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.]

Friday, February 22, 2013

Rise of democracy by petition could be a bad sign

Kennedy Stewart, the 46-year-old New Democratic Party MP for the British Columbia riding of Burnaby-Douglas, is a good egg. Before he was elected in 2011, Stewart was a tenured professor at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University. He’s the NDP’s science and technology critic. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Stewart is obviously a very smart guy, but he has this very big idea about how to revivify Canadian democracy, and if we’re all not very careful, Stewart’s idea will turn Parliament into an audience-participation reality show, like Dancing with the Stars. Or worse.

Stewart’s idea is catching on, not just within the NDP caucus but also among Liberal and Conservative MPs, and on the face of it what he is proposing is eminently sensible. The idea is to get with the times, go digital, and change the laws so that citizens can submit petitions to Parliament online, without resort to pen, paper and envelopes.

The way the law works now, petitions must have at least 25 signatures. Once a petition is tabled in the House of Commons, the government is obliged to answer the petitioners, one way or another, within 45 days. Stewart’s e-petitions would work much the same way, except that any petition that garnered 50,000 signatures would automatically trigger an hour of debate in the House of Commons — if at least five MPs agree. All petitions, too, would require some sort of government response.

Stewart laments the “disconnect” between the House of Commons and ordinary voters, and he proposes this new system as a means to address declining voter turnout at election time and “plunging levels of social capital” generally. The point of his e-petition initiative is to “give citizens more of a say in their own governance.”

The problem with this line of argument is that its logic is chasing its own tail: Why would Canadians want to more effectively “connect” with a Parliament that arbitrarily forced MPs to yammer uselessly about some arbitrary matter every time a particular government web page recorded an arbitrary number of clicks? And what would any of this have to do with actual governance?

“Part of the issue is the disconnect people feel between issues that impact their day-to-day lives and those being put on the parliamentary agenda,” Stewart explained when he introduced his e-petitions private member’s bill last week. “In order to counter this sense of disenfranchisement, all governments need to take immediate action to reverse disturbing trends.”

But there has been quite a bit of flotsam under the e-petition bridge since the government of Liberal prime minister Paul Martin first kicked around the e-petition idea back in 2004. Much of Europe has shifted to e-petitions, most notably Germany, and there is no evidence that the move has addressed “disenfranchisement” at all.

In 2005, Germany’s petition law was amended so that e-petitioners who managed to solicit 50,000 signatures were entitled to public meetings with the Bundestag’s petitions committee to discuss the legislation their petition was targeting. Young, educated activists have availed themselves of the new law, but that’s about it.

Britain’s Conservative-led coalition government found itself in an awkward spot in October 2011, when the first British e-petition to reach the required 100,000-signature threshold found its way to the House of Commons. MPs managed to dodge a debate on the petition — it had picked up a whopping 240,000 signatures — which called for welfare recipients convicted on charges related to the August 2011 riots to be stripped of their benefits. Instead, the “debate” allowed MPs to talk about everything except the issue of welfare benefits.

Under Britain’s rules, any petition that elicits 10,000 or more signatures receives at least a response from the relevant government department. After an initial burst of interest, the number of British petitions and the volume of signatures steadily dropped off.

In the United States, the opposite has been the case, and this has prompted the White House to raise the thresholds for government action.

When the U.S. “We The People” petition system launched in September, 2011, the White House was required to respond to any petition with 5,000 signatures. The threshold was then boosted to 25,000, and last month it was raised again, to 100,000.

By the end of 2012, the White House petition site had been used by at least five million people whose nearly 10 million signatures were affixed to more than 73,000 petitions. More than 100 “We The People” petitions had garnered sufficient signatures to warrant formal responses.

The White House has had to explain why President Barack Obama was not likely to order the construction and deployment of a Death Star, and why it would be wrong to deport CNN interview-show host Piers Morgan back to Britain. Oddly, roughly three-quarters of the American petitions concern appeals to allow certain states (usually Texas) to secede from the United States — a state of affairs that prompted 29,650 people to sign a petition calling on the White House to deport everyone who signed one of those secession petitions.

You could say that Canadians saw this coming. In November, 2000, the CBC’s Rick Mercer managed to raise more than 370,000 signatures on a petition to force a national referendum on whether Canadian Alliance Party leader Stockwell Day should change his name to Doris Day. Mercer’s mischief was intended to show that any jackass could get a petition going that would meet the Canadian Alliance’s proposed thresholds.

Kennedy Stewart is no jackass. There are dangerous ideas hovering at the edges of his private member’s bill, but they’re not all stupid ideas. Not by a long shot. Stewart should be allowed to proceed. But he should proceed with extreme caution.

Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Terry Glavin

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