Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Don’t look to provincial politics for a change from Harper’s vision

VANCOUVER—Connect the dots between the defeated Jean Charest, the departing Dalton McGuinty and the embattled Christy Clark and what you get are three parties whose political capital has been severely depleted by a decade in power.

The symptoms may be specific to each province but the illness that is plaguing the governance of Ontario and British Columbia this fall is not fundamentally different from that which recently claimed the life of Quebec’s three-term Liberal government. And the prognosis for both ailing ruling parties is not promising.

In what turned out to be the dying throes of his government last spring, Charest was so obviously running on empty that he could not even lead Quebec to a negotiated settlement on a normally minor issue of a hike in tuition fees.

The government’s confrontation with the student movement festered until it bloomed into a crisis that threatened the day-to-day governance of the province. But at least the National Assembly stayed open.

By comparison to Montreal last spring, the streets of Toronto and Vancouver are quiet this fall. But then so are the legislatures of Ontario and British Columbia.

In both provinces, the opposition has been shut out by a governing party too preoccupied with its own fate to fulfill its basic legislative duties.

In Ontario, the notion of advancing even a minimally ambitious policy agenda in the context of the looming retirement of the two most prominent figures in the government — the premier and the minister of finance — flies in the face of political reality.

So does the idea that winning the confidence of the Liberal party in a leadership vote will ensure that the next premier will have a sufficiently credible mandate to implement his or her vision for Ontario in a minority setting.

There is a reason why few minority governments change the guard mid-course.

The ruling Ontario Liberals are not the only ones who are treating the public to the illusion that they are in a position to offer more than caretaking services this fall.

In B.C., Premier Christy Clark has been trying to draw Alberta (and the federal government) into an electorally-beneficial discussion of the Northern Gateway pipeline.

But with polls showing her Liberals lagging far behind the NDP, it would be only human for her would-be negotiating partners to conclude that any agreement arranged with the current B.C. government could have a severely limited shelf life.

In the unlikely event that all came to the table and arrived at a resolution of their differences over the pipeline project, the prospects that it would survive a plebiscite-style provincial election next May are somewhere between slim and none.

With a conditional sovereigntist government in place in Quebec; a decapitated Liberal government at Queen’s Park and a party whose days look like they are numbered in power in Victoria, political instability in three of the four largest provinces is at an unprecedented high.

On a very good day, none of those provincial governments can claim to speak for more than a third of its electorate.

From achieving sovereignty in the case of the PQ, to implementing austerity measures in Ontario, or to striking a saleable environment/energy balance in B.C., none of the three ruling parties is in a strong position to secure a mandate to move forward.

These days, the premiers who are at the top of their game often hail from the same political family as Stephen Harper. And Canadians looking for an alternative vision of the country to that of the ruling federal Conservatives would be best advised to focus on the opposition parties in the House of Commons.

Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Chantal Hébert

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