DREAM OF DEMOCRACY 2: What is 'Canada'?

Last time around I talked about recent evidence that we don’t live in the sort of democratic society we like to think we do. This time I want to consider what to do when you wake up one crisp, bright morning and discover that you live in a society that is neither just nor a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word? First off, you need to calm down, have a coffee, and accept that this is nothing new. There is not now, nor has there ever (yet) been, a truly just or democratic society.

As with 'Christianity', 'communism', or any other another admirable idea that never played out as more than a bad joke in society-wide practise, 'democracy' is a fine dream still waiting to be realized. As it stands, we all dwell in militarized nation-states that protect their power and wealth with blinkered eyes and white-knuckled fists. As Bob Dylan once sang, “democracy don’t rule the world/you better get that through your head/this world is ruled by violence, but I guess that’s better left unsaid”. Both our material wealth and the thin veneer of democracy that wealth allows us exists in tandem with, indeed, because of massive injustice, suffering and death, both at home and around the world.

In other words, as it stands, there is no justice in the world, assuming one accepts the precept that all human lives have equal value and that justice for one means justice for all. If we try to argue that Canada is in some ways a just nation, we need look no further than the evidence of our sweat shop-produced possessions to see that this is not the case. Justice within national borders bought at the expense of injustice outside these same borders isn’t justice at all—unless we don’t believe that non-wealthy people are human.

Similarly, we cannot claim that our elected government enforces the true will of the people as it wastes our resources, ravages our land, and allows people to live in poverty, both at home and abroad in nations that supply us with our wealth. None of this is disputable; none of this should be considered controversial. These are merely facts that have been documented again and again.

Practised democracy was a farce when a slave-owning Jefferson espoused its virtues, and it remains a farce today when the 'developed world' exports its need for slave labour to the 'developing' world while professing universal brotherhood at home for the consumption of its citizenry. Critics of professedly democratic nations usually point to the voting process whereby an under-informed and deluded public, manipulated by politicians and corporate interests, elect leaders whose real constituencies are never publicly acknowledged (corporate masters, vanity, blinkered ideologies, horoscopes, spouses, polls) and then wash their hands and relinquish all control of their political lives for the next four or five years.

What is usually forgotten, however, is that voting is not the alpha and omega of democracy. An elected government isn't supposed to be able to do anything its Grinch-like heart desires. It is (or is supposed to be) subservient to a constitution. In fact, the textbook definition of a democratic republic is of a society ruled by a constitution. The constitution, in turn, is administered and enforced by the government of the day. Governments come and go, the theory goes, but the constitution remains the same.

So we’d better be pretty certain we’ve got a strong constitution, right? Well, we don’t.

Simple constitutional reform could, with the stroke of a pen, eliminate corporate influence from media and government, make illegal the bitter fruits of sweat shop misery, ensure an end to global warming, or enshrine basic rights to health care or food and shelter for all of a nation’s citizens. And yet this avenue of justice is rarely explored. The reason is obvious: politicians are de facto constitutional gatekeepers and, generally, enemies of constitutional reform, given that they are prime beneficiaries of the status quo.

Perhaps what is needed in order to make democracy more than a dream is a serious effort by the public to bypass politicians and re-make their constitutions so that they more closely reflect citizens' shared values. Do Canadians think sweatshops and global warming are unacceptable? Yes. Do Canadians have any meaningful way to act on their beliefs in the current context? No.

Constitutions are humanity's only alternative to giving ultimate authority to corruptible individuals and are a universal human need, as yet unrealized, whether one be Afghani, Russian, Palestinian, or Canadian. Perhaps we can find the seeds of true human brotherhood here, in our common, unrealized dreams of justice.

At present, though, all we have is the status quo. There is an arbitrary land mass in the northern hemisphere. People call it ‘Canada’. There are a group of people who claim to be in charge of ‘Canada’. They call themselves the ‘government of Canada’ and the ‘citizens of Canada’. There is a fairly weak document called the ‘Canadian Constitution’ that purports to look after the interests of the people. It does a fairly poor job of this: can anyone deny it?

In effect, this status quo amounts to, not justifiable sovereignty over the land and its people but a dictatorship. We assume that the system with which we are saddled is somehow inherently legitimate. But is it?

More next time.