Opening panel on Democracy at the Crossroads

Transcript

Thank you for being here. My name is John Bibe. I lead the Democratic Engagement Exchange here at Toronto Metropolitan University, and we’re part of the Faculty of Arts. I get to begin by acknowledging the land that we are on today.

I’d like to acknowledge that the land that I have the privilege to call home is sacred land. My journey to this place began when my ancestor settled in what is now called New York and continued when I settled here 14 years ago. This land that I now call home has been the site of human activity for over 15,000 years. This land is the territory of the Haudenosaunee Nations, such as the Huron, Wendat, and Seneca, as well as the Anishinaabe, most recently visited by the Mississaugas of the Credit. The territory later became the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant—an agreement between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Anishinaabe to peacefully share and care for the resources and relationships around the Great Lakes.

At this moment, I am powerfully reminded of the wisdom of this Covenant, and that our presence here relies on all of us to take action for the collective good. I am committed to listening to and learning from generations who have come before so that generations that come after can also enjoy this land.

Now, I’d like to offer some wisdom from TMU’s Elder and Senior Advisor on Indigenous Relations, Joan Dear, who has recorded brief remarks for us. Before turning it over to our Interim Dean Amy Pang from the Faculty of Arts, I just announced myself in my ancestral language, which is Cree. My ancestors hail from Adaabaskaot, and I said, “Hello, my name is Shadow Hawkwoman, and I’m from the Wolf Clan,” and I’m Omushkego Cree, which states the territory I’m from.

I’d like to offer this brief prayer:

“Oh, Great Spirit, whose voice I hear on the winds, whose breath gives life to the whole world, hear me. I come before you, one of your children. I am small and weak, and I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty. Make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset. Make my hands respect the things that you have made. In my ear, sharp to hear your voice. Make me wise so I will know the things that you have taught my people and the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. I seek strength not to be superior to my brothers and sisters, but to be able to fight my greatest enemy, myself.”

I think that prayer says a lot about what we’re talking about today. It’s about the power behind voting and the luxury that we have in this country to not have to fight every year to vote. We haven’t had a severe war in our country for a very, very long time, and that’s because we have a democratic system that speaks to our power as individuals. At no other point in life will you be more powerful than when you cast that ballot. It’s one of the freedoms we cannot lose—our ability to own our own destiny by having the power of the vote.

So please, find a way to make your vote count. It’s a way of stating your opinion, and it’s very important. I hear people say, “My opinion is important,” and I totally agree with that. Everyone has an opinion. For your opinion to be heard and respected, you have to do the same for all those other opinions that you don’t agree with. You have to listen and be respectful. As you go out and think about voting, and with the world full of all kinds of situations that need to be voted on right now, I hope that you will think about peace, civility, love, and respect for each other. I’m wishing you all a very good day. Thank you very much for listening. Take care. Bye-bye now.

John is tall, so try to adjust a little bit.

Well, good morning, everybody. I’m Amy Pang. I’m a faculty member in the Department of Economics. Right now, I’m the Interim Dean for the Faculty of Arts. On behalf of Toronto Metropolitan University and the Faculty of Arts, I want to extend a warm welcome and thank all of you—participants, speakers, and guests—for joining us today. Events like the Canadian Vote Summit truly highlight what makes TMU special. Here, we blend research with real-world practice, creating a unique space where policymakers, practitioners, and academics come together to learn from each other.

Since its inception in 2017, the Democratic Engagement Exchange has showcased our commitment to democracy. The initiative brings together scholars, students, practitioners, and public sector leaders from across Canada, all united by the shared goal of building a vibrant and inclusive democracy. Through workshops, seminars, and public forums, the Exchange serves as a platform for dialogue, collaboration, and innovation. It bridges the gap between academic research and practical implementation, encouraging active participation and informed decision-making among all citizens. It also champions grassroots initiatives aimed at boosting voter turnout and civic engagement, especially in underrepresented communities.

Our Faculty of Arts further demonstrates its dedication to democratic engagement with the recent launch of the School of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation. By fostering interdisciplinary research and building community partnerships, it addresses the modern challenges of democratic governance. It’s a hub where academic insights translate into practical solutions, reinforcing our democratic institutions and equipping the next generation of leaders with the skills needed to navigate and shape the complex landscape of public policy and democratic processes.

In times like these, when democratic discourse feels strained and the political climate can be discouraging, universities have crucial roles to play. We need to model and support constructive democratic dialogue, encouraging the sharing of ideas and the expression of diverse views. As we tackle pressing global challenges through research, education, and public engagement, we can foster a culture of critical thinking and open debate, essential for a healthy democracy. It is up to us to inspire our students and community members to actively participate in democracy, emphasizing the importance of voting. By creating programs that engage students in the electoral process, we can support their efforts to become change-makers. At TMU, we believe that democracy is not given but a continuous process that requires active involvement and constant nurturing. Our efforts are aimed at contributing to a society where everyone has the opportunity to participate fully in democratic life and where public policies reflect the diverse needs and aspirations of the people they serve.

Now, it is my honor to welcome Stefan Perol, Chief Electoral Officer at Elections Canada. Elections Canada has been an invaluable partner and a key supporter of the Summit. Their dedication to ensuring fair and accessible elections is a testament to the strength of our democratic system. Welcome and thank you, and please enjoy the [Applause].

Welcome to the 2024 Canadian Vote Summit. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here, and Elections Canada is proud to support, for a second year now, the organization of the Canadian Vote Summit. I want to thank John and the team here at the Democratic Engagement Exchange for their leadership in organizing this important event.

So, I’ll confess that I wanted to lead the conversation this morning by taking a bit of a contrarian stance. I’m taking exception to the underlying narrative of the agenda. It seems that we’ve never talked so much or read so many media articles about democracy as we have in recent years and months. In fact, the only time that comes close to this was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when everyone was talking about democracy. At that time, the perspective was that democracy had won, and the feeling was that every country, sooner or later, would become stable democracies.

History had a clear and very linear direction. The tone of the conversation, of course, is vastly different today. It’s become a bit of a commonplace to talk about 2024 as being the year of democracy, the year in which over two billion people on the face of this planet are going to the polls. But the mood is not at all one of celebration. The question is whether democracy will hold or whether it will falter—or even how badly it will falter during this year of democracy. The tone of that conversation is reflected in the themes of the Vote Summit.

Building on last year, we’re going to talk about declining trust in institutions. We’ll hear from panelists about how Canadian democracy finds itself at a crossroads, grappling with an array of complex challenges and what that potentially means for our future. We’ll talk about polarization, realizing fully that this is not just an American problem. We’ve all seen or heard in recent years or months multiple accounts of MPs or MLAs resigning or indicating that they will not run again because of a hostile or toxic political climate in which they regularly face death threats or misogyny.

Now, polarization is a problem for democracy for at least a couple of reasons. The first is that we see a negative correlation with trust. Voters that express higher levels of polarization also express lower levels of trust in democracy and institutions. The second point is that a key condition for democracy to survive is a minimum level of respect and tolerance for others. In a world where the other is not just your competitor but your enemy, where political adversaries are seen or perceived as a threat to your lifestyle, no amount of democratic procedure or judicial procedure—as we see in the U.S.—will provide legitimacy to the other side. An electoral system in which the other side wins must be rigged, or else it is not worth fighting for. So yes, polarization is a big deal for democracy.

We’ll also be talking about disinformation and misinformation—familiar topics—as well as the challenges posed by AI and deep fakes. And of course, we have the specter of foreign interference as a backdrop—or I should say in the forefront—given the recent report of an SI COP. So yes, these are all very important and daunting challenges.

But before we go about discussing those challenges, I wanted to bring a bit of perspective so that we don’t start these two days completely depressed. I want to put forward two pieces of data that give me, at least, a sense of hope and a sense that not everything has gone down the drain. Far from it.

So, please show the first slide. This piece of data looks at confidence levels in Elections Canada over the course of the last two general elections—2019 and 2021. In 2019, because it was a fixed-date election, we had the ability to poll Canadians just before the election, during the election, and immediately in the days after the election. What we saw was a consistent growth in confidence in that period. Prior to the election, 85% of voters reported that they had at least a fair amount of confidence in Elections Canada, including 35% who had a great deal of confidence. Those numbers increased during the election and peaked, which is what you want to have. They peaked after the election, where the numbers of those who had at least a fair amount of confidence increased by 7 points to 92%, and the number of those who had a great deal of confidence increased dramatically by 23 points to 58%. In other words, as voters got more information about the voting process, as they got to experience it firsthand, their confidence grew. The same thing happened in 2021.

Now, because it was a snap election more or less, we did not conduct pre-election polling. But we did do the polling during and after, and a similar picture emerged. We saw confidence grow—86% during the election had a fair amount of confidence in Elections Canada, including 45% who had a great deal of confidence. In the post-election period, that rose to 91%, almost the same as 2019, and those who had a great deal of confidence increased by 20 points to 66%. So again, firsthand impressions based on experience as opposed to preconceptions generate significantly higher degrees of confidence. That’s something we can all take home and feel good about. I am 100% confident that if we took the same polling in provincial elections, you’d get the same results. People who experience Canadian elections, and by that, I include provincial and territorial elections, believe in the quality of our democratic process.

The second piece that I want to share is one that I’m stealing shamelessly from a recent presentation by David Ketto of Abacus Data. But it’s not based on his polling but on polls done as part of the Canadian Elections Study, which a number of EMBs, including Elections Canada, helped support. Next slide, please.

It shows, and this is probably the most interesting or surprising piece, that over the last 30 years—from 1993 to 2022—the point in time when Canadians had the highest degree of confidence or satisfaction with their democracy was 2022. And by a wide margin. In fact, what’s interesting is not only that 2022 is the high watermark, but at 73%, it is a pretty high watermark. That is surprising. I have no explanation. David Ketto did not provide any explanation for that. I can speculate that as Canadians look elsewhere and see democracies in action, they feel pretty good about their own democracy. But that’s just speculation.

The point I want to make here is not that everything is fine and that we have nothing to worry about. In fact, a recent poll from Abacus also shows that 71% of Canadians are concerned about the state of their democracy. So it seems that Canadians are satisfied, but they are concerned. And I don’t think that this is contradictory. I think that reflects how I feel about our democracy. I think we have a good democracy, but I am concerned about where it’s going. The risk of degradation is real, and there are many factors that are driving us in the wrong direction that we need to address. But there is still a pretty healthy foundation, and I think it’s important that we recognize and celebrate that so that democratic backsliding, as it has now become familiar, does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So that’s the first point I wanted to make as we start this conversation. The second point that I want to make, and the one I would like to close on, is related to the unique character of the challenges that we face. Whether it’s foreign interference, declining trust in institutions, misinformation, or polarization, these are all extremely complex issues for which there is no single institution, no single group, no intervenor that can wrap its arms around these issues. No election management body, not civil society, not academics, not the media, no security agency can tackle these issues working alone. That is why a forum like the Canadian Vote Summit is so valuable and so unique. It brings people together from government, from academia, from the industry, from civil society, electoral management bodies, and the media to look at these topics from various angles and hopefully to piece together not only a picture but also elements of a response.

So, I very much look forward to the discussions, which I know will be fascinating and engaging. Thank you, and I hope you have a great two days of discussion.

Thank you, Stefan, for your insights, setting us up perfectly for the next couple of days. Your data you shared speaks to the trust that has been earned by you and your team, and by many folks in this room who work tirelessly to deliver a democracy that works for Canada. We are very lucky. Voting in Canada is easy—not everyone knows that, but it is for most people. It’s easy. But what we have to do is ensure that people are engaged, that it is meaningful, and that they remain satisfied despite their worries.

So first, I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all our supporters and partners who’ve made this gathering possible. A particular shout-out to Elections Canada, who has been a consistent supporter of both the summit and the work we do here at the exchange.

I also want to thank our lead sponsors, Apathy is Boring and Microsoft. Our supporting sponsors include the Association of the Municipalities of Ontario, Elections BC, Elections Ontario, the Atkinson Foundation, the Hamilton Foundation, and the Consortium on Electoral Democracy. We also extend our gratitude to our research partners in Advocus Data, and our media partners at the Toronto Star.

Of course, we must thank our advisory committee, who has been instrumental in shaping the content and the focus of this summit and who has met over the last few months. As Stefan alluded, the Canine Vote Summit is a unique cross-sectoral gathering of thought leaders from across Canada, representing civil society, academia, public service, media, and industry. Each of you brings an exceptional range of experience and expertise. We brought you together to build bridges across sectors to meet these challenges because we know that no one sector can do it alone.

Our challenge to you is to talk with each other, connect, and build those bridges. Take advantage of this time—that’s why we brought you together in person. Today, on day one, you will hear from leading thinkers and community builders, and we also want to hear from you. You hold the solutions and the challenges we’ll be discussing. We encourage you to ask questions and propose solutions through Slido or using our tech here. Cat will explain a little bit more about how you’re going to do that.

Tomorrow, on day two, you’ll have more opportunities to contribute solutions during workshops and interactive solution-focused sessions. Based on your input and the insights shared by our speakers, we will create a white paper with policy and program recommendations that will say how we can move forward, build on our successes, and address the challenges we’re facing.

So, why are we here? We need only to look to our south to see the dire consequences of democratic backsliding. Families and friends are torn apart by political differences. Leaders threaten to dismantle election laws and institutions that act as safeguards against abuse and corruption, while framing campaigns as battles between good people and evil. Of course, I’m talking about the recent elections in Mexico.

We know that we don’t just have to look to the US; we’re seeing challenges in elections around the world. Just yesterday, we heard reports of Russia spending a billion dollars to push a narrative aimed at undermining the very foundations of liberal democracy ahead of the European Parliament elections. But we can also find hope when we look around the world. For instance, in India, a leader who ran on a cult of personality faced a real setback. Democracy is messy, but it has a unique ability to correct itself when it works well. That’s the key to what we’re trying to do.

We face threats from foreign actors and broader trends of a fraying social fabric. Over the next two days, we’ll explore these challenges and consider possible solutions. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to work with us at The Exchange, I want to explain a bit about what we do. We are driven by an urgent desire to build solutions. Our mission is simple: to build a vibrant and inclusive democracy where everyone has a voice in shaping their future. But this simple mission is not easy, and that’s where all of you come in. Just like we can develop the best vaccines in the world, unless we have people to administer the vaccine, they are of no use at all. We need community partners, academics, and public servants committed to delivering democracy using the best tools to engage our community, so everyone has a voice.

We do this by partnering with our community partners. We provide tools and resources at The Exchange, including free training. We champion proven policies and programs that make political participation not just possible but probable. We bring together community leaders like we have here today. So, thank you for being here. Let’s use this summit as a springboard for meaningful action and positive change because together we can strengthen our democracy and ensure that it thrives for generations to come.

With that, I have the honor of introducing the person who has actually brought us all here together: Katherine Corvo, who is the real master of ceremonies behind the scenes and is now stepping up to welcome you, as well as all of our panelists for our first panel. Katherine, we’re almost on time, so I will bring you up. Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Before I get started, just a little bit of housekeeping. You’ll see on our slide in just a second that part of this conference’s goal is not just for you to listen to us, but for us to listen to you, as John mentioned. We really want to give you the opportunity to share your thoughts, ideas, questions, and so on. Every session will have a unique QR code that you can scan. Please share your questions, policy recommendations, any concerns, or thoughts you’d like to share. Some of them will be read by our great colleague Helen here during the Q&A, but we want to make sure we capture everything, even if we can’t get to it during the Q&A.

Unlike many school settings right now, I will be encouraging you to be on your phone and to type away during the session. Now, onto the fun stuff. We’re here because, as John alluded to, Canada’s democracy stands at a crucial crossroads. We face formidable challenges from rapidly evolving technologies, a fragmented information ecosystem, and a weakening social fabric. Many Canadians struggle with their daily lives and are constantly asked to position themselves on major crises. For many, this feels like being asked to do a very complex task with inadequate tools. Yet the decisions we make now will shape the future of our democracy, and it is our firm belief that each one of us has a part to play in this journey.

Today, we’re going to examine the current state of Canadian democracy, its vulnerabilities, and the stakes for upcoming elections. We’ll discuss waning public confidence in governance and growing frustration with our democracy’s ability to address pressing issues both at home and abroad. Our conversation will highlight the importance of engaging the majority center that may feel forgotten and understanding the profound disillusionment among our youth, who report feeling disconnected and mistrustful of our government.

So let’s dive into these important issues. Today, I’d like to welcome three people I personally admire a lot, each from very different backgrounds and perspectives. We’ll be doing some problem identification and hopefully challenging some of your preconceived notions. More importantly, I hope that all four of us can move swiftly toward solutions and thinking about next steps.

If this is to be our democratic crossroads, my question for all of you is: Where to next?

Without further ado, our panelist Sean Spear. He’s the editor-at-large for The Hub and is widely recognized as one of this country’s most respected political commentators. He is also a senior fellow at the Public Policy Forum and the University of Toronto’s Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Sean also previously served as an adviser to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and happens to be a walking encyclopedia of knowledge. If you ever want to know anything about politics, he’s the guy.

We have Oana Kuk, who’s the Director of Strategy and Insight at Abacus Data. With nearly a decade of experience in the market research industry, Oana combines her passion for data and curiosity to create impactful research plans and cultivate new practice areas. She has been deeply involved in our work and many of the organizations in this space to help us understand how Canadians, especially young people, really feel about the state of our democracy.

Finally, we have Michael Warik. He’s the Jovi Chair in Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa. His 38-year career in the federal public service culminated when he served from 2016 to 2019 as Canada’s 23rd Clerk of the Privy Council. In 2021, UBC Press released “Governing Canada: A Guide to the Tradecraft of Politics,” a book I myself have and proudly display in my Canadian politics bookshelf.

Michael contributes regularly to a number of leading policy publications and provides advisory services and mentorship to emerging leaders and students. He is also a senior adviser to M&P Digital Inc. So, we’re in good hands this morning for this first conversation. Thank you for being here and for participating in what we hope will help us reflect on the challenges and opportunities that we’ll be discussing for the next two days.

So let’s dive right into it. I’ll ask each of you, who has a unique perspective on this, to think about what the most significant challenge is that you see facing our democratic system today. Also, think about what the root cause of this challenge is.

Michael, I’ll ask you to go first, then Oxana, and then Sean.

Well, thanks for the opportunity to come, and thank everybody for spending the day with us. Thank you to the organizers for the exchange. I’ve come here not for my panel, but to learn from everybody else over the next two days. So, I’m looking forward to it.

Just a few things in terms of where we come from. Looking back at some of this, and I think Stefan alluded to this, I’ve been voting since 1975, a couple of weeks after I turned 18. I haven’t missed an election, even though I’ve taken a nonpartisan turn in my career. I remember looking back at this from my first year poli-sci courses onward. We’ve always been lamenting low voter turnout and worrying about civic participation and the health of our civic culture.

There’s a deep literature in Canada and other places around that. A lot of it is well known, and there are people far more expert in the room on that. People have delved into the predisposition to vote: Where does it come from? Is it interest in politics, family upbringing, a sense of civic duty? Ease of voting clearly matters, and all kinds of socioeconomic factors push that up and down.

In Canada, the risk of oversimplifying, there’s always been sort of two tracks. I’ve been going to conferences for 40 years as well. One track is always to play with the software of democracy and voting. Endless conferences come up with things like compulsory voting, lowering the voting age, or some kind of different electoral system, like proportional representation.

The other track is consistently there: enthusiasts for more direct democracy to supplement elections. People who want plebiscites, recall, versions of citizens’ assemblies—this was a big thing in the 90s. I guess my sense of it in 2024 is that these are answers to old problems. They remind me of the metaphor of generals fighting the last war, not the next one that’s coming. In fact, I go further and say that they might be really bad ideas right now.

My sense is that if you added referenda, recall, and proportional representation to our system now, you would make things worse. It would be like putting lighter fluid on smoldering coals because it would create more incentives for politicians and parties to respond to incentives and pursue the politics of division, narrowcasting, harvesting grievance, rage farming—all those sorts of things. We should always pay attention to the incentives we create for our politicians and parties because they are highly rational and scientific about it, trying to put together a winning strategy.

So, there’s more to it than voting. I mean, the title of the Summit is important, but I’m sure what we come to is real engagement. Do people give money? Do they give time? Are they volunteers? Do they belong to constituency associations? Looking at the young people I know, are they engaged in issues and causes, but not through partisan politics? Do they participate in voluntary activities, community things?

I think one of the things that’s worth exploring is, and this is in the literature about people’s predisposition to come out and vote: Why would you vote, and why would you run for office? At some basic level, politics has become more distasteful, more grimy, less noble. It’s a hard life for elected politicians. I have enormous respect for people who run for office, whether it’s my local School Board trustee or people running for federal Parliament.

So, I think the topics are exactly right, and Stefan’s exactly right. These are the issues. Let’s not fight the old wars. Let’s deal with the new ones. It’s very much about disinformation. It’s very much about the implications only being felt in its early days of AI. AI will be the biggest change in our lives since the internet, and we’re only just at the early, early days of that.

The erosion of middle ground, compromise, accommodation, and civility is part of why people would say, “Why would I go into politics, and why would I even show up and vote?” A lot of politics looks very performative, a lot of theatrical, ritualistic. At a deeper level, what I believe is that it’s seen as something other people do—politicians and us. The solutions are going to be, and this network’s so important to that: grassroots community engagement of people in making decisions, whether it’s local zoning, school board policies, library boards, municipal, or federal. It has to be something we do, not something other people do. That’s where the solutions seem.

I think we have to defend the electoral system in depth and not take it for granted. The good news in Canada, compared to looking down south, which I will do, is we have not breached limits on spending and fundraising and third-party spending. We have not been taken over by big money as the Americans have. I guess we can blame the American Supreme Court ruling or whatever. I would be hyper-vigilant to any relaxing of the rules around spending, fundraising, and third-party spending because then we will slide towards the more American situation.

It’s a very efficient system. Stefan’s going to deliver a national election; the votes are all counted within hours, and people trust the outcome for about $600 million or $700 million. It’s a bargain. It’s a bargain that wouldn’t buy you a congressional race in the United States. But the conditions are here. We have to worry. Populist politics, if it becomes a winning strategy, will give us populist leaders. They’re thin-skinned, intolerant of dissent, and play to their base instead of a broader public.

So, you asked about solutions. I mean, I think it’s to defend in depth, and there’s no single panacea. Probably the most important thing, and I think we’re talking about this more later today, is defending the information space. The biggest threat, if I had to put them in some kind of rank order, is disinformation and news deserts. The thinning out of our journalistic capacity to engage people in their communities and their politics. There are news deserts in local politics and provincial politics across the country.

I’m not crazy about defunding our national public broadcaster. I mean, I would at least wait 10 years. If you want to do it, do it, but first, grow community-based media and journalism before you get rid of a very important pillar of our media space. We have to just do what we can with AI and those sorts of things. There’s no single solution, but you know, debate, amend, improve, but get it done. The Online Harms Bill has been dragging on for almost two years; the Digital Bill has been dragging for almost two years. There is a productivity problem in Parliament. We should get these things done before the election.

Stefan’s probably far too polite to say this, but the House and the Senate have got to pass the Elections Act changes which he recommended. It’s turned into performative theater about MPs’ pensions, and there’s important stuff in that bill: two more days of advanced polling, easier voting by mail, voting on campus, dealing with crypto, dealing with prepaid payment cards, at least a step towards dealing with deepfakes. We need to get that done before the next election. Voting anywhere in a riding, people in this room probably are more expert and will be useful. But really, we’ve got to get rid of the liar’s dividend from the use of AI. That would be the primary thing.

I don’t have solutions, but we have to be focused. That is where we should be focused: really AI and disinformation.

Thanks, Michael. We’ll definitely be talking about the information ecosystem right after this, so stay tuned. But before Oxana, I’ll let you go next.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on behalf of Abacus. When I think of voting and democracy and all these conversations, the most often question I’m asked is, “Who’s going to win the next election?” While that’s sort of fun to have that nugget in the room at a conference or a dinner party, I personally am interested in a lot more than just the horse race number.

Thank you so much, um, for inviting me into this space and to be able to have those conversations. Um, I also have the privilege of working with, uh, a number of organizations. Some of them were up on the screen earlier, and I think I saw a few faces, um, already, uh, to kind of get at these more deeper conversations about, um, the why—why people are coming out to vote, um, what we need to be doing about it, and all the sort of more spicy pieces of the conversation.

To your question on sort of the most significant challenge facing our democratic system today, um, I’m going to spend a little bit of time on the challenge part and a little bit of solution, but the word challenge was in the question, so that’s where most of my answer for these opening remarks lies. One way I think of framing this—and I think it has been part of a lot of the conversations—is sort of that fragmentation conversation, um, which I’m sure we hear a lot. A lot of us in this room have heard that. I’d like to use a different word to describe that and try to encompass a few more things in that—calling it independence or sort of a nod to my younger sort of representation on this panel, the independence era.

For a lot of Canadians, I think that looks like a number of different things. Two pieces that I think are sort of most important to this conversation are the independence from others in society, um, and the independence from systems or institutions that we’re seeing a lot. So, a number of different sort of pieces that I sort of think about when I think of these two things are the declining sense of community. Um, it started during the pandemic, and it started to persist. That looks like, um, sort of systemic things, but also more and more people saying they’re lonely—more young people than ever. Half of young Canadians say, “I’m lonely.” Um, that’s a lot of young people to be just saying that statement, and there’s a lot of different, uh, sort of consequences from that.

Sense of community, uh, through our work with Apathy is Boring, has been one of the biggest motivators for young people to vote. Uh, and so if they no longer feel they have community, they feel they’re lonely. These things start to abroad and start to impact these bigger pieces of the conversation. The other piece is independence from systems and less of an allegiance to institutions and the processes that are there. Sort of, as Stefan alluded to, and a lot of the data shows that people still trust, um, elections and all those sorts of things, but there’s also this other piece where they feel less connected to it. Um, These processes and these systems and the people in them represent them less.

Question of systemic fairness—uh, a quarter of Canadians don’t believe a democratic system is fair for everyone. Um, a minority, but that’s still one in four. So, there’s all these sorts of other pieces about independence from systems. Um, and, and also with that sort of connection is that fewer Canadians feel that they have a sense of connection to systems. So, not just individuals, but they are struggling to sort of make those leaps between them and the systems there.

A few sort of causes that I think, um, might be part of this and just add these onto your list for the discussion later, um, I think part of this is something that sort of we’ve been talking a lot about called the scarcity mindset, uh, where a lot of people think there are limited resources. Um, not just housing, but there’s not enough to go around is sort of a general feeling that a lot of people have. And they become sort of, they self-select and become more independent. They try to protect what they have. Um, Over half of Canadians believe there are not enough jobs, not enough homes, not enough healthcare resources, not enough workers, which is an interesting juxtaposition to the jobs and green spaces in Canada. So, there’s this real feeling like we don’t have enough. I need to kind of go back in myself and protect that.

The other piece is sort of a fragmented media space. Um, I think people get news in a variety of different ways, um, and my perspective is that’s just how it is. Um, We have to accept that, and that’s the space that we’re working in, and so we need to figure out a way for people to feel more comfortable knowing the truth, um, and navigating misinformation, that sort of space. Um, and then also sort of this distrust in institutions piece that comes with it. Um, really figuring out how to navigate that.

On solutions, um, like Michael, don’t have as many notes for that section, but, uh, looking forward to talking about that. I think, uh, part of it comes with, um, more education. Um, through a lot of our work, um, with Civics, um, who I think I saw in the room, um, that we know that, um, a lot of Canadians, including adult Canadians, admit they don’t know, um, how institutions work. They don’t know, um, all these sorts of pieces, and I think that’s a great foundational, um, space just to start in. If people know these things, they’re more comfortable having conversations.

I think individual empowerment really, um, sort of meeting Canadians where they’re at in this sort of individualistic space and figuring out how to bring them back into community. We know they like that, and, and that’s what really motivates them. So, bringing them back there. Um, and then on sort of that institution space, the transparency in access. We know a lot of people say they admittedly don’t know, um, but they trust these institutions, and so I think there’s this willingness to move back towards those spaces that’s still there. We haven’t lost that, and we need to sort of jump on that opportunity because people aren’t going to kind of be in that space forever if they’re drifting away.

Thank you, Oxanna and Sean. [Music]

Um, it’s a tough fact to follow. Uh, first of all, let me just say thank you for having me. Uh, I’ve been grateful to be part of, uh, the Democracy Engagement Exchanges, uh, events over the years. Uh, I think it speaks well of the organization that it’s so committed to ensuring, uh, a broad set of perspectives and views on these issues. And so, it’s a great honor to be back.

I should preface my observations by saying I feel a bit self-conscious talking about democracy to a group of people who spend most of their time thinking about democracy. Um, There are some virtues of having a flyover perspective. I can put some ideas on the table and move on. There’s this great story, apocryphal story, of, uh, during the war, the British were struggling to deal with the U-boats, and somebody said, “Well, why don’t we just boil the ocean?” And someone said, “Well, how are we going to do that?” And he said, “That’s not my job. That’s implementation.” Uh, and I kind of feel like that general today.

Um, I thought I’d put two ideas on the table, um, in part to provoke a conversation here, but hopefully to provoke a conversation over the next couple of days. The first is I’m more sanguine—I’m more sanguine about polarization. Um, In some ways, like changing media consumption, I think it’s sort of built in. I think we have to think about how to accommodate it, um, not to combat it. Effective polarization—polarization informed not by competing conceptions of, uh, you know, the proper focus of our government or even things as fundamental as what constitutes the good life—is a problem. You know, that is to say, polarization that’s primarily about, um, opposition to one’s political opponents is unhealthy. But I would say normal polarization is, I think, likely to grow in Canada for two reasons.

The first is growing heterogeneity. We’re just becoming increasingly diverse, and with diversity comes a growing multiplicity of, of views and perspectives about the proper focus of politics. Um, The second is I think we’re living in a period of intellectual heterodoxy. You know, for, um, the better part of, of 40 years or so, there was a broad set of assumptions that, that formed the goalposts of, of political and public policy debate. Uh, Those goalposts have changed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Um, The rise of, of disruptive politics in the Anglo-American world and elsewhere, and that means that the kind of intellectual center of gravity of our politics is up for grabs, uh, in a way that it hasn’t been for a long, long time. And I think that is contributing to this both a kind of more intense conception of politics, but also a messier one. And as I say, I think in some ways, uh, the rise of polarization is, is sort of inevitable and something, uh, for us to, to accommodate, not combat.

Uh, The second thing I would say is, uh, it’s been—I think John and Cat both talked about how a key part of the Democracy Engagement Exchange vision is to make sure that everyone’s voice counts, that everybody has a voice, and it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, uh, at least since 2016. You know, I must admit I didn’t think big thoughts about democracy, um, in the past two factors. I think, uh, my wife is much more of a SME democrat than I am. Uh, She grew up in a, in a rural Canada on a farm and was just shot through with a conception of democracy and a sort of bottom-up understanding of how we organize our society and how we do politics, and it had some influence on me.

The second, of course, is Trump’s election in 2016. Um, and it, it seems to me, for Canadians, it prompts the question: how do we proactively protect against the rise of that kind of disruptive politics? What proactive, preemptive measures can we take to make our politics more responsive than representative? I think we have to think a bit about whether there’s an inherent trade-off between representation and responsiveness on one side, and political efficiency and policy-making efficiency on the other side.

You know, we feel good about the fact that it’s relatively straightforward for a majority government to pass sweeping legislation, and we juxtapose that with the so-called gridlock of the American Congressional system. We like the fact that our first-past-the-post system tends to produce majority governments, even if we don’t have parties winning 50% plus one. Again, because it’s relatively efficient.

I increasingly think that there’s an argument we ought to be prioritizing responsiveness and representativeness, even if it makes our politics messier and more complicated. Over the long run, incorporating different voices into our politics may be the best protection against the rise of a big explosion like we saw in 2016. Cass Mud, who has a name that’s made for television, is a European political scientist who talks about populism being the repoliticization of issues and subjects that the political class has sought to depoliticize. I think that’s an apt description of a lot of big issues in Canadian politics.

Depending on how you ask the question, a majority of Canadians believe corporations should pay much higher taxes. There’s really no political voice for that perspective in our mainstream politics. Depending on how you ask the question, close to a majority have serious misgivings about our immigration policy. There’s really no political vehicle in our mainstream politics for that perspective. You can go down the line on different issues where we’ve essentially closed out debate, where we’ve excluded large minority voices from having a means of expressing their political preferences.

At the risk of going to the past, I do think that we need to have a conversation about proportional representation. Yes, it would make things messier. It would make things more inefficient. But I think one can make the case that, over the long term, making sure that people feel like they have a voice in our politics, that they have representation, and that our politics is more responsive may, counterintuitively, be the best means of protecting against more extraordinary political developments in our country. In that sense, we would be effectively trading off making our politics admittedly less efficient—probably less edifying—but, over the long run, fortifying it against the types of disruption that we’re seeing in other parts of the world. Thank you, and thank you all three for these thoughts.

Well, I’m glad you brought all of this up, Sean, and I think this puts us in a great position to have a bit of a conversation between the three of you. I’m curious to know more about what you see that responsiveness looking like in Canada. You mentioned proportional representation. Alan, I’ll come to you in a second, just because I think there’s an interesting tension there with the idea that a lot more Canadians feel like they’re in their independent era and don’t necessarily want to engage with the institution.

You know, we’re facing many crises in this world, and Canada as well. A lot of our politicians don’t feel like they’re necessarily equipped to do the work and to be efficient. But when efficiency is needed—and was needed, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic—we had very strong responses, but people felt hurt that they weren’t necessarily listened to. But if we hadn’t had that effectiveness, there are questions around where we would be today. So what does that responsiveness look like for you, and how can we make sure we’re really striking that balance as we face more and more crises, be they health crises, environmental, or whatever name it?

You know, how do we find that balance? These are all trade-offs, for sure. But I’ve come to the view, rather painstakingly—this is certainly not where I would have started some years ago—that if you accept the premise that our democracy is foundational, and protecting our democracy is foundational, then I think we have to accept trade-offs down the line. Just on the subject of responsiveness, I don’t know the Elections Canada folks here probably thought about this a great deal, but if you look at our electoral map, a large swath of current incumbent members of Parliament won by more than 10 percentage points.

There are large parts of our country—if you back out, basically, like Winnipeg to Quebec City—where you have members of Parliament winning, in some cases, by 40, 50, 60 points. I think that creates a lot of problems. First of all, it creates perverse incentives for them, as Michael mentioned. But I think it leaves those minority populations in those communities feeling underrepresented. So I think, in that context, as I say, I’ve increasingly come to the view that proportional representation would probably, over time, create a multiplicity of parties. We’d see the rise of possible regional parties and the rise of ideas-based or issues-based parties. It would make our political system more fragmented and fractured.

But if you go back to the point that John made—that we want to make sure that every voice counts, and everyone has a means of contributing or participating in our politics—I think we can say that’s presently not the case. So it prompts the question: what types of reforms would give people that sense that they do indeed have a voice? I’ve come to the view that proportional representation would be the best means to do that.

Oksan, I’ll get to you, but Michael, you’re next. So, you mentioned that Canadians, especially young ones, feel very disconnected from the systems. Some of the systems, I think, that Sean’s mentioning. So how do we address these factors to make Canada’s system more responsive, as Sean puts it? Is that even something that you’re seeing in your data as something Canadians want? Do they want to be more engaged in the conversation?

Yeah, I think I’m not the person best placed to have a conversation about different sorts of systems and reforms. I think, in part, because the people I talk to every day—average Canadians—also don’t have these conversations. I think that’s part of the discussion. But I think the other piece is that people need to be having conversations with each other and feeling comfortable about having those conversations. We did some work earlier this year, and half of Canadians are uncomfortable having a conversation with someone they disagree with. That could be someone they know, someone they love, someone in their network. There’s this uncomfortableness about disagreement and sort of that engagement beyond the system but engaging with each other.

I think that’s an important part of democracy as well: having these conversations. If we’re going to be talking about polarization and all these places, I think there’s certainly conversations to be had about the far left and the far right, and if they’re ever going to talk to each other. But I think the other piece is those people in the middle. I think your article earlier this week highlighted that there are a lot of people who don’t identify on either side and feel sort of forgotten in these conversations or uncomfortable with starting to engage on their views. So I think that’s another area we can start in and work on: making Canadians feel more comfortable talking with each other and more comfortable disagreeing. Healthy disagreement and difference of opinions are important.

Thank you, Michael. What are your thoughts on all this? Because you said we shouldn’t dwell on the past and talk about these technocratic solutions. Any first thoughts on Sean’s response?

Yeah, no, I’m not a proportional representation fan, as you can tell. You just have to look at Germany, where they now have seven parties. The left party split three times.

The right party split. Now you’ve got a virulently anti-immigration, you know, sort of rage-farming party, and so on. If PR is a good idea, let’s try it in Ontario. Convince Doug Ford, try it in Quebec, try it in BC. Have a province. This is how we built Medicare. We’re a federation. Try it, see how the parties respond and campaign. See what a coalition government looks like. Coalition government is very different than the cabinet government system that we’re used to. It would take a couple of pancakes to get it right, so let’s try PR in Ontario. I wouldn’t bet our national system on it right now. You know, I think what’s important is what happens between elections.

So I think we have to kind of see our representatives as people who are conveners in their communities, bringing people together, instead of just conveyors of their party’s message to you. There are a lot of techniques that people in this room are very expert at—creating spaces for dialogue and engagement. We know we have to do something about climate. What can we do here? We know we have to do something about AI. What are we going to do here? And so on. It’s really about everything that happens in the four years between elections that I think we’re going to find the solutions.

Thanks, Sean. I want to get back to you just for a second here. So, I hear you that a lot of people feel like their voices aren’t being heard, and we need to have a system that’s a bit more responsive. But, to Anus’s point, a lot of people just aren’t really engaging with the system at all. They’re outside the traditional system of getting their ideas out and engaged, and they want things to go faster. They want a fast change on a lot of these issues, and, you know, quite apparently feel quite unhappy with the pace of things.

How do you address that? The system you’re suggesting could potentially work, but it would take a long time. I think we have very critical issues happening in this country right now and everywhere. While I’d like to be an optimist, things are not looking like they’re getting better necessarily. So how do you engage with those people in that responsiveness?

Well, I think in some ways that people are disengaged is somewhat rational. You know, I mentioned just a small number of issues; I could go on where we have large minorities who are just their political preferences are completely locked out of our mainstream politics. If you have any of these views that can’t find expression in our mainstream politics, of course, you’re inclined to disengage. But I think the lesson from the United States is that it’s not like people stop feeling those things. It’s not like they stop thinking them. All they do is fester below the surface until they finally explode.

So I would say for me the trade-off is to bring them above ground, subject them to open political debate and discussion through our political institutions. It seems to me that’s a more credible means of dealing with the fact that there are—we, you know, politics is about trying to reconcile the political pluralism that manifests in our country. We’re debating a lot of big things right now, and there are a lot of unsettled questions and deeply held perspectives. It seems to me, as I say, I’m not sure our politics is doing a very good job of managing those differences and finding accommodation for how they can be reconciled in our society.

Can I just make one other point, though? I think the other—I said there were a couple of reasons why I think polarization is bound to persist and possibly rise. I want to add one more. I was thinking about it as some of the other panelists were talking through my political formation and certainly Michael’s and those here of his generation. We were principally focusing, most of—so much of the energy of our political debate was on fundamental questions of how we structure our economy and the role of the state in our economy.

Those are questions that generally lend themselves to compromise. How much spending as a share of GDP should be dedicated to the government? Well, we can tinker on the margins. What should be the marginal effect of tax rates on corporations or capital? We can kind of cut the baby in half. Right now, we’re debating fundamental questions of identity and culture, and they just don’t lend themselves to compromise in the same way.

Part of, I think, the solution, as I say, is to try to bring some of these different voices and perspectives into politics, recognizing that that comes with downsides. I’m not minimizing those. Then the second would be to seize on something Michael said: subsidiarity. It’s going back to some of the underlying thinking of the British North American Act, which was to try to push as many of those issues down to lower orders.

I’ve been critical of the current government because of its use of the federal spending power, pushing so many of these issues, for which there is a plural of perspectives in our society, up to the national level. This necessarily forces on us a single way of thinking about them. So I guess if I was to put a second solution on the table, it would be to sort of recommit to some of the underlying principles. If you look at the design of 91 and ’92, it was quite intentional. Alexander G. I think is actually the most underrated representative in the constitutional negotiations. He, as a Quebecer, I think understood that the way to deal with pluralism in our politics was to try to push as many of those issues down to lower levels of government.

As we become more pluralistic, I think that’s a recipe we ought to rediscover. I’m going to shift us a little bit from this conversation and come back to the idea of incentives. Michael, you mentioned the idea that parties and different political actors will be incentivized one way or another to act and/or not act, to say or not say things that might engage or enrage some groups of Canadians and people around the world.

How do you think we can build incentives that foster a more safe and healthy political discourse in this country? What are the ways for all of us to feel like we can be on board and that politicians want to contribute and participate in this world? And we don’t see a mass political resignation of politicians in this country. What are some of these incentives that you could think of?

Well, that’s a good one. I mean, one thing I think we should do is give greater respect to the role of elected politicians and political staffers. We tend to sort of, you know, crap on them all the time, and they get a lot of abuse. We are stingy about what we pay them; we’re stingy about their pensions. We expect people to give up their lives and their family time. They work really, really hard. Almost all of them go in for the right reasons, and we treat them like crap a lot of the time.

So I think, you know, honoring and respecting the role of the people, making it a job that’s worth doing—maybe for four, five, or six years. Don’t think of it as, “I’m going to do this for 25 years, start as a political staffer, and retire 30 years later as an MP used to go to the Senate.” It’s just something I would join elected politics at the municipal or federal level for maybe four, five, or six years and then go back. I think I would see politics a bit more as that and work on the incentives and disincentives to stay in it. These are hard burnout jobs, and they come with doxing and cyber abuse and so on.

So we probably have to expect more turnover and work on resilience, mental health, cyber security, and safety. Treat these jobs as important and give people the tools to do them well.

Maybe a question for all of you here: How do we make sure that the players in this space also contribute to building that healthy space? Because I think, you know, a lot of politicians and a lot of Canadians feel like it’s become a very toxic space to engage in, and then they don’t want to engage in. Where does the responsibility lie? And if it’s not one person’s job, then how can we as a whole of society work together to create a better space for our democratic arena to exist?

Jump, jump into that one. I think, um, part of that is having those, um, other conversations. I think, like, other panelists have now mentioned, it’s about sort of beyond just the top of the stack kind of, um, political debate that’s on the front of newspapers. I think having those sort of conversations, um, in other smaller spaces, um, I think having conversations with the folks that they represent, to Michael’s point, just having more of those conversations in those spaces.

And I think the other sort of piece is, and I don’t know necessarily how to word this or what exactly the answer is, but I don’t think we need to abandon the idea that we have different ideas. When we come to a space where we talk with others who we disagree with, we don’t need to pretend that we, um, disagree with them or sort of have these pieces. People are going to have different opinions, and they’re going to come to the table with those different opinions. So I think having a space that respects those different opinions, that they can see in sort of a model to have their own conversations with others, is probably one place to start.

I agree with Michael’s starting point that we need to, um, improve the conditions around what it means to be an elected official in this country. Obviously, the response to that differs depending on the context, but focusing on federal politics, um, I think doubling down on Michael Chong’s Reform Act to try to strengthen the role of members of Parliament relative to party leaders is important. Right now, there are constraints or disincentives on members of Parliament to reflect the growing heterodoxy in our society. There are incentives instead to effectively limit oneself to a set of propositions held deeply by either the party leader him or herself or the party faithful. When, of course, the truth is, most of us have a diverse set of political preferences.

So I think one way for parliamentarians to give expression to views that may buck up against party orthodoxy is to strengthen the Reform Act. I think, second, is to look at successful models and try to understand what and why it’s worked. I note, for instance, that Liberal Member of Parliament Nathaniel Ersin Smith has more successfully than just about any elected Member of Parliament for the better part of my lifetime found a way to be a constructive member of the Parliamentary caucus on one hand, but on the other hand bring his own unique political preferences to bear. There have not been a lot of people who’ve been able to manage that balance. And he seemingly has. I’d be, you know, ostensibly, it’s come at some trade-offs. He’s not a member of the cabinet, for instance. But he’s also not been thrown out of the Parliamentary caucus, even though data shows that he’s voted against the government more than any member of the governing parliamentary caucus by a magnitude, more than anyone else over the past quarter century or longer. He makes Michael Chong, who had that reputation during the Harper years of looking like a train seal. So, you know, there may be lessons to learn from someone like him. How has he managed to do that?

The third, you know, it seems to me, is to think a bit more about supporting candidates, prospective candidates, so that the barrier to entry is as low as possible. I’m generally disinclined towards state regulation of party processes. I think, you know, parties are political institutions and have different cultures and ethos and processes. I think we ought to generally enable that. But I think there can be a role for civil society and even possibly for government to try to help people who have an interest in participating as prospective political candidates to do that. Right now, as Michael says, although the process is broadly open, there’s clearly a bias towards people with deep roots within political parties, oftentimes people who’ve, as Michael says, come up through maybe as a staff member or whatever. Trying to bring new and different voices into the process would be helpful, particularly since, counterintuitively, it would often come from parts of the country where a political party is underperforming. So, not only would it help bring new and different voices, counterintuitively, it may actually help them win elections.

I’ll let you respond, Michael, and after, I would just want to go back to you, as we wrap up for a last little section, to talk about how we meet Canadians where they’re at. But Michael, let you respond.

Yeah, I just build on Sean. I think we’re ending in a lot of agreement. You have to make the job feel meaningful because it’s not, you know, it’s a hard job. There are things you could do to tweak the parliamentary calendar to put more time into private members’ bills being debated. We could have more attention paid to what committees do to study issues in depth. You know, um, I think, and I’m at risk of this all coming out wrong, but the media and the information space is really important to this. I don’t think we’re going to get what we need from the legacy mainstream media, to use that phrase, because they over-focus on horse-race polling and question period. That’s what Canadians think politicians do, and in fact, they’re working really hard in committees and pushing issues and forming caucuses across party lines and doing really interesting stuff that Canadians never hear about.

So, I think we need to build the information space that gives more attention to the efficacy of our parliamentarians. Devote all the Friday to private members’ bills. Have people cover the—I was in a parliamentary committee yesterday for an hour; nobody covered it. That’s not a personal thing. It just says, like, the media bureau chiefs, they were somewhere else on a day with Auditor General’s reports, and they’ll move on to the next thing.

So, there’s a kind of yin and yang thing. We have to build up the information space in order to create the kind of politics we want.

May I just jump on that for one second? I’ll be very quick. I couldn’t agree more that the media has a role to play here. Members of the press gallery lament when politicians speak with them in talking points. But in the one case where a politician goes off script, what’s the story? The party leader has lost control of his or her own caucus. You can only have it one way. If you want to create the conditions for elected officials to be sincere, to reflect actually the diversity even within our brokerage party caucuses, to say nothing of a possible PR system, then the media has to be careful not to characterize every divergence or disagreement as a political crisis.

Yeah, well, this is a great segue to my next question, which is around actually connecting with Canadians. And, you know, you mentioned, Oana, Canadians have never had this much access to information. You can find the information if you want it. There are many different ways to get it, whether it’s accurate or not is debatable at times. But, you know, how do we make sure that Canadians actually do consume the information and engage with it? Because, you know, a lot of people are checked out, so they might not want to, you know, as interesting as it must have been yesterday, they might not want to listen to it. And so, how do you, you know, think of solutions to make sure that Canadians are not just receiving the information but engaging with it as well?

Yeah, I think I have to echo kind of the conversation that’s just been happening. The media ecosystem is not what it used to be. Not only are people consuming content on different platforms, but I think the way in which people—like the type of content people are consuming—is vastly different. Older generations tend to like written content, those sorts of things. You hear this all the time. Young people like that audio-visual, but it’s evolving beyond that. I think we’re stuck in these other conversations about like, oh, we just need to make a video about that and then, like, Gen Z is going to tune in.

Do you know that most Gen Z don’t watch videos with sound on and use captions? It’s a very evolving space. And so, I think there are all these sort of technical pieces to reach people where they’re at. But I think there are other pieces too, like having these conversations—just sort of being in the space. I hear from a lot of MPs saying, “Well, I have my email blast and I reach out and people still don’t know what I do.” And then there are young people in their ridings who say, “My MP never listens to me and gives me opportunities to talk,” while all the while they have these invites out for their town halls and so on.

think there’s just—I don’t again, I don’t know what the solution is. I hate to say that, but there’s this sort of passing of ships and that they’re not. I think they both want to have these conversations, but there’s not necessarily an alignment yet.

Thank you. We’re actually going to shift over to our crowd and audience so we can hear what you have to say about all this. Helen, we’ll start with the questions from the Slido.

Sure. So the first question is: How is the defunding of journalism and a lack of diversity of resourced publications affecting our ability to participate in democracy? Anyone want to take that?

I take it. I suppose I didn’t realize this before I came today, but I guess if I have a key message, it’s one about trade-offs. Yes, of course, there are downsides to the decline of traditional media outlets. It just seems that strikes me as self-evident.

But we’re also living in a more egalitarian or democratized environment as well. And so that has its own sets of upsides. It’s messier; it’s more complicated. There’s a risk of poor quality, etc. But I would start from the premise that the way we ought to be thinking about these questions is: How do we account for it or accommodate it, as opposed to try to combat it? Because it just strikes me that these forces are so powerful.

To give you a concrete example of the potential downsides of the evolving landscape, or at least the interaction of the evolving media landscape and politics, in the province of Alberta, the two major dailies—the Herald and the Edmonton Journal—now have smaller press gallery capacities than some of these independent media on the right, including True North and Western Standard.

I think if Jason Kenney was here, he would say one of the reasons, one of the factors that led to his eventual resignation as UCP party leader and Premier is that those independent outlets have a large reach, or at least a growing reach, with a kind of particularly galvanized part of the population. They had a pretty profound influence over at least internal politics on the Alberta right.

So there’s an example, better or worse, whatever one thinks of it, of the increasing influence of independent outlets. I would start from the premise: How do we account for these changes as opposed to overcome them? In some ways, that question is long passed. I mean, it’s just an old issue.

This is waves of the Internet and the decline of advertising models and subscription models. Everybody’s struggling to find a way to pay their journalists. But there’s a lot of innovation and creativity. But it’s not going to be free. I mean, you know, there’s The Hub and The Logic and Substack and, you know, dozens of podcasts. There’s probably more information available of diverse quality to consume that’s out there, but you know, you’re going to have to spend your dollars as if they were votes and say, “Well, I can only afford three or four of these, but these are the ones that are important.”

I think there’s still a space for public broadcasters in that mix, but we shouldn’t bet our democracy on that either. You need a very diverse space. I think the technology reduces the barriers to entry in the costs. And I think you can actually be—I would rather get rid of the legacy media. I would get rid of the subsidies that are in place right now and encourage the growth of local startups and let businesses like Shan’s grow and fill that kind of space. The market people will vote with their dollars and subscribe to quality products.

Alright, Helen, if you want to go for the next one.

Sure. How can civil society groups and research organizations work together to ensure that policy is passed to address online harms? Any initial thoughts on sort of getting—there’s a bill in front of the House of Commons right now that’s been there for nearly two years. So I would send emails to the MPs and say, “Get it done.” You know, this is a pure case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. They should get it done. Legislation is just software; if you don’t like it, update it in a couple of years. But you need to get on with it.

Any questions from the audience? We can go directly to you; otherwise, we can—oh, we have someone in the back. Maddie’s going to come to you with it. Helen, or the mic right there. It’s a bit of a workout at the same time. If you can just quickly introduce yourself as well.

Sure. My name is Michael Yash from the Global Center for Pluralism. Picking up on Michael’s comment about the good work being done in committee, and I don’t want to sound feudalistic in asking this question by any stretch, because I’ve dedicated a lot of research to the kind of ingenuity that can come at a committee, but if you bring the media there, do members not start playing to the base again? One of the things that’s wonderful about committee is the kind of genuine relationships that can develop and good work that could be done. Isn’t the challenge really that members have kind of ceded the ability to get back to the population almost as Burkean trustees to show why their compromises are necessary?

I think you’re always going to get a certain amount of performing for the camera and trying to clip things for fundraising video. I mean, that’s just—we have to live with that. I think, you know, once people have got their performative 30 seconds out of the way, they actually do tend to get into debate and discussion.

There was a time when there were joint House and Senate committees, you know, which were able to do deeper dives into issues. We could do more of that. We could send more bills to Senate committees to be debugged and have people engage, and then send them to the House, which is always going to be more partisan. There are things you can do. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have parliamentary committees meeting a lot behind closed doors, if that’s your question—maybe the National Security committee for some things.

But I think, you know, the premise that any Canadian can go on their laptop and look in is probably part of that trust equation. I think it touches a little bit on the responsiveness versus effectiveness question. So Sean, I’ll ask you to answer that as well or any thoughts that you have on that question.

Yeah, I, on balance, agree with Michael. There is a trade-off for transparency. And in some ways, technology is making that trade-off worse in the sense that, you know, I have a hard time getting myself up to go to a parliamentary committee because you just know you’re going to read your five-minute statement and then sort of just observe a lot of political tactics, you know, for the subsequent hour or so.

But I think, on balance, for—for first of all, I can’t imagine a politician arguing for less transparency, so even sort of as a practical matter, there’s probably not a starter. But there are, I think, some things that can be done to try to strengthen the role of committees generally. The composition of the committee membership, the role of the committee in itself and selecting both the chair, but also selecting the study agenda.

You know, even kind of—one of the things the TR government did for small-D democracy, for which it deserves a lot of credit early in its mandate, was undoing something the Harper government had done incidentally, which was withdrawing the role of parliament in setting the annual borrowing limit. The SH government restored that principle, and I think you could take that idea further. The fundamental—one of the fundamental roles of parliament is its role in appropriation, and yet our estimates process is Byzantine and the schedule is kind of a mess.

There’s a whole host of things I think you could do apart from closing the door to journalists to try to make parliamentarians think that their role in committee is important and they ought to prioritize that important work as opposed to TikTok videos.

Oxana, I just have a quick follow-up question. You mentioned the need for education and for giving people a better understanding of how things work because a lot of communities don’t actually understand, or necessarily trust, the institution. But they don’t necessarily—how do you think we can do a bit more of that to get them a bit more aligned and informed on some of the issues we’re discussing now?

Yeah, I think some of it starts maybe a bit too late for some of us who are sort of past the education system.

But I think there’s a big role to be played in that and sort of educating people from the onset about what democracy looks like and how it influences their lives beyond just voting. I think that’s really important.

But then also just to echo the conversation about committees, I think opening the door to more parts of the process and what that looks like—not to say that if you sort of take things out of in-camera, every young person is going to get on their laptop and phone and turn on CAC and jump right in. But I think you have to start somewhere, and you have to start sort of opening those spaces or at least keeping them open so that it will take time, but people can end up in those spaces.

I’m actually a little less fussed about this idea of how much Canadians know about the kind of intricacies of the system. It’s a good thing that politics doesn’t matter as much in this country as it does in countries where it really matters. The fact that people can hive off a large share of their time and their attention to things other than politics is healthy.

So yeah, on the margins, we should be doing more civic education and so on. There are some great groups here, but I don’t think that, for me, is the central problem. Especially if PE—you know, what we want in our representative democracy is a mechanism for people to be able to convey to political actors what they care about and then for political actors and public servants to figure out how to respond and then be able to demonstrate back to those people progress or a lack of progress.

It’s why I keep coming back to this point about representativeness and responsiveness. I worry that there is a barrier between what people are telling us about the stuff they care about and our political system’s responsiveness to those. If someone can think of alternatives within the status quo, within our current structure, to make our system more responsive, I’m certainly open to it. But there is just something peculiar to me that, you know, I don’t want to use the word collusion—it’s too strong—but sometimes it feels like our political parties collude on certain issues in a way that effectively depoliticizes positions that are not fringe positions.

They have large minorities saying emphatically over time, “We care about this,” on the left and the right. And those ideas are not finding a voice of representation in our politics. I think that’s something long term we ought to be concerned about. I come back to the Trump election—obviously, it was multifaceted, a lot happening. But if you accept the premise that in some ways these were the voices or the places that didn’t matter, that felt like their voices weren’t represented and they wanted a blunt-force instrument to be their avatar, for better or worse, then I think we need to try to figure out a way for those people to feel like our system is hearing them. Maybe not even acting on their preferences because some of their preferences are bad and wrong. You know, that’s democracy. But at least they feel like it’s being heard and engaged with.

We have time for one last question. So if there’s someone in the audience, we can do that; otherwise, we’ll go to the Slido. I have one person in the middle there. Maddie, where you can raise your hand just a little higher—there we go.

I am Valer Gas, a PhD candidate from the University of Ottawa. My question is: Are issues with democracy being discussed—so like populism, polarization, disinformation, etc.—driven by politicians and elites or citizens? And should institutional solutions focus on one of these groups, both of these groups, or are there other factors at play?

Thank you. A small question with an easy answer, I’m sure. I mean, I think that’s actually a great question to sort of wrap up. If you had to identify sort of one stakeholder group or one sort of area where we can better improve—I know it’s probably impossible, but…

No, I mean, I think my glib answer is everything everywhere all at once. I think you need that. There are only 41 million Canadians now. As I said yesterday, there are only 338 or 343 soon who actually get to write laws, throw in 105 Senators.

So there are things like the online harms bill and changes to the elections act and the AI legislation and so on that only parliamentarians get to do, and they should deliberate and bring Canadians in and do what they can do. But to go back to earlier parts of the conversation, I think that fixing the information space and building cultures of civic engagement and being involved in changing the trajectory of our communities and society is probably more a grassroots and community-driven thing.

The people in this room are more expert. If you know, it’s not if the czar only knew, he’d fix things. I think we have to take ownership of it, and everybody has to be involved.

Oxana, I would say the same thing. It’s not just Canadians; it’s not just those who they elect; it’s not just those in the Ciems. It’s everyone that needs to work together to find that common ground and have those conversations with each other rather than in their individual spaces.

Yeah, I would just say quickly, it is a good question, and I would think about reform at two levels: a kind of bottom-up level, which is—I won’t go on anymore about this notion of representativeness and responsiveness—but then at an elite level as well.

I do think the structure of parliament, the role of parliamentarians, similarly in parallel needs to be addressed so that, as Michael says, we’re creating the conditions for people to want to self-select in and then feel like when they’re there, they’re making a contribution and the country is leveraging their skills and talents. No one in parliament’s an idiot; they sound like idiots a lot of the time, but they didn’t self-select in to be an idiot, right? No one would do that. They didn’t self-select in to read talking points. They self-selected in ostensibly because they thought they could make a difference. Maybe they’ve had some success in some other part of their life or whatever.

So in some ways, one of the biggest opportunity costs of our politics is we’re not leveraging the kind of skills and talents and perspectives of these people. And so, as I say, I think a reform agenda has to operate at both levels.

Thank you, and we’re going to wrap it up now. But thank you so much for being here and for your thoughts. So, a round of applause for our speakers.