Should Canadians Have an Ongoing Say in How They're Governed?

What's wrong with direct democracy, anyway?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve assumed that direct democracy can’t work. Isn’t it too impractical and unwieldy? But like many long-held assumptions, perhaps it’s due for another look.

Direct democracy is an umbrella term describing variations of a system where all citizens are invited to directly participate in legislative debates. That’s in contrast to the more familiar representative democracy, where citizens elect representatives to make legislative decisions for them.

Canada’s mainstream political parties illustrate both representative democracy’s potential and limitations. On the one hand, parties can offer big-picture ideological frameworks that give voters a sense of how the fine policy details will be addressed. When you buy into the big picture, you can be confident that much of the little stuff will be managed according to your preferences.

But increasingly, parties can be inconsistent in the way they handle important issues. Worse, many policy issues are never addressed at all. If you’ve been following along with The Audit, you’re already familiar with billion dollar programs still going strong even though their mandates’ best before dates came and went decades ago. The arts-funding-industrial-complex - most of whose tens of thousands of heavily-subsidized products are barely noticed by the arts-consuming market - is one great example. Research grants funding thousands of secretive studies of questionable value are another.

You can, of course, ask some legitimate questions about direct democracy. The “impractical and unwieldy” arguments have been put to rest by the accessibility and immediacy of the internet. And real-world policy disasters take a lot of the urgency of the “but normal folk just aren’t smart enough” claim.

But we would have to address the possibility that direct democracy could lead to a dangerous tyranny of the majority, where the clear preferences of a majority override the core civic and legal rights of minority groups. Similarly, we wouldn’t want to create a world where public officials can avoid personal accountability by claiming that they’re just carrying out the explicit will of the people. (Which, sadly, is not to say that public officials ever accept responsibility for their decisions even now.)

Practically, digital voting of any kind is still hard to protect from manipulation and fraud. So any large-scale adaptation of direct democracy would have to account for that.

Taking Citizen Opinions Seriously

Here’s how I think it could work in a way that avoids those problems. The government (or, for that matter, anyone with a significant internet presence) could set up a site that invites Canadians to vote electronically on policy-related questions. On one level, it wouldn’t be all that different from the countless website surveys that you see here and there.

To turn these “surveys” into something more substantial, you’d need to incorporate a few important elements. Those might include:

• Scale. The website (ideally, hosted within the canada.ca domain) would need to successfully attract hundreds of thousands of Canadians so it can claim to truly represent public opinion - and so it provides greater value than the many poll results we’re all fed.

• Authentication. You’d need to apply the technology tools to ensure that individuals or groups aren’t flooding the site with multiple responses.

• Context. Each question should come with links to background information clearly and fairly representing all sides of an issue.

• Transparency. Providing full open access to all response data would make the process far more effective. Having a clear system for the difficult job of composing the poll questions would also make a difference.

…But Not Too Seriously

To avoid those “tyranny of the majority” and accountability issues, you’d need to be clear that the opinions the website collects are not legally binding on parliament. That way, a sitting government has the option of ignoring individual results, but also runs the risk of losing credibility if it exercises that veto too often. This would be especially true if heavy public opinion clearly lines up against existing government policy.

Keeping the results informal would also reduce the urgency of controlling user authentication. The consequences of a security breach wouldn’t be nearly as devastating as they would for a digital voting system.

It’s not like there haven’t been recent attempts at direct democracy - even in Canada. Just think of the Prohibition Referendum of 1898, the 1942 Conscription Crisis Referendum, two Quebec Referendums (1980 and 1995), and the 1992 Charlottetown Accord Referendum.

There are also many examples of public consultations around the world - particularly at the state and municipal levels. Besides the normal public consultation sessions, Toronto’s mayor offered a comprehensive online opinion survey to city residents before tabling her $17 billion 2024 budget. The city even released a brief summary of the results - which were so internally conflicted as to be near-impossible to honor.