The Fair Vote Canada Election; Adventures in Constructive Shit Disturbing.
With Some Discussion of Deliberative Democracy and Greater Toronto Transit Policy.
I participated in the FVC candidates debate last week. There were fourteen of us running for six positions. I was running as a spoiler; trying to get the ossified FVC organization to start thinking beyond tweaking the election system and looking at what a real democracy would entail.
Further explanation of this is in the first two articles about FVC I recently wrote. The urls are at the bottom of this piece. I definitely had an opponent running the technical aspects of the ‘debate’.
She sent me an e-mail saying she resented my previous articles. She did not include me in her special list of Ontario candidates. I do not like people like that.
I have not been able to get around to finishing this and putting it out until after the voting has started. I think I can safely predict I will not win. I am not satisfied with my effects at getting my message across, which is what I was trying to do.
I am a really bad public speaker. This is partly because I do not get much practice at it. So I will try to get more practice. I will improve. But I will always have to talk through my fibrofog.
One problem I had that I did not realize until I watched the video replay on YouTube is that I have a lousy mike. It did not sound so bad played back in other recorded zoom conversations I have done. Still, I should have used my headphone. Also, I come across a lot better when I look straight at the camera and do not read.
Despite my difficulties, I will likely try running for the FVC board next year and maybe every year. I am participating in other activities which require me to do some speaking on zoom. I might even start making podcasts.
Some other frustrating things; when I held the two books up which I wanted them all to get and read, they looked backwards to me. I have noticed this on zoom; printed objects held up to the camera often appear in mirror image. But when I looked at the Youtube recording of the debate, they were right way around. People must have wondered what I was talking about.
Further impediments to my effort to get my subversive message across; I could not turn on the screen share and show the graphic I prepared showing URLs and book titles, and encourage people to screen shot it. I tried typing the information into the chat. They had restricted the chat and I only got this through to the other candidates.
They told me afterward that the second time I typed it, it got into the main chat. That is of limited value because I do not think many people went to the chat after being told it was restricted. Also, this information was not in the Youtube.
There were not many people online anyway; only about 60 for the whole of Canada. To repeat, readers on Twitter and other platforms can find the information I was trying to get across at the bottom of this. It includes the book titles and ISBN numbers.
Getting down to the debate itself.
Reviewing the Youtube recording of the candidate’s Q & A, I got more time to notice the other candidates. I have some idea who I will vote for, even though I am so cynical about the usefulness of FVC. I will generally vote for the younger ones. I will avoid the ones who are obvious career apparatchiks.
It is depressing to see young people backing FVC. I guess they just do not know better; they have not have a better view of reality shown them. I try, I try.
But people in their twenties in most western countries are out waving signs and getting gassed over the need for an end to capitalism and for a direct democracy. I generally like these generation Z people. I have generally small patience with the boomers of my own generation.
People in Europe, who generally have proportional systems, or have had one, are much further ahead of North American people on the need to go to a direct, or more precisely, a deliberative democracy. Could it be as simple as; people in Canada have to try a proportional system and discover it still does not provide them with a well functioning government?
The point I keep hammering is that Proportional Representation (PR) governments in Europe, where they invented it a century ago, have not been performing well in this century. Canadian PR people are fixated on the “New Zealand” experiment, which I think gave the founders of FVC their idea. PR has definitely had a positive effect in New Zealand.
New Zealand connection
I do not think FVC pays enough attention to the Canadian Born New Zealander who helped organize the referendum on New Zealand PR in the 1990s. This person has observed that the Canadian PR movement has faced far more intense resistance from the oligarchy. He believes that New Zealand only achieved PR by dumb luck in a time before oligarchic methods of population control and perception management improved.
Running for the board of FVC is another New Zealander. This one was born in kiwi land and migrated to Canada for some reason. He is another one of the twenty somethings in the race who are optimistic about PR in Canada.
I am only going to discuss his basic theme here. I had the idea of responding in this piece to the best arguments about PR but I am disappointed. His is the only really interesting take on the topic of PR.
Very few of these candidates offer any kind of argument at all for PR. These people are just debating about who will best carry out the FVC’s set-in-concrete arguments and course of action. The message of FVC has become a kind of party line.
Analyzing GTA transit through the lens of PR
My kiwi friend decided to use the inability of governments at three levels to implement a transit strategy for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. He notes how poorly transit is organized in our mighty conurbation. His analysis is the same as many observers of Canadian politics; the seesawing of policy caused by the two party system.
One government puts a program in place then loses office. Another party comes in and scraps it all and tries to put into effect a different policy. So nothing gets done. This, however, is just surface effects.
The theory is that a PR system will change this. The political parties will all cooperate somehow and agree on a policy and start building out a new transit system. People who think this will happen if there is a PR government at Queen’s park need to look more closely at what has been happening.
The first issue is that responsibility for the transit system is split between multiple levels of government and multiple local governments.This was set up in colonial times, it has become very dysfunctional, and there is no way to restructure government in a way that makes sense. Government cannot reform itself.
The second issue is there is no real democracy in Canada anyway. If there were, the public would be able to deliberate and reconstruct government in the GTA, set it up in a logical way. We live in an oligarchy and politics here is about struggles among oligarchic factions.
These are the causal factors in Greater Toronto’s failure to build its transit system. Also, its inability to move to a more democratic system of government. Powerful factions are not so much interested in forcing their own ideas forward as they are in preventing anything happening which might negatively effect their interests.
This culture of immobilism has strangled all of Canada since the nineteen eighties. It is only going to be broken by some type of revolution. It is also frequently noted by some of the more intelligent commentators that Canada’s biggest problem is that it has not had a revolution, a real shake up, in a very long time.
I hate to throw such a wet blanket over my opponent in the FVC election campaign, but nothing else is ever going to lead to a functional transit system in GTA, or to any change in the way the Ontario legislature is voted in. This is why he needs to forget about PR and start looking at what it will take to get a deliberative democracy going in Ontario, the GTA, and Canada.
To tie up the remaining threads of my argument that PR will not fix transit in GTA; there are no political parties in local politics in GTA. Most of the obstruction of transit development comes from within the GTA, not from the provincial or federal governments. There is a strong faction in the local oligarchy which is dead set against a surface transit system; it wants only cars and a limited subway network.
The present government structure leaves a great number of vectors from which this faction can drive spikes into any attempt at a surface system. From the performance of government in many PR counties in recent decades, a multiparty system would likely open up even more vectors. It is not a matter of one party blocking action but of no party being able to act on its own.
Conclusions about how a real democracy breaks out
PR will not stop destructive conflicts between powerful oligarchic factions. A real democracy will; that is the usual reason why a real democracy develops. It is not just about ‘the people’ rising up.
Most revolutions leading to the establishment of a successful democracy happened because part of the elites realized that the only way to end the fighting between oligarchic factions is to establish The Demos as a neutral force which can create stability. This concept will give the conniptions to political theorists from the far left to the far right.
This will also perturb most members of FVC. But this is what is really wrong with the system of Proportional Representation. It is still all about political parties. It is still about interest protecting behaviour of powerful factions. It does not necessarily lead to compromise.
To wrap this up; my jag in relation to FVC will continue to be to get them to start looking beyond voting systems to the idea of deliberative democracy.
Resources; links
On the relationship between Voting Reform and Democracy.
https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2021/05/06/on-the-relationship-between-voting-reform-and-democracy/
FVC and poor old Me
https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/fvc-and-poor-old-me/
Books
They Can’t Represent us Sitran &Azellini ISBN 978-107816097-1
Against Elections Van Reybrouck ISBN 978-1-60980-810-5