Canadians and Democracy or the Great Truck Ball debacle.

by Joe Thornton

17 Feb 2022

What we are currently looking at is a marginal segment of Canadian society who have suddenly decided that because they aren’t being heard they have the right to make people listen.  So with that in mind they all saddled up their pickup trucks, balls dangling, rounded up a few semi’s and its off to the Ottawa rodeo. 

The problem with our representational democracy is that we elect people to speak for us.  We seldom have the opportunity to approach the king of the hill directly in any substantive manner.
 
Representational democracy generally allows for dissent to be heard and dealt with through discussion and a vote taken of those elected officials present – our Members of Parliament or at the provincial level our Members of Legislative Assembly.  Here’s the thing. If you don’t like what is happening in government the person for you to talk to is your representative. No one talks to their reps. No one makes them accountable. They keep electing them over and over for years without ever attending a constituency meeting or a townhall.
 
We have argued and discussed the shortcomings of such a system many times over the decades, always arriving at the conclusion that it’s still the best system we have, short of direct participation in democracy.

The problem with direct participation is that there are just too damn many of us. 27.4 million Eligible electors to be exact, more or less…  We’d never get anything passed ever if we had to wait for them all to have their say and vote.
Until now that is.

Electronically it might be possible to accomplish this by allotting a few moments daily while the house is sitting to vote via a secure electronic device on the issues of the day.  The internet and parliamentary servers would have to be beefed up somewhat to allow for that kind of traffic but that’s coming anyway… you know, “the Metaverse”.
 
That works until someone decides not to play. They want all the marbles and don’t want anyone else to have any.  These are the disrupters who don’t care what anyone else wants. They demand that their wants and desires apply to everyone else whether the others want them or not.

Then comes the small block protests who refrain from voting to prove their point, later coming out in opposition because they didn’t vote and their voices weren’t heard. Again with the pickup trucks and the semi’s and the hot tubs on Wellington…

In order to have a law and order society we need to have law and order. It is evident that occasionally the enforcement of those principals has to be more heavy handed than we would like.
 
The part of democracy that everyone is missing is “responsibility”.  We are all responsible to make democracy work. This is not a top down initiative, it is a bottom up action. Get with it Canada, we can be the crown jewel of democracy or continue to be the laughing stock of the world.