Max Cameron

The time between now and the convention will be rocky for the NDP. Will the Liberals capitalize on the inevitable disarray in the NDP, or will the two parties form a coalition or alliance? The best strategy would be a coalition but the strategic position of both parties will make this hard. See: Ottawa Citizen.

The following story appeared in Embassy, August 24, 2011.

Harper avoids sticking points in Americas speeches

By Anca Gurzu

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speeches in Latin America show he appreciates more than ever how Brazil projects power over the region, say experts—and how he is willing to avoid sticking points.

Mr. Harper’s speeches in Brasília and São Paulo painted a flattering picture of the South American giant. They both had rhetorical flourish, which was especially apparent in the latter. But Latin American analysts say they also took great pains to leave out uncomfortable topics in the region such as the Organization of American States and the Mercosur trade bloc.

They argue his speeches in Bogota, San José and San Pedro Sula, on the other hand, were still warm but considerably more formal, and thus re-emphasized that the prime minister’s true challenge was Brazil.

Praise for Brazil leaves out sticking points

Mr. Harper visited the four countries from Aug. 7 to 12 on a six-day trip widely seen as an attempt to diversify trade links, but also to bolster an Americas Strategy that was seen as lacking focus even from within the Foreign Affairs department.

The prime minister’s first two speeches in Brazil highlight Canada’s clear interest in the economic opportunities the BRIC country has to offer. Especially in the second speech, Mr. Harper evoked “powerful energy and enthusiasm” coming from the “soaring buildings, the bustling construction activity, the beauty of the surrounding region.”

He lavished praise on the country, saying Brazil is a “new industrial power,” “a clean energy giant” and “a powerful democracy at the hub of a great continent.”

The prime minister’s courting also aimed to put Brazil on equal footing with Canada at the international level, stressing the two countries’ collaboration on a variety of global issues including Haiti and the global economic recovery in the G20.

In fact, only in Brazil did Mr. Harper put Canada, the host country and the rest of the world in the same context, said Max Cameron, director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia and an expert on Latin America.

“Not many countries in Latin America have the capacity to project power over the region and Harper acknowledges this about Brazil,” he said.

But what was missing in the foreign policy discussion is any mention of the Organization of American States—outside of acknowledging the return of Honduras to the body. The OAS is an entity that Canada has been highly engaged in, but which is not on Brazil’s favourites’ list, said Jean Daudelin, a professor at Carleton University who specializes in Latin America.

“There is no point in trying to push those institutions there, and that was clever,” Mr. Daudelin said.

Mr. Cameron also said that the OAS “is not the alpha omega of [Brazil's] foreign policy,” and that its lack of presence in the speeches in Brazil is a recognition that the country prefers other types of sub-regional multilateralism.

As well, only twice did Mr. Harper directly allude to the current exploratory trade talks between Canada and Mercosur, the trade bloc consisting of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Instead, he chose to emphasize the continuous exploration of bilateral trade and investment opportunities.

He singled out existing and new Canada-Brazil agreements, like the CEO forum, but also specific industries where the two countries could find mutual benefits, such as aerospace and infrastructure.

Mr. Daudelin speculates that Mr. Harper chose not to emphasize a trade deal with Mercosur too much due to Venezuela’s efforts to become a member. The Harper government has been cool to the government of Hugo Chavez, saying he was “shrinking democratic space” in the country.

Other speeches shorter

While the prime minister delivered uncommonly flowery speeches in Brazil, he returned to the usual formal and direct, but still warm, discourse in Colombia, Honduras and Costa Rica.

That’s because the real test of Canada’s America’s Strategy was indeed Brazil, Mr. Cameron said.

During Mr. Harper’s visit to Bogota he announced the official launch of the free trade deal between Canada and Colombia; in Honduras he announced the two countries have concluded negotiations; and in Costa Rica he spoke about updating the already-existing trade deal.

There was nothing in those moves that indicated big changes in Canadian foreign policy, Mr. Cameron said.

“It’s all business as usual. The test was to go to Brazil and make a commitment to spend more time in the region. I think that is novel.”

But the prime minister could have used his trip to Honduras, for example, to make a stronger statement on the importance of defending democratic institutions, Mr. Daudelin said, especially since Canada supported the re-inclusion of the country in the OAS.

Honduras was suspended from the OAS in 2009 after a coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya. In his speech, Mr. Harper re-iterated Canada’s support for Honduras and praised the country for establishing a ministry dedicated to justice and human rights.

But Mr. Daudelin said the prime minister’s speech in Honduras was disappointing, considering Canada’s strong leverage there.

In Colombia, Mr. Harper acknowledged the country’s progress in security and human rights, while observers describe the prime minister’s trip and relationship with Costa Rica as “easy.”

agurzu@embassymag.ca

Vote-splitting and bitter memories of Alberto Fujimori handed the left a victory.

The Mark, 8 June 2011.

By Max Cameron and Fabiola Bazo

What can explain the election of a leftist, nationalist, anti-system candidate in a country that has experienced extraordinary rates of economic growth and significant poverty reduction for the better part of the past decade?

In the first place, the explanation lies in the failure of centre-right candidates in Peru to co-ordinate their strategies around a single leader. Had the democratic right not split its vote between former president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) and his erstwhile premier and finance minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the outcome might well have been a pro-system, free market-oriented president with a strong mandate.

In a run-off, Toledo would probably have won handily over either victor Ollanta Humala or Keiko Fujimori. In technical terms, he was the Condorcet winner.

The division of the centre-right in the first round, on April 10, opened the door to a run-off between extremists on June 5. Logically, they had to compete for votes in the centre. Humala moderated his image, abandoning Bolivarian rhetoric from his earlier campaign in 2006, and instead posturing as an apostle of the highly successful former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The conversion to moderation and democratic respectability was difficult to sell. Many voters remembered that Humala led a military uprising in 2000, in the dying days of the Alberto Fujimori government, and later offered rhetorical support to an ill-conceived rebellion in Andahuaylas led by his brother, Antauro, in 2005. His own record in combat as a soldier in the 1990s suggested possible human-rights abuses.

But Humala’s competition had to make an equally difficult sales pitch. Keiko Fujimori tried to shake charges that she only sought power in order to free her father, Alberto, who is currently serving a 25-year prison term for human-rights crimes and corruption during his term in office, from 1990 to 2000.

She claimed, unpersuasively, that she would not pardon her father; worse still, her campaign elicited memories of her father’s autocratic and corrupt style, and her entourage included many faces from his government. She handed out food in exchange for support, and ostensibly allowed campaign operations to be run out of her father’s prison compound.

There were rumours that Alan Garcia, the sitting president, was placing intelligence operations at her service, as he had in 1990 when Alberto Fujimori was first elected. In the final days of the campaign, a telemarketer, posing as part of Humala’s campaign, spread rumors that Humala would expel Chileans from Peru, mistreat investors, or was being promoted by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

As the election date drew near, there were multitudinous protests against Keiko Fujimori that reminded Peruvians about human-rights abuses – including massive programs of sterilization of women without their consent – during her father’s reign.

In the end, the outcome of the election was a replay of 2006, except that Humala narrowly won rather than lost. As before, he won by a considerable margin in rural areas, especially the southern highlands, where Peru’s indigenous and peasant voters expressed, yet again, their desire for change. He fought hard to win votes in Lima and the coast, where prosperity has trickled down more rapidly, but was outpolled by Fujimori by a margin of 3 to 2.

For some observers, the idea of a Humala victory in 2011 was inconceivable. It was thought that if he lost in 2006, surely he would win even fewer votes this time around after another five years of growth. It was precisely this overconfidence that led the centre-right to fail to unify behind a single candidate with broad appeal. Moreover, after five years of growth, prosperity remained unequally distributed and heavily concentrated in Lima and the coast.

For years, social scientists have insisted that Peru’s democracy needs strong political parties, and its open economy, export-driven model must be more inclusive. These pleas have all too often been met with complacent yawns and smug rebuffs. “Peru has never had strong parties,” said some. “Modernity can be achieved through growth first; prosperity will trickle down over time,” said others.

As a result, Peruvians have managed to elect an anti-system candidate who has no real party organization, 46 seats in a 130-seat legislature, and a very weak mandate from the people. He will govern in a climate of hostility from the media, business, and much of the political establishment. Yet he has created expectations among his followers and he will have to deliver results.

Humala would do well to follow the model of Lula, as he has promised. He should provide reassurances to investors. This does not preclude mutually agreeable renegotiation of contracts; indeed, several contracts negotiated in the 1990s are soon due to expire and have to be renewed. He should also focus much of his energy on poverty alleviation in the areas most neglected by previous administrations.

He should make political reforms a top priority, but not with a wholesale rewriting of the constitution. The most pressing reforms don’t require constitutional change; they demand a vigorous modernization of Peru’s corrupt and inefficient judiciary and penal system.

Humala should root out malfeasance in public administration wherever possible. Drug trafficking has become a major problem in Peru, and it has started to penetrate the highest levels of power.

Finally, Humala can put Peru in step with the rest of the Andean sub-region by adopting new participatory innovations – referenda and recall, citizen initiatives, community councils, policy consultations. Participatory budgeting is already being practised in municipalities throughout Peru. Consultations with indigenous people should be used routinely to address resource extraction on ancestral lands.

All this can be done within the framework of Peru’s democracy, while fully respecting basic constitutional precepts and the rule of law. The real question, however, may be whether Humala can deliver the goods.

Financial Times
May 31, 2011 7:20 pm by beyondbrics

By Max Cameron and Michael Marx McCarthy

This Sunday, when Peruvians go to the polls to elect a new single-term president, they will be casting their ballots in an echo chamber of analogies.

In politics, analogies can make game changing differences. Saddam Hussein was an Adolf Hitler. Nelson Mandela fathered a new South Africa. Obama represents the Joshua generation.

Sometimes these analogies hit the mark. They can reveal a profound truth by finding a hidden connection. Other times, they are more like card tricks, revealing less than they hide.

The front-runner in the first round of the election, Ollanta Humala, has been compared to Hugo Chávez. According to his critics, he would trample on Peru’s democratic institutions and create a self-perpetuating quasi-dictatorship.

The other candidate, Keiko Fujimori, has been called a Trojan horse who would take Peru back to the decade of the 1990s when her father ruled through a combination of bribery, blackmail, and abuse of power.

These analogies are both true and false.

Humala would not govern like Chávez because conditions in Peru are totally unlike those in Venezuela, which occasioned a system breakdown and paved the way for Chávez’s rise to power in 1998. Peru’s economy has been booming like thunder for a decade and millions have been lifted out of poverty.

No fundamental reversal of the policies that produced this socio-economic change is at issue. Rather, an urgently needed debate over wealth distribution has been stimulated by Humala’s candidacy.

Peru’s economic boom has resulted in a substantial reduction of poverty.

Today about a third of the country is poor, down from half the country a decade ago. But growth has been concentrated in Lima and the coast. In the south and central highlands and in the Amazonian jungle, poverty remains high and a ‘wild west’ approach to natural resource extraction has intensified conflict.

Indigenous Aymara in the highland city of Puno have captured headlines in the midst of the election campaign with protests against plans by Bear Creek, a Canadian miner, to open a silver mine that protestors say would pollute Lake Titicaca. A combination of negative environmental side-effects and a struggle over economic rents generated from these activities could fuel another cycle of violence and repression.

These pressures raise questions about Peru’s political institutions, which are not as robust as those of Chile and Uruguay, for example, often praised as poster children for democracy in the region. But the sky is not falling. A major collapse that would create an environment fertile for a ‘salve patria’ mission is unlikely.

To make Chávez-like changes, Humala would need a huge coalition hungry for major political transformation. This he does not have.

Moreover, one of Chávez’s most vocal critics in the region, Mario Vargas Llosa, is now supporting Humala.

He and other liberal intellectuals, including his son Alvaro, could convince undecided moderate voters that a Keiko presidency would not be compatible with democracy.

Their support for Humala stems from two factors: Humala’s move to the center and pledge to respect Peru’s democratic rules; and the direct connection that exists between Keiko and her father Alberto Fujimori, the former president who wielded power ruthlessly and arbitrarily in the 1990s.

Keiko was part of her father’s government, if only as “first lady” (a stand-in role that she assumed after her mother was brutally mistreated by her father). She has not repudiated her father’s policies, and we suspect she would release him from prison where he is serving a 25 year sentence for corruption and crimes against humanity. In fact, her campaign appears to have been run, in part, out of the penitentiary where father Fujimori is incarcerated.

Critics say the very same dirty tricks he used to perpetuate himself in power have been used in her campaign.

When a journalist in one of two pro-Humala newspapers revealed that the Peruvian military intelligence service was engaged in dirty tricks to support her campaign, the editor received a funereal bouquet. Another newspaper that is more sympathetic to Humala was purchased on masse to prevent circulation in certain districts of Lima. Much of the media is heavily biased against Humala, abandoning any pretense to neutrality in news reporting.

If she pardoned her father and attacked the judges who put him behind bars there is a danger that the entire mafia that ran the judiciary and armed forces, and which was never entirely purged by previous governments, would be reactivated.

Then there is the key matter of powerful interests and checks and balances, the main reason she represents by far the greater danger to Peru’s democracy.

Keiko has few incentives to govern democratically, while Humala faces constraints that may force him to govern democratically.

She would govern with the collaboration of powerful de facto interests – big business, the media, the armed forces, the most socially conservative forces within the Catholic and evangelical churches, and much of the political establishment – which would be all too pleased to watch as she imposed a “mano dura” (or iron fist) on crime and dissent, applied band-aide solutions for poverty, and asked for kickbacks in exchange for continuing “open for business” economic policies.

Humala, on the other hand, would be hemmed in on every corner. A hostile business community, rabidly critical media, nervous armed force, and all the corrupt office holders in congress, the courts and the judiciary would do everything possible to keep him off balance. The only way for him to govern would be to take the higher ground and rule democratically, since the legitimacy of his right to rule would not be backed by Peru’s powerful private actors.

All this tells us that Peru has a long way to go before it becomes a stable democracy with good governance and laws. For these ‘democratic consolidation’ strides to be taken, powerful actors will have to lose power.

Convincing elites that such a recalibration is a positive sum game will be difficult. But if Peru’s elites were to look east, across the Andes to Brazil, they would find inspiration from an elite that learned a worker’s political party headed by a worker could be good for business, good for democracy, and good for the welfare of society.

As the region’s weathering of the Great Recession shows, the Latin American left can be quite good for domestic and international business. Indeed, these elections, beyond determining the future trajectory of Peru, hold major implications for the ‘growth with equity’ development model.

An Humala presidency would broaden the reach of that social democratic model. A Keiko presidency would damage democracy and pay lip service to equity while growing the fortunes of the rich even more.

The bigger danger is not that Humala would reveal himself to be a wolf in sheep’s skin. It is, we fear, that he would turn out be like Obama: that he would come to power and find himself able to do very little to address his country’s deeper structural problems.

Max Cameron, a Peru specialist, is Professor of Political Science in the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. Michael Marx McCarthy is a doctoral candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University.

A lively panel was held at UBC on the federal elections. It was sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. See the live blog for a blow-by-blow account. Here is a report from The Province:

The Province, 4 May 2011, p. A6.

Experts clash on Liberals’ future: Comeback kid or ‘toast’

By Ian Austin

Even the experts can’t agree on what Canada’s confounding election results mean.

At a panel discussion of University of B.C. political experts Tuesday, political scientists disagreed fundamentally on whether the Liberals’ dismal thirdplace showing means the death of the party or a potential for rebirth.

“I can quite easily see the Liberals winning the next election,” Prof. Fred Cutler told a surprised roomful of fascinated students.

“I can see the Liberal Party coming back with a bilingual leader who has credibility in Quebec and gaining 200 seats.

“The Liberal Party still got 20 per cent of the vote.”

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff resigned after the party was pummeled Monday night.

Regardless of who the Liberals choose as a new leader, Prof. Richard Johnston predicted the Liberal Party is finished.

“I think they are toast,” said Johnston. “I think the centre is extremely difficult to defend.”

The panel was somewhat astonished by the NDP’s strong showing in Quebec -but cautioned that the province tends to change on a dime from party to party.

“Quebec continues to be the great unknown,” said Prof. Ken Carty, who noted the party is just the latest to sweep Quebec, following the Bloc Quebecois, the Conservatives and the Liberals.

Cutler said Harper can’t stray too far to the right if he wants to be reelected, citing many close races in the Toronto area where MPs will be defeated if Harper moves too quickly and too far to the right.

The panel was split on how effective Green Leader Elizabeth May can be as her party’s only MP.

- Voter turnout Monday was 61.4 per cent, up from 58.8 per cent in 2008, when the Tories earned a minority win. In B.C., the 2011 turnout was 61.1 per cent, up from 60.1 per cent.

iaustin@theprovince.com

Photo credit: Ken Cameron

Maxwell A. Cameron

Politicians are storytellers. At best, their stories become part of the narrative of the nation. At the least, they offer us reasons to support them—reasons to believe that their cause is ours.

Stephen Harper offered a compelling narrative to his supporters. The election was not about him, he insisted. It was an unnecessary election, brought on by squabbling politicians, and it threatened to derail the economic recovery that his government had achieved.

For those who did not support Harper, his attacks on the other leaders for their excessive ambition seemed pretty rich. But that did not matter because Harper framed the election debate so that it was not about him but about the other leaders and their desire to replace the government with a coalition that would be nobody’s first choice.

The strategy worked against Michael Ignatieff, the target of most of the Tory attack ads. Ignatieff was particularly vulnerable because he had spent his life outside Canadian politics, and could be dismissed as “just visiting.” Worse, he appeared ambitious without explaining the source of his lust for power.

Ignatieff failed to provide a competing narrative that would frame the election in a way that people could identify with. Having supported the war in Iraq he could hardly be an avatar of Pearsonian internationalism. As someone who called himself an American, he couldn’t captivate Canadian nationalists.

Layton benefited from Ignatieff’s weakness. His feisty debate performance reframed the election as a three-way fight. His expressed desire to be the Prime Minister was crucial to making the case that he was a real contender. Ignatieff’s ambition became an embarrassment, but for Layton it was critical to his credibility.

Layton was able to frame the debate, not in ideological terms, but as a choice between change and more of the same. With a leaf taken from the Obama campaign (“We can do this” rather than “Yes we can”), he argued that Ottawa was broken. His success in Quebec—a long sought prize for the NDP, it must be stressed—eliminated the single biggest barrier to the growth of the NDP elsewhere. This produced a massive realignment.

As the official opposition, the NDP will be in a good position to develop the narrative of change that has worked so far. It would have been very difficult to be leader of the opposition in a hung parliament. But for New Democrats, victory is bitter sweet.

A Tory majority means the better part of half a decade more of inaction on the climate crisis, to name but one example of the kinds of issues that will rile the NDP (and part of the Liberal) base. If Liberals and New Democrats think the Conservatives governed undemocratically in a minority government, they can anticipate a much more radical approach from a Conservative majority.

The big question we are left with is whether Canadian politics will now polarize along left-right lines or will the NDP find a way of working with the Liberals (and, at last, one Green MP) to reclaim the centre? Already there are voices calling for a new liberal democratic party to represent the 60 percent of the electorate that did not want this election result. For this to work, however, the Liberal Party must examine itself and come up with a better message about why it matters and a better messenger to deliver it.

by Max Cameron and Fabiola Bazo
The Mark
April 14, 2011

The resurgence of the Fujimori family in this year’s elections threatens Peru’s development.
This past Sunday, Peruvian voters selected Ollanta Humala (under the banner of Gana Perú) and Keiko Fujimori (Fuerza 2011) to enter a second round of voting, or ballotage. Voters chose between 10 candidates for the presidency, and from 13 congressional slates. Definitive parliamentary results will not be known for days (or weeks), but it appears that Gana Perú and Fuerza 2011 will obtain the largest number of seats in Congress, followed by Alejandro Toledo’s Perú Posible. The runoff will be held on Sunday, June 5.

Humala was the only candidate to occupy the centre-left of the political spectrum. This is what got him into the top running in the last presidential election (2006). At that time, he lost in the runoff against a superior tactician, Peru’s current president, Alan García of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA). Under an amendment to Peru’s 1993 constitution, García was not allowed to run for re-election this time, and APRA did not even field a presidential candidate.

Unlike in 2006, when Humala aligned himself with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, in this election he has presented himself as a leader in the mould of the former moderate-leftist president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. By running a tighter, more professional campaign – one that cast him in a kinder, gentler light, as a caring father and husband and a moderate democratic leader – Humala significantly lowered the number of voters who viewed him negatively.

Humala’s success in the first round exposed the errors of politicians on the democratic right, many of whom believed that García’s victory in 2006 signalled the definitive triumph of moderation and market-friendly policies over populist nationalism. If Humala failed in 2006, they reasoned, his chances were even bleaker in 2011 after another five years of rapid economic growth. The assumption that the economic model was not at risk lulled the right into complacency.

Discounting the need for unity, the right ran three candidates rather than one: Alejandro Toledo (Perú Posible), president from 2001-2006; Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (Alianza por el Gran Cambio), former prime minister and minister of finance in the Alejandro Toledo administration – which ran the country from 2001 to 2006; and Luis Castañeda Lossio (Solidaridad Nacional), former mayor of Lima. Try as many did, Peru’s right could not unite for this election.

Running against Humala is Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity. A victory by Keiko Fujimori would be a serious setback for Peru’s democracy. It would open the doors to the return to mafia rule and rampant corruption, to the abuse of power, and to the violation of basic constitutional precepts. It would also be a step toward the consolidation of a dynasty: Keiko Fujimori is not the only member of the Fujimori family to do well in this election. Alberto Fujimori’s youngest son, Kenyi Fujimori, who ran for Congress, appears to have obtained the largest number of votes in Lima, just as Keiko did in 2006. Many believe that, if she were elected, Keiko would immediately pardon her father. The joke is already circulating that Kenyi will run in 2021 so he can pardon Keiko, a clear allusion to the view that Keiko would end up in jail at the end of her mandate, as her father did, for human right abuses and corruption.

By Maxwell A. Cameron
Embassy
April 13, 2011

Support for democracy is a central pillar of the Harper government’s policy of re-engagement with the Americas. To this end, the government created a ministerial post responsible for foreign affairs in the Americas in 2008, which Peter Kent held until he was replaced by Diane Ablonczy in a Cabinet shuffle in January.

Minister Kent played an active and constructive role at the Organization of American States, the Western Hemisphere’s main multilateral body. After the June 2009 coup in Honduras, for example, Canada joined the rest of the region in expelling Honduras from the OAS, and Kent later played a role in seeking a resolution to the diplomatic crisis.

The Harper government has also taken less visible steps, such as creating a “hub of democracy” in the region. The Andean Unit for Democratic Governance places civil servants responsible for developing democracy assistance policies in the region, thereby ensuring those policies reflect the complexities and subtleties of reality on the ground, and ensuring a sustained presence in the region.

Funding has been provided to intergovernmental organizations like International IDEA. And the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Glyn Berry Program for Peace and Security puts citizens at the centre of democracy assistance programs.

On the downside, however, Canadian policy has tended to be more in tune with the thinking in Washington than the rest of the region. Canada accepted the victory of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo in Honduras’s December 2009 election, for example. Many other nations of the Americas argued that the elections were not legitimate, and Honduras remains excluded from the OAS to this day. This has not stopped Canada from initiating free trade negotiations with the Lobo government.

When Canada has pursued policies distinct from the United States—like making aid to Bolivia a priority, and avoiding antagonizing the government of Evo Morales—policymakers in the region have not always registered such nuances. Canada and the United States were both excluded from the Latin American and Caribbean Unity Summit in 2010, and neither country was offered membership in the newly formed UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations.

Perhaps the biggest obstacles to deeper engagement with the Americas have been domestic. A minority government situation is probably responsible for the lethargy in the government’s democracy agenda. But the Harper government has not moved forward on its policy response to a major statement by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development with respect to democracy assistance. It has not created the Canadian Democracy Promotion Agency that was announced in a throne speech in 2008.

The policy of engagement with Latin American democracies needs an injection of resources, imagination and political will. Canada can regain influence by funding sustained on-the-ground engagement, and by giving a longer leash to Canadian diplomats.

It could promote dialogue with civil society in the region, and fund Canadian non-governmental organizations (like KAIROS and the Canadian Council for International Co-operation) that build bridges with the region.

Finally, Canada could link practitioners and researchers, and use social media to promote dialogue and deliberation in cyberspace.

Canada could also promote democratization at the global as well as local levels. The OAS is a club of states that don’t like to criticize each other. It could be transformed into a more inclusive, deliberative body. The OAS would be more relevant, and the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the main diplomatic instrument for promoting and defending democracy in the Americas, could be more effective, if legislators and civil society were given a voice to empower the secretary-general to undertake missions in the region to promote democratic innovation and prevent backsliding.

And Canadian foreign policy itself should be democratized. A well-designed, broadly consultative foreign policy review is overdue. There are all sorts of innovations in civil society participation that could serve as models for democratic consultation. Brazil holds participatory policy conferences on a range of public policy issues. They are convened by the executive and generate proposals that can be submitted as bills to the legislature. We could learn from Brazil.

A bold democracy assistance agenda would not be just about making “them” more democratic like “us.” It would be about making the world a more democratic place, Canada included.

Maxwell A. Cameron co-ordinates the Andean Democracy Research Network in the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. With Catherine Hecht, he is the author of Canada’s Engagement with Democracies in the Americas in the October 2008 edition of Canadian Foreign Policy.

by Maxwell A. Cameron
Professor, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia

The Mark, April 13 2011

Competition is good. It makes us better, stronger, and more successful. This mantra is widely accepted in business and politics. It enjoys an aura of scientific respectability: Darwin’s survival of the fittest suggests that competition is not only good – it is natural.

But the great evolutionary advantage enjoyed by humans arises from our capacity for co-operation, not competition. Great civilizations have never been built on competition alone. The human capacity for empathy, for social problem-solving, and for moral judgment are the foundation of human progress. Without our ability to imitate, collaborate, learn, and understand one another, we would have developed neither language nor tools, neither art nor, indeed, war.

Yet over and again, our public discourse emphasizes conflict and competition over empathy and co-operation. Tom Flanagan’s claim in a recent commentary in The Globe and Mail that “an election is war by other means” is a good example of this bias. Since all is fair in love and war, why should we worry when politicians attack each other, bend or misrepresent the truth, and present themselves, not their ideas, before the electorate? To think otherwise is high-mindedness, says Flanagan.

Curiously, Flanagan quotes Aristotle to back up his argument. But Aristotle was a “do the right thing” kind of guy, not a mean-spirited bully. He thought politics was about finding the common good, about doing what was right for one’s self and one’s community. Flanagan should have quoted Machiavelli instead – although I hasten to add that there are even readings of Machiavelli that would suggest the imprudence of the “election is war” mantra.

More to the point, contemporary political science has increasingly moved away from the idea that politics has any natural essence. It is not “like war” or “like nature.” It is what we make of it. If politicians race to the moral bottom, then political life suffers. There is nothing inevitable or natural about this.

Politics requires the exercise of political and moral judgment. An election is not a war by other means. It is a process of selecting leaders on the basis of their capacity to assume responsibility, to know their ethical limits, and to have the empathy to understand and serve the public well. If they can’t exhibit these qualities during an election, they certainly won’t in power.

When we treat politics like war, our adversaries become enemies. They are no longer collaborators as well as competitors in a struggle to serve the common good, but nuisances or worse. They must be crushed or eliminated. This is indeed a step toward war.

Campaigns are not only about selecting leaders. Our deliberative institutions are weakened when we obsessively focus on the horse race among leaders and ignore the platforms they propose to implement. There is nothing particularly high-minded about the expectation that substantive debate occur around an election. We want to know not only who is going to govern us but also how they are going to govern us.

One of the reasons we are in this election campaign is precisely because of the contempt for Parliament exhibited by a government that does not accept that truth in politics matters and that ministerial responsibility is an inherent and indispensable part of our system of government – a government that thinks it is OK to bully top civil servants into submission, punish whistleblowers, and hide from accountability.

Flanagan is right in one respect: Going negative does work. This is why Canadians who are tired of the incivility of politics should speak out. The trend toward attack-style politics is not irreversible. We get the politicians we deserve and, if we think we deserve better, we should express a little more outrage about the tenor of political life.

The last thing we should do is encourage nastiness. We need look no further than Flanagan’s own words to see what happens when we fail to hold ourselves to standards of civil discourse. Not long ago he publicly, albeit fatuously, called for the assassination of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, on national television.

Flanagan’s words brought to mind an observation by political philosopher J.G.A. Pocock. He said that when Shakespeare’s Brutus calls Caesar a tyrant, he “invokes a whole world of reference structures, into which his other words, his intended act, and his verbalized state of consciousness now enter in such a way that it qualifies them all; so that ‘Caesar,’ ‘kill,’ ‘intend,’ and even ‘I’ take on new meanings retrodictively as they enter the world that ‘tyrant’ invokes.”

Pocock went on to make a memorable observation: “Because of the magical quality of speech, the worlds you invoke are likely to appear around you.”

One can only hope that Canadian democracy does not start to appear more like the worlds invoked by the words of Flanagan.

Elections are all about positioning. There is a basic law in political science called the medium voter theorem: the candidate wins who is located closest to the median voter, provided that the distribution of preferences has a single peak. Most voters in Peru are located in the centre. Invariably, in all recent Peruvian elections, the winning candidates have managed to locate themselves near the median voter.

The two candidates selected for the runoff were Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori. Humala won a lot of votes because he was the only candidate on the center-left (and while the majority is centrist, there are many voters on the left). Keiko benefitted from the fact that the centre-right was divided by three different candidate (what a massive failure of foresight on their part!).

Now, to win the runoff, both candidates must move closer to the centre. That will be the winning strategy, but equally important, it will also define the mandate to govern of the winner.

For more on this, see the excellent report by Robert Kozak:

LIMA, Apr 11, 2011 (Dow Jones Commodities News Select via Comtex) — The two candidates for Peru’s presidency are likely to rush to the center of the political spectrum, attempting to seek allies before a June 5 run off.

04-11-11 1304ET