A Modest Proposal To Improve Democracy In Canada

We must strengthen self-government by putting more Canadians in charge of the political agenda.

Ordinary people can make good political decisions. If that seems counterintuitive, blame the sample from which you draw your conclusion or the environment that leads us to make bad judgments. Because given the right circumstances, non-expert, day-to-day people can and do make good political decisions. Our democracy would be healthier if we had a standing national body that invited them to do so.

In 2019, I wrote a book about political decision making. I argued that members of a political community make bad political decisions all the time, but not because we’re unable to make good ones. Rather, it’s the structures, incentives, and nefarious actors around us who weaponize our psychological predispositions in such a way that we end up making uninformed, irrational, unreasonable decisions we can neither explain nor defend.

Chairs included. Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash

Under the right conditions, people can and will make rational, autonomous, consistent decisions for which they can give reasons to one another — and to themselves. Under these, assemblies can and will do the same. They will choose to discuss important issues in good faith; they will meet one another as moral and political equals; they will collect reliable information; they will assess that information; they will give reasons back and forth about what they prefer and why; they will reach a conclusion, if not a consensus, about what is to be done; they will respect the outcome and one another; they will leave the exercise with greater trust in the system and, indeed, the capacities and intentions of their peers. In short, they will deliberate.

Democratic deliberation by ordinary people isn’t a cure all, nor is it the only way to do democracy. A healthy democratic system is made up of varieties of political participation, some of which will be conflictual. Contemporary mass states will require legislatures made up of representatives elected by the population. That entails elections, political parties, and at least some level of partisanship, horse trading, debate, and theatrics. We can and should still incentivize and expect those representatives to deliberate with one another in good faith, but that will only get us so far. What if we want to go further?

To supplement our national legislature and improve our democratic politics and decision making in Canada, we ought to create a standing citizens' assembly (CA) that would raise and deliberate on issues of importance that would select and inform issues the elected legislature should consider and how they should to consider it.

The assembly would co-exist with the House of Commons and Senate, functioning as a citizen-led group to come up with policy solutions that politicians refuse to tackle or are unable or unwilling to address effectively. Members would be randomly selected through sortition, controlling for whichever variables we decide must be represented: region, gender, language, age, indigeneity, and so forth.

For a period of months or years, the asssembly would meet as needed — perhaps, eventually, in the House of Commons chambers built in West Block as a temporary home for members of Parliament while Centre Block undergoes renovation. The body would deliberate, be compensated for their time, have access to expert testimony, and make reports to the legislature and the public. They would sit as individuals, not as caucuses or parties. When their sittings were through, the body would dissolve and a new lot of participants would be chosen.

The assembly would have no power to legislate or make policy, only to advise. Their force would be the moral and political suasion developed through building trust with the population. Elected politicians could take or leave their advice, and pay the price accordingly. Members of the assembly could set their agenda based on the interests of ordinary people, removed from the political pressures of elections and strategic concerns. elected politicians would retain the final say over the national legislative agenda and would remain accountable through elections. The assembly would be a guide — and a useful one.

As always, governments would need to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons to govern. The assembly would have no direct standing on matters of confidence. We’d still have elections, which are necessary in our democracy but, as we’ve seen, insufficient to produce healthy political dialogue and agenda setting. Indeed, elections tend to be poor times for policy discussions as politicians focus more on strategic communications and media gets caught up in reporting the horse race.

This isn’t an original idea. Citizens’ assemblies, grounded in ideals that stretch back to antiquity, have been used around the world for decades. In Germany, the Bundestag used these groups “to obtain direct feedback from the center of society on a specific political issue, going beyond conventional methods such as opinion polls and lobbying.” Ontario and British Columbia each used a citizens’ assembly during their referendums on electoral reform just over two decades ago. The Council of Europe takes these assemblies seriously. The online encyclopedia of democratic participation, Participedia, lists hundreds of cases of CAs and other forms of democratic innovation.

We need a long term strategy to manage major political challenges. Elected politicians in the House of Commons and appointed politicians in the Senate aren’t, on their own, fit for the task. A standing assembly of Canadians would help us set a policy agenda that reflects the interests, needs, and priorities of the millions of people who are shut out of the political system. In the process, the CA would build civic capacity and trust. The only people who stand to lose are entrenched politicians and lobbyists. The rest of us, the majority of the country by far, stand to gain. So, too, do our democratic institutions, which would end up healthier and more robust for having the support of the complementary assembly — support our democracy desperately, and increasingly, needs.