a republic changes hands the new government may not know everything the previous government did and, because the previous government does not support the new government, some dealings may be kept secret. The monarch knows the secrets of each government and, if it is in the interests of the nation, he or she may reveal the secrets of a previous government to a sitting government.
The Canadian monarchy lost some of its effectiveness when the crown began to appoint Canadians nominated by the government of the day as Governor General, and it was crippled when former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau "patriated" the constitution.
The words "patriating the constitution," have a fine nationalist ring but in fact the old system, in which the Canadian government could not change the constitution on its own, was close to ideal.
If the government can't change the law freedom is safe, but a government that can change its own laws is not bound by law. We saw that when Brian Mulroney packed the Senate with his supporters to ensure passage of the Goods and Services Tax that most Canadians didn't want. Thanks to Trudeau a prime minister with a majority can now act as a virtual dictator, and we have a political system that could some day be taken over by a real dictator.
We need to restore the monarchy to a useful level of power in Canada. More, the government of the day should not be allowed to name its own Governor General any more than it should be allowed to name its own ethics commissioner -- and for the same reason. I would even support a petition to ask the British parliament -- or perhaps the United Nations or some other international body -- to take custody of our constitution. If a government has custody of its own constitution it can ignore or amend it at will. If the government can change the law we have rule by government, not by law.
CIVIL SERVANTS
The third branch of government is the civil service, which wields power through its control of information and its ability to recommend and administer regulations. In theory the civil service has no governmental power at all, but in fact it has considerable.
And in some ways, a civil servant may be beyond the reach of the law. In its investigation of the AdScam scandal the Gomery Commission was told that most of the civil servants who flouted the law and delivered millions of tax dollars to friends of the Liberal party were not punished or even dismissed. Three civil servants received reprimands for their behavior, but one of them appealed and the reprimand was withdrawn.[8]
Civil servants don't make laws but they do propose regulations, and we are ruled more by regulation than by law. Politicians and civil servants both like regulations because they give civil servants power, and every new regulatory board gives politicians an opportunity to install their friends and supporters in sinecures.
Most of the rest of us don't like regulations because they limit what we can do, and because many regulations cost us money.
The need for regulation is obvious. If there were no regulation of radio broadcasting, for example, radio stations would be impractical because signals on the same frequency would overlap and neither would be useful. Without regulation, traffic on city streets would be hopelessly snarled.
But some kinds of regulation are open to question. The Canadian Wheat Board requires that western farmers sell their wheat to the Board, at the Board's price. Building and zoning bylaws limit the supply of affordable housing and the opportunity to develop new construction techniques.
We have seen how fire regulations serve some retired firemen better than they serve the public and that an attempt to regulate handguns created a nightmare world of armed gangs and gunfights in our cities. In the United States an attempt to ban the sale of liquor created organized crime and changed the FBI from a small and innocuous government office, mostly concerned with commercial fraud, to the large, politically powerful and well-armed force it is today and an attempt to regulate the sale of drugs has created the structure of a police state.
Regulation produced the worker benefits that cripple Canadian industry and World Trade Organization regulations prevent us from protecting Canadian jobs with import restrictions.
It's also a problem that regulations are developed in the never-never land of government service, but they are applied in the real world upon people who work for a living.
In the mid 1980s I wrote several stories for Transpo magazine, published by Transport Canada. One was about the department's plans to mandate front-wheel brakes on big trucks.
The bureaucrat who wanted the regulation had an impressive demonstration set up, with a small ramp and a model of a tractor trailer truck. He showed me that the combination could jack-knife with the tractor's rear wheels locked, but not with the front wheels locked and the rear wheels free to turn.
He said his demonstration proved the trucker's worry that front wheel brakes would cause rigs to jack-knife was unfounded. That was a surprise to me because by that time I had spent about five years talking to truckers and writing about trucks, and no-one had ever told me that front-wheel brakes would make a rig jack-knife.
When I researched the story I spoke to working truck drivers and while some had heard that front-wheel brakes might cause a jack-knife, they were not worried about it. Many Canadian truckers already had front-wheel brakes, but there were a few who did not want them.
They drove in hilly country on roads that were sometimes slippery. They were afraid of front-wheel brakes because if they did not make it to the top of a hill and had to back down, very little brake pressure would make their front wheels lock up and they would lose all steering control. On the other hand, if the hill was so long and so steep that they could not make it up on the first try, it would be deadly dangerous to try to back down without using their brakes.
They could accept front-wheel brakes with a cutout switch, to shut them off if necessary, but the proposed regulation would not allow that. If the brakes were mandated, truckers who disconnected them would invalidate their insurance.
In the USA at the time all new trucks came with front-wheel brakes, but truckers were free to install a cutout switch or disconnect them completely.
I wrote these reservations into my story, but the editor took them out and the regulations were approved. Since then I have seen several trucks that went into a ditch because they could not back down a slippery hill with front-wheel brakes.[9]
The trouble with regulations is that, almost as though by natural law, they tend to increase in power and complexity and restrictiveness. That should be no surprise because regulation is what the civil service does and, when one regulation is written, it's time to start work on another. As regulations become obsolete they may be forgotten but they are seldom repealed.
Years ago the Reader's Digest published an anecdote about a student at Oxford University who discovered an old regulation that required the university to supply him with free beer while he studied for exams. He demanded beer and got it, but the University fined him for not wearing his sword.
Another anecdote describes a review of British Navy regulations during the 1950s, and the decision that it was no longer necessary that British warships carry a saddle for the captain's use when he goes ashore.
We need regulations but we also need common sense. I suggest that we need a government department that would, in effect, be in charge of deregulation. Any citizen would have the right to appeal any regulation to this office, and all serious appeals would be investigated. If the regulation was found to be inappropriate, exemptions could be issued or the regulation itself withdrawn. In addition, this office would review all regulations every five years, and challenge any that appeared questionable. If the challenge was not answered, the regulation would be withdrawn.
HONESTY AND CORRUPTION
When I was young we used to assume that Canadian politicians and civil servants were honest and that corruption was found only in other countries.
But that was a fools' paradise. Until the late 1980s, Canadian tax laws allowed companies to claim bribes to politicians and civil servants as a legitimate business expense and, on Jan 31 of 1986, Revenue Canada actually published a circular to advise them how to handle the paperwork.[10] Amid a storm of public protest the government said the regulations would be changed but I don't know if they were. Either way, if Revenue Canada saw the need for a circular we have to assume that it knew about a lot of bribes, and it's a safe bet that there are still a lot of bribes.
About 30 years ago a small manufacturer told me that he did not deal with the federal government because he could not afford the bribes. Because he was the only Canadian manufacturer of his product and because his American competitors had no representative in Canada, the federal government had to buy direct from the States.
More than 20 years ago the American-born president of a Canadian 'high-tech' startup told me, with some bitterness, that he had discovered that his company was a fraud. It seems that a Canadian politician had a brother who was an investment banker in New York. It had been arranged for the brother to get a $30 million grant to start new businesses, but just a few million had been spent and the businesses were now being wound down. The man who told me this was bitter because he had given up a good job in the States to become president of a company that, he now knew, was never intended to succeed.[11]
When three of the four tires on my car were found to be defective I wondered why there was no recall. Later, a friend told me that one particular employee of Canada Transport has very expensive tastes, and that companies that help him indulge those tastes don't have to have recalls.
As I write this the City of Toronto is investigating a multi-million-dollar scandal involving the rental of computers and another involving the municipal electrical utility, the federal government is investigating the three hundred million dollar "AdScam" scandal and Saskatchewan is investigating the disappearance of at least a million dollars in welfare funds.[12]
It's obvious that Canadian politicians and civil servants are not all honest and, if we don't recognize that, we give them free licence to rob us.
The honesty of politicians and civil servants is hard to guarantee but we could start with a law that, as a condition of employment, any civil servant or politician is subject to a random forensic audit while working for the government and for ten years afterward. As protection against the 'revolving door' system that makes some regulators too friendly with the industries they are supposed to regulate, no politician or civil servant would be allowed to accept a job in or connected to an industry he has helped regulate until at least ten years after he leaves public service. At the very least, anyone who does so should forfeit all pension rights.
That would be a serious restriction of their personal freedom but, on the other hand, these people are paid to put restrictions on our freedom. They have job security and benefits and pensions that the rest of us can only dream of and, if they don't like the restrictions, they don't have to enter 'public service.'
In May of 2005 the Gomery Inquiry into the AdScam scandal learned that Chuck Guite, the former bureaucrat at the heart of the AdScam scandal, earned more than a million dollars as a lobbyist in two years after he retired. That's in addition to a gold-plated pension that could have kept him in luxury for the rest of his life.[13]
If I really had my druthers I might even consider a system in which politicians were selected by lottery rather than by election. I do not think the average person would be much better qualified to rule than the average politician but I suspect that we might get a higher average level of honesty. In our system it takes a lot of work and a lot of money to get elected and, while I concede that some may make the investment for the benefit of the country, I am sure that some do it for personal gain.
There's probably no way to ensure that all politicians and civil servants are honest but we need a policy that, as a condition of employment, they accept restrictions that give the rest of us -- their employers -- some assurance that they will not be overly dishonest.
A LOTTERY?
I first suggested the idea of election by lottery as a joke but, as a friend pointed out, it might be worthy of consideration.
In England the House of Lords gave the nobility a voice in government without the need for election. In Canada the Senate was presumably planned to do the same but in fact it gives party hacks and friends of the Prime Minister a sinecure. Senators are paid for life and many of them don't even bother to report for work.
Some Canadians think Senators should be elected, but elected senators would be politicians who would have to toe the party line and who would have political debts to pay.
But suppose senators were chosen by lot, from among everyone who voted in the most recent election. Because the job might require a sacrifice for some people anyone could refuse it, and if he/she does another would be chosen.
Senators would be appointed for five years, not for life, and they would be well-paid, but only if they actually do the job. They would not get a pension but, as an aid to resettlement, they would get full pay for one year after their term expires.
That would be a good deal for the senators but it would also be good for the country because it would create a representative group of Canadians -- people who are not professional politicians and who have no 'duty' to any particular party or to the special interests that finance political campaigns -- to balance the House of Commons.
Some of the senators chosen by lot might be stupid and some might be dishonest but, on average, they are not likely to be more-so than senators chosen by an elected politician. The difference is that while we know that senators appointed by a Prime Minister will represent a party, and quite possibly a special-interest group, we can hope that senators chosen by lot would actually have the same interests as the majority of Canadians.
TAXES
We also need to talk about taxes. I've already outlined my proposal for a point-of-sale benefits tax, but when politicians speak of taxes, they usually refer to business and income taxes. Often, they promise to lower them -- Martin wanted to give business a $4.6 billion break in his 2005 budget -- and somehow the rich always seem to get more breaks than the poor. I guess that's to be expected, because the rich contribute poor to politicians and the poor don't, but it doesn't seem fair.
Some politicians justify tax cuts for the rich with the "trickle down" theory. They say that if rich people have more money they will spend it to start new businesses that will provide more jobs for the rest of us.
In fact, as we have seen, most productive businesses are started by tradesmen. Few wealthy men can do it, because they lack the know-how. If the rich have more money they may use it to buy existing businesses and reduce employment by automation, or by sending production offshore. It would be foolish to assume that they would use it to increase either employment or wages in Canada.
Tax relief for the rich is popular with the rich but it's not likely to be much benefit to the nation. Some historians believe that tax relief for the rich was a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire. The rich were not required to pay taxes and the poor could not pay much, so the empire could not afford to maintain the army.[14]
Another problem with tax cuts is that they are not easily reversible -- especially if the people or corporations whose taxes have been cut are rich. If a government has a surplus it can always spend it somehow -- hopefully on something useful -- and if times change it can then cut back on spending. If it cuts back by not starting new projects, few people will complain.
If taxes are reduced it's hard to raise them again, especially if the hard times that leave the government short also affect taxpayers. Because politicians have to pander to the people who pay for their election campaigns, they are more likely to tax the poor or run deficits rather than raise their supporters taxes.
I don't like taxes any more than anyone else but I wish Canada could do as well as Sweden, which has very high taxes.
Personally, I would be pleased to see a tax on wage differentials. In Japan, a few years ago, a typical CEO made about eight times as much money at a typical production worker. In Canada and the United States, these days, a CEO may make thousands of times as much as a typical production worker. Many CEO's, in fact, collect huge stock options and bonuses even as they lead their companies into bankruptcy.
Canadian CEO's are not likely to accept Japanese standards but should they make more than -- say -- 100 times as much as a production worker? I would suggest that the total income -- including stock options -- of a senior executive should be taxed on a sliding scale that increases in proportion to the differential between workers' and executives' salaries in the company.
Rather than tax relief for the rich -- especially for rich people who don't produce anything that benefits the rest of us -- we should offer a tax holiday to any tradesmen who makes an honest effort to start a manufacturing or repair business.
A government should also maintain a public information office to explain any law or procedure to any citizen. If the government serves me, why should I have to pay a lawyer to tell me what it wants?
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