Practical Wisdom

From the Tyee, April 20, 2012.

NDP victories in Port-Moody Coquitlam and Chilliwack-Hope expose the vulnerability of the Liberal Party and Premier Christy Clark. The rise of the BC Conservative Party has divided the centre-right vote.

The landslide for former mayor Joe Trasolini in Port-Moody was no surprise. He “could have won as a Marxist-Leninist candidate” tweeted Mario Canseco, of Angus Reid.

But the disappointing third-place showing by BC Conservative candidate John Martin in Chilliwack-Hope is good news for the premier, who can still make the case that the Liberals remain the party of free enterprise. “If you care about free enterprise in British Columbia,” Clark warned before the by-elections, “remember this, in 1991 and in 1996, Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark were elected because there was a split in the free enterprise vote.”

Add Gwen O’Mahony, the new NDP MLA for Chilliwack-Hope, to that list.

Contrarian Conservatives

Conservative leader John Cummins is not buying Clark’s line. It is not just that the Liberals need to articulate why conservatives should vote for them. More importantly, Cummins knows that his main obstacle to power is the Liberals not the NDP. He complains about the “drift to the left” of the BC Liberals, yet admits he voted NDP in 2009. That’s not inconsistent. The Liberals, not the NDP, block his path to Victoria.

The rise of the BC Conservatives makes an NDP victory in 2013 much more likely. Cummins believes that polarizing the party system is worth it in the long run, however, because his goal is to create the conditions for the rise of a more conservative right.

Bit of breathing room for Clark

The fact that the combined Liberal and Conservative vote in Chilliwack-Hope exceeded the vote for the NDP will renew pressure on the two parties to come together. But my sense is that the Conservatives have a longer-term game plan in which an NDP victory in 2013 is worth it as long as the Liberal Party collapses.

Whether that happens depends on the leader. The weak performance of the Conservatives in Chilliwack-Hope gives the Liberals some — but only a little — breathing room. Calls for the removal of Christy Clark may be more muted. But if she wants to win, she has to do something to define herself more clearly. Is she a family-friendly, moderate liberal leader of the ilk of, say, Paul Martin? Or is she a tough-minded pro-business conservative like Stephen Harper?

It is not enough to oppose the NDP bogeyman. That does not cut it with moderates or conservatives. A centre that does not know where it stands will not hold in a polarizing party system.

From The Mark, April 17, 2012.

Think of the biggest policy failures you can imagine. Policies that make worse the very problems they’re designed to solve. Policies so perverse that they actually give people a stake in the failure of those policies. Policies that last for decades in the face of overwhelming evidence of their failure.

Such a policy would be what my pre-teen son would call an “epic fail!”

There are two such fails in the Americas today. The first is the pathetically lame U.S. embargo on Cuba. After 50 years, the Cuban gerontocracy remains firmly entrenched in power.

The embargo has not just failed to end the dictatorship in Cuba – it has actually propped it up. It provides the regime with the best possible argument for refusing to liberalize: Its leaders warn that as soon as they open up the country, Miami Cubans will flood back to reclaim their property and privileges. A Cuban official once told me that Cuba has no need for opposition parties – the Miami Cubans fill that role.

So, why does this failed policy continue? The answer lies in U.S. electoral politics: No president is prepared to defy the Miami Cuban voters in the crucial electoral battleground state of Florida.

The second epic fail in the Americas today is the war on drugs. Decades of prohibition have failed because they have attacked the drug scourge on the supply side while utterly failing to reduce demand. The entire burden is on enforcement, while prohibition policies ensure that the price of drugs remains high. The result is that thousands of Latin Americans are dying in a hopeless “war on drugs” with no end in sight.

Yet, the policies continue. Billions of dollars have created vested interests in the continuation of the so-called “war,” and politicians are reluctant to consider alternatives for fear of seeming to be weak.

These are monumental policy failures.

But consider this. Canada has never supported the U.S. embargo. Our country has maintained normal diplomatic relations with Cuba since 1959. Nor has it ever been a major advocate of the war on drugs. In fact, the Insight program in Vancouver, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, offers a health-based approach to drug addiction.

Yet there we were, at the Summit of the Americas, in Cartagena, Colombia, standing shoulder to shoulder with the U.S., refusing to include Cuba in future summits. Instead of supporting alternatives to the failed drug war, there we were backing U.S. prohibitionist policies. Indeed, Canada has been quietly ramping up co-operation with the U.S. military to fight drug gangs in Mexico and Central America.

This is precisely why Canada is finding itself out of step with the hemisphere, and why we’re increasingly excluded from diplomatic fora in the region. We may look back on the summit in Colombia and see it as one of the biggest miscalculations Canada and the U.S. have made in the Americas. We have underestimated the willingness of Latin American nations to say that the emperor has no clothes. We’re standing beside a naked giant and insisting that he is beautifully attired. What a fail!

The following commentary was published in Spanish in Politai, an initiative of political science students in the Catholic University in Peru.

The autogolpe of April 5, 1992, was an important event, and not only for Peru. As a political scientist, I opposed the autogolpe and worried about how the concentration of executive power would undermine Peru’s democratic regime. I was always conscious, however, that assessing the autogolpe was not a straightforward matter. The question of whether the autogolpe was necessary and justified was (and is) open to multiple, reasonable interpretations. I was frankly much less impressed than many other observers by the fact that Fujimori won overwhelming support from the public, at least as revealed by public opinion polls and anecdotal evidence. There are many petty dictators who have enjoyed moments of glory in the eyes of the public, and some vicious criminal regimes have started with widespread approval. What impressed me was that the support for Fujimori was not only understandable but, arguably, reasonable. That is to say, the Peruvian public had many good reasons in the early 1990s to feel desperately besieged by the twin evils of Shining Path violence and catastrophic economic troubles.

Of course, like many others, I believed that the Shining Path was already in deep trouble even before Abimael Guzman was captured. That event was a colossal stroke of luck that seemed to retrospectively justify Fujimori’s actions. Nevertheless, I could easily see how so many Peruvian citizens desperately wanted to see the kind of energetic leadership in the executive branch of government that Fujimori seemed to offer. Fujimori seemed to have the interests of the nation at heart, and he also seemed was to take difficult decisions necessary to place Peru on another course—something that previous governments were unable to do. Whether in terms of the struggle against the Shining Path, or the management of the economy, Fujimori showed leadership even if one did not agree with his policies. Moreover, he was attentive to the needs of those who brought him to power, and while he made peace with the business community, the Church, and political elites, he did not forget that the key to his power was his strong connection to a broad swath of the electorate.

At the same time, it is critical that we not whitewash the Fujimori regime. Nobody who supported him can play innocent. It is not as if the Peruvian public did not know about the abuses and atrocities committed by the regime. The victims were not just collateral damage. The bodies that were left behind in the massacres in Barrios Altos and La Cantuta were not simply unfortunate casualties of an otherwise ruthlessly efficient strategy of counter-insurgency. They were very much the intended effects, and they were welcomed. I cannot remember how many arguments I had with friends and colleagues at this time. I would often as ask if Abimael Guzman’s human rights deserved to be respected. The resounding answer was “no,” and that says just about all you need to know to understand why Peru had a decade of unjust and illegal trials and other judicial abuses of power under Fujimori.

And so the paradox of the autogolpe was that it was an event that occurred within a functioning, albeit battered and badly discredited democracy, and it occurred with widespread backing from a beleaguered public; and yet it created a monstrous system in which fundamental rights and freedoms were abrogated and the abuse of power ran rampant, a regime that undermined the most basic principles upon which democracy rests.

The question that emerged was, in some ways, as old as political theory itself. Who guards the guardians? In a democratic context, this means “Who will protect democracy when the guardians (the people) are willing to allow a dictator to rule on their behalf?” My answer, which is the answer of virtually every serious thinker from Machiavelli to the present, is that you cannot surrender your democratic rights and freedoms without losing them. When the people are willing to turn a blind eye to injustice – nay, to aid and abet a tyrant in acts of oppression – then democracy is lost. I predicted that the Fujimori regime once established could not persist as a democracy, that ultimately it would fail, and there would be a transition to a new regime. That transition would not happen democratically. In this sense, the autogolpe simply serves as yet another in a very long line of stories (we could go back to the Gracchi brothers in Rome, to Hitler in the 1930s) that show us the simple truth of Lord Acton’s dictum: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It is, perhaps, a testament to the lack of appreciation for the basic truths of politics that these ideas were so hotly contested in the 1990s. Every generation believes it has reinvented politics anew; every political community thinks it can defy the rules that govern everyone else. As a corrective, the autogolpe in Peru provided a sort of living laboratory in which to observe, yet again, the inherent danger in the concentration of executive power, especially when accompanied by broad public approval. It breathed new life into the discussion of constitutional underpinnings of modern democracy, and some of the best work on the autogolpe helped us to understand that there is more to democracy than elections. The autogolpe became a point of reference for the discussion of electoral authoritarianism, the idea that there can be elections (not free and fair, but not entirely meaningless either) in authoritarian regimes. In fact, some of the most robust authoritarian regimes we have known (like the PRI in Mexico) routinely hold or held elections. The difference between a democratic and an authoritarian system must be more than elections. And it is not just that elections have to be free and fair, which is no trivial matter, but that in order to attain this there are constitutional underpinnings of a democracy that must be respected.

For me, personally, the autogolpe induced in a sustained interest in the topic of the constitutional separation of powers. My research focused on the way in which the events of April 5, 1992, created a democracy without the separation of powers. This is, at least under conditions of modern mass society, an oxymoron. Here is why. In a democracy, the people form a self-governing community of free and equal citizens under the law. That, at least, is the ideal. In practice, the will of the people takes the form of the law, and the mechanism for translating will into law is the legislature. It is the job of the legislature to produce the general rules that, in the view of the lawmakers, correspond to some sense of the public good. It falls to the judiciary to interpret what these general rules should mean and how they apply in particular cases. In order for the legislature to be a genuinely representative body, that is to say, a body that speaks for the political community in a way that reflects both its diversity and its unity, it must be able to deliberate about what is right for all citizens in a general sense. The independence of the judiciary is the institutional guarantee of impartiality in the application of the law, and this requires freedom from political influence and meddling. Working together, a representative legislature and an independent judiciary provide the legal framework necessary to ensure that all actions by all government officials are in compliance with the rule of law – above all the actions of the state’s coercive agents.

The autogolpe disrupted this system, and replaced a dysfunctional, reactive, weakly representative legislature with an even weaker legislature that operated at the behest of the executive branch; and it transformed a corrupt and inefficient judiciary into a political instrument of executive rule based on provisional judges and politically controlled judicial committees. Such a system could function within a sort of institutional masquerade of democracy provided the key features that gave it internal coherence remained in tact, and as long as it did not have to deal with massive public opposition. But opposition only mattered to the extent that the regime was internally divided, which it was not until the end. It was not effective opposition that ultimately brought the regime to its knees, but the internal divisions that emerged once the intricate web of blackmail and bribery managed by Montesinos was exposed. It was this informal web of power that held the regime together after the constitutional framework was effectively dismantled. I say effectively dismantled because it is clear that Fujimori’s goal was never to create a robust constitutional order. He dismantled the constitution of 1979, but not to replace it with something better. Fujimori, in this respect, is not like Chavez or Morales, and certainly not like Gaviria. He did not seek to build a lasting constitutional order but rather to perpetuate himself in power.

We can learn a lot from the experience of the autogolpe of 1992. I believe that the main thing we should learn (or rather re-learn) is that democracy means not just the momentary and fluctuating expressions of the will of the people but a lasting commitment to living together in an egalitarian and law-based self-governing community. The laws should reflect enduring values and interests, a sense of what is generally just for all. Only when people learn to live together under laws that are just, both because they correspond to the will of the people and because have been formulated through democratic procedures that are inclusive and fair, can we properly speak of a self-governing community. And herein lies the biggest lesson of all. That a congress could be closed, and a judiciary purged and stacked, not only with impunity but also with the enthusiastic applause of the nation, suggests the degree to which the vital institutions of democracy lacked any public support. That is certainly a cautionary tale to heed as Peru and other democracies look to the future.

From The Tyee, 27 March 2012.

Now that Tom Mulcair is leader of the NDP, what happens to the proposal for cooperation among the opposition parties?

The idea is not dead, because the logic of the single member constituency electoral system punishes parties that fail to coordinate when they compete for the same space on the ideological spectrum.

That said, the NDP strategy under Mulcair is to expand the NDP rather than build alliances (quiet discussion among the leaders, behind closed doors, may still happen). The NDP will try and occupy the space historically occupied by the Liberals. And Bob Rae is not a good person to win that space back: his credentials are that he managed one of the worst provincial NDP governments ever. 
 


If the Tory government continues to govern as if it has the support of a majority of the electorate, it is possible that this will generate enough backlash to enable the NDP to win a majority government in 2015. But that is not likely as long as the economy is in reasonably good shape. The robocalls scandal is a wild card, but so far has not done major damage. Even if the NDP and Liberals do not agree on any formal cooperation, however, they have to think in terms of how they might govern together as a coalition. These are the issue that partisans should be worrying about. But let’s look at the situation through less partisan lenses.

Cullen’s vision versus Mulcair’s
 


Nathan Cullen mounted an impressive leadership bid based on the idea of being less partisan. Both Cullen and Mulcair represented a change in the NDP — and shift away from the party establishment represented by candidates like Brian Topp or Peggy Nash. But there the similarity ends. Mulcair will expand the base of the party and thereby give it a less clearly defined social democratic identity. Social democrats have never won by sticking with their core constituency — they have to expand beyond organized labour and encompass a broader swath of the middle class. That was the process begun by Jack Layton, and it will continue with Mulcair. It is not about rhetoric or even policy so much as who the party wants to represent. It wants to represent the centre as well as the left. 
 


Cullen wanted a broad progressive movement too. He called for cooperation to select join candidates. Much of the appeal of Cullen’s thinking was that it was new and refreshingly less adversarial. Mulcair may try and avoid getting nasty with the Tories, but he is adversarial by nature. A big danger is that he will try to whip the NDP into a more disciplined machine — something that operates a little bit more like the Tories under Harper. That would be too bad because the last thing Canadian policies needs is more party discipline, more sheep in the House of Commons, fewer free-thinking and independent MPs. 
 


The call for cooperation among opposition parties is a call for democratic renewal based on the need for electoral reform. The fact that Cullen was defeated could put these issues on the backburner, but they are not going to go away.

Free the NDP MPs

The truth is political parties are part of the problem in Canadian politics. Some degree of party discipline is good, but too much undermines the deliberative quality of the legislature and weakens the connections between MPs and their constituents.

Mulcair needs to recognize that Canadian politics need to be overhauled. This means putting more power in the hands of riding associations, and giving more power to the ordinary member of parliament. Mulcair noted during the campaign that each region of Canada has its own issues and the national campaign has to be attuned to local issues. He should not forget this now that he is the leader. 
 


Canadian parties need to be more democratic. The NDP convention was a good (if glitchy) exercise in democracy, but the way that party operates between conventions is not very democratic. The level of turnout in voting for the NDP leadership should also worry the party brass. More has to be done to engage members and especially youth.

One of the nice features of Cullen’s proposal for cooperation is that it would have given the riding associations a bigger role in deciding how to approach the next election. Even if cooperation is not immediately on the table, the NDP should involve riding associations in thinking about the strategic dilemma imposed on opposition parties in our electoral system. Convening joint meetings between Liberal, Green and NDP riding associations or groups of members and leaders could help ensure that the hyper-partisanship on the right is not matched by similar negativity in the centre and left.

The final NDP leadership debate exposed stark choices facing the party as it prepares for the next election. Tom Mulcair presented himself as the most natural successor to Jack Layton; he was an architect of the Quebec strategy, which gave the NDP credibility to cast itself as a truly national party and government in waiting. For those New Democrats who want to see Layton’s strategy fully executed, Mulcair is the obvious choice: he is from Quebec, holds the second NDP seat ever won there, and is probably most able to consolidate that position. His strategy would be to expand the NDP beyond its traditional base, and that means throwing out boilerplate language and tailoring the party’s message to diverse constituencies. Not only would this breath life into riding associations, it would help extend the party to places where it currently has few seats, like the West. This he called “modernization.”

The problem with Mulcair is that he is a newcomer to the NDP, having served previously in Jean Charest’s Liberal provincial government in Quebec. Peggy Nash challenged Mulcair on his view that the party needs renewal. Mulcair countered that he does not propose to take the party in a different direction so much as continuing to move forward with Layton’s strategy. Some of the other candidates were skeptical. Brian Topp said Mulcair had been “very critical of the party.” Mulcair responded that at one point the party was strenuously advocating universal daycare – a message that did not resonate in Quebec, which has had such a policy for some time. With respect to the West, his view was that the NDP should do what it did in Quebec: listen to the local constituencies and tailor the message. The NDP, he said, has trees with shallow roots (Quebec) or roots with no trees (Saskatchewan, where the party has won no seats in 4 consecutive elections).

Topp painted himself (and Peggy Nash) as an “unreformed social democrat,” thereby highlighting his loyalty to traditional party commitments. Topp has the big establishment endorsements, including party icon Ed Broadbent; he talked about being with Layton when he wrote his final letter to Canadians. Nash, for her part, has links to the labour movement (auto workers), leaving no doubt about her social democratic bona fides. The two seem like the most likely to benefit if Mulcair stumbles. Ashton also positions herself close to the party activists – attacking Mulcair for not supporting opposition to trade deals – but she lacks gravitas.

The most personal attack on Mulcair came from Paul Dewar who said that Layton was a “happy warrior”; Mulcair, no the other hand, “got the warrior part down” but where was the inspiration?” This got chuckles from the audience, many of whom know of Mulcair’s reputation as a pugnacious and often bad-tempered leader who does not always work well with colleagues, particularly women. One woman I spoke with after the debate said that Mulcair’s smiles did not seem genuine; another said she found him stiff and unnatural (he read both his opening and closing statements). But Mulcair’s answer to Dewar was to say that it is not enough to quote Layton about being “loving, hopeful and optimistic” (which Topp did in his opening remarks), one had to incarnate this by taking the high road and being good, kind, and respectful of the other candidates in the race. He also noted that the point is to win.

The second major cleavage was between those who would work with other opposition parties and those who would not. Ashton struck a partisan note when she said, in her opening remarks, “Liberal, Tory, same old story.” Only Nathan Cullen – and, with some big caveats, Peggy Nash – seemed to be willing to talk about working with the other opposition parties. Both advocate electoral reform because they believe the Tory majority is, in Cullen’s terms, “false” – that is, based on electoral arithmetic that is allows 39 percent of the voters to have an absolute majority of the seats in the House of Commons.

The cooperation issue emerged when Paul Dewar alluded to the Leadnow.ca website where Peggy Nash, in response to a survey on where the candidates stand on cooperation, argued that she would be willing to pool resources with other opposition parties. Dewar noted that this seemed like a change in position and he wanted to know what it meant. Nash responded that she was not endorsing Cullen’s plan for joint NDP/Liberal candidates in key ridings to dislodge Tories, but she saw no reason why Liberals and New Democrats might not, for example, work together on an ad campaign against building more jails or in favour of proportional representation.

Niki Ashton challenged Nathan Cullen on his plan for joint opposition candidates in Conservative held ridings saying there are no shortcuts to forming government. Cullen responded that Tommy Douglas was elected on a CCF and Social Credit ticket, and he insisted that Canadians are not as partisan as people in the NDP often think (there are more members of the Mountain Equipment Coop, he noted, than in any political party). Politics is one thing, partisanship is another, and there is no evidence, he argued, that Canadians won’t accept a different way of doing politics, as revealed by public support for budget deals and past coalitions: “politics is about working together to get things done, and that is what Canadians want” he said. In his closing remark he insisted that the party has both an opportunity and responsibility to do everything it can to prevent another Tory government, which he characterized as a “clear and present danger” to Canada.

In short, there seem to be two cleavages in the current line up of candidates. These cleavages are directly linked to inter-connected risks the NDP faces. The NDP’s orange crush could fizzle if the base in Quebec is not held and expanded westward. Another risk for the NDP is that competition with the Liberal and Green parties could divide the votes needed to form government. In the first-past-the-post system, failure to coordinate is heavily penalized. Worse still, these risks intersect. For the NDP to hold onto its base and grow, it must compete with the Liberals. Yet competition with the Liberals could result in another Tory majority. It could also make it harder to form a coalition in the event that no party wins enough seats to form a majority on its own. This is a tough strategic dilemma for the members of the NDP as they select their next leader.

From The Mark, March 7, 2012.

Canada and the United States were pointedly excluded from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a regional group that was formed in December 2011. The launch of CELAC symbolizes major transformations in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. influence is declining, China is stepping up, and Brazil is flexing its muscle as a regional actor.

Clustered around Brazil and the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) is the newly formed Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The more radical Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) groups Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Cuba under the leadership of Venezuela. Importantly, CELAC brings together members of both UNASUR and ALBA, creating a potential alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS), which is trapped between conservative critics in Washington and hostility from leftists in ALBA.

My, how the neighbourhood has changed! When Canada joined the OAS and negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), market liberalization and democratization promised an era of hemispheric co-operation. Canada felt it could be a player without getting caught in conflicts between the U.S. and the debt-ridden and unstable nations in its backyard. The free-market model – based on policies of privatization, liberalization, deregulation, and free trade – was driven by the need to attract U.S. investors and gain market access through trade deals, and encouraged the prospect of deeper hemispheric integration.

When the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas was killed in a summit of the Americas in Argentina in 2005, three tectonic shifts were at work: a commodity boom led by explosive growth in China; shifts to the left starting with Venezuela’s election of Hugo Chavez in 1999; and 9/11, which diverted U.S. attention to the Middle East.

Today, through a series of initiatives on infrastructure, energy, banking, and telecommunications, Latin America seeks to leverage the resource-extraction boom into regional integration on its own terms.

Where does this leave Canada? Beyond pursuing a piecemeal approach to bilateral trade agreements (for example, Canada’s recently signed agreements with Honduras and Colombia), we can pursue a mix of three strategies.

First, we can work with the U.S., negotiating trade deals, co-operating on security and drug enforcement, and strengthening the existing OAS. This strategy entails a risk, however. The U.S. underestimates the importance of UNASUR and CELAC, which it regards as weak, underfunded, poorly organized, and ephemeral. But these initiatives reflect perceived problems with OAS and the region’s desire for greater autonomy from the United States. If we align with the U.S., Latin America will want distance from us, too.

Second, we can partner with Mexico to gain leverage in Washington, and try to make NAFTA a more attractive model for Latin America by reinforcing its institutions. It is puzzling that Mexico is not more central to Canada’s engagement with the hemisphere. It matters to the U.S., and is a pivotal player in the region. Mexico is in CELAC (but not in ALBA or UNASUR), and it, along with other Pacific nations that are more open to a free-trade agenda (like Chile, Peru, and Colombia), is a natural partner for Canada.

Moreover, Mexico and Central America face challenges arising from drugs, gangs, and violence that have security consequences for North America. And yet, the current North American “community” based around the under-institutionalized NAFTA is stalled and does not appear to work, much less serve as a model to address these issues. It is imperative, therefore, that Canada look farther south than Mexico, working to develop much more comprehensive mechanisms of policy co-ordination and innovation so that Canada, the U.S., and Mexico are better-equipped to confront common challenges.

This brings us to the final point: Canada can work with Brazil and emerging powers on the Pacific (Chile, Colombia, and Peru), support UNASUR as a complement – but not a competitor – to the OAS, and help build bridges inside the OAS. Building bridges beyond North America allows Canada to exploit its reputation as an honest broker and a reliable partner.

Beyond these three strategies, Canada can – and should – continue to make democracy a central part of its engagement with the Americas, working with countries like Chile, Peru, and Mexico to reinforce the effectiveness of the OAS’s Democratic Charter. Canada has proposed a compendium of best practices of democracy, and this could be a building block for developing a peer-review mechanism, a democracy rapporteur, or an early warning system.

Meanwhile, CELAC is competing for a role in the defence of democracy. Its democracy provisions, based on similar mechanisms in UNASUR, have teeth, but the focus is limited to preventing coups against executives rather than upholding the principles of representation, separation of powers, and the rule of law.

In short, Canada must adapt and prepare to navigate turbulent waters. This means recalibrating the balance between working with the U.S., cultivating North America, and building bridges to emerging institutions and leaders. If we’re not careful, Canada may find itself marginalized even as it seeks to be more engaged.

*Adapted from a presentation at a ministerial round table on the Americas, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Ottawa, Dec. 6, 2011.

I was recently asked by the Inter-American Dialogue to answer the following question (in 250 words):

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala on Dec. 4 declared a state of emergency 60 days in the Cajamarca region. Local groups say a $4.8 billion gold mine will be detrimental to the region’s water supply and protests have threatened the project. The conflict also spurred a major cabinet reshuffle in the young government; Humala replaced 10 ministers on Monday, including Prime Minister Salomon Lerner. How well is Humala balancing the desire to promote economic growth with the demands from his base of support? Will the confrontation in Cajamarca erode support for Humala and his party? Does the government have a strategy to deal with the protests? What changes will the cabinet reshuffle bring?

Here is my reply, which appears in the Latin America Advisor, Monday, December 19, 2011:

The cabinet crisis and emergency measures have created alarm about the prospect that President Humala is taking a hard line on protests, aligning with investors over local communities, asserting the power of the military, and adopting a caudillo-style of rule. These are all real concerns, and deserve to be watched closely, but they may be overstated. The cabinet retains members like Rafael Roncagliolo who inspire confidence for those who want to see a balanced approach to mining and consultations with affected populations. Nobody said it was going to be easy to manage the hundreds of conflicts created by extractive industries. It is unclear that the military has more power in the new cabinet, or that Humala is building the foundation of a civil-military regime. At least Humala is trying to govern. Previous governments have sat on their hands or even made protests worse by either ham-handed repression or ill-conceived concessions. That said, the loss of Lerner is significant — he has been credited with much of Humala’s success so far. Emergency measures can easily provide cover for the abuse of power. The rupture with Toledo and Peru Posible creates challenges for making the legislature work. Although I’m not signing in the chorus of denunciations just yet, the emerging pattern is troubling.

A shorter version of this essay appeared in The Mark, December 20, 2011.

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions recently organized a conference on “Why Don’t (More) Good People Enter Politics?” One of the main conclusions of the conference was: we need to empower ordinary parliamentarians. There is a pretty powerful logic behind this idea.

Let’s start with the basics. What do we want from a leader? I think it is fair to say that nobody likes a phony. We don’t want people in politics who we don’t believe and can’t trust. But politics seems to attract just that kind of person. Why?

One of the reasons why “good” people (for the sake of argument, lets say we mean by this people who try to be truthful and treat others with respect) don’t want to go into politics is that they have to pretend to be something that they are not. As Carole Taylor put it, “we expect politicians to be perfect, and if you’re not perfect then you better pretend you’re perfect. And if you do that then you rule out most of the world.”

She said that when she has tried to encourage people to run for office they often say things like: “I could not withstand the kind of media scrutiny that looks at everybody I’ve ever dated, every business I’ve ever been in, every person I’ve ever had coffee with, and say that I have led an error free existence.”

Media scrutiny discourages good people from participating—and encourages those who do to pretend to be something that they’re not. This is an especially powerful inhibitor for women who don’t want their children to see them dragged through the mud and slandered.

Another way politics selects phonies (or turns otherwise good people into phonies) is by creating disincentives to admit mistakes or to change one’s views. In an adversarial game there is no incentive to admit your opponent may be right. “I’ve never belonged to a political party with which I agreed 100 percent of the time,” said Rick Anderson, a leading political strategist and consultant. “There is no such beast. But day after day after day partisans are expected to go out and pretend otherwise. The other folks are always wrong, we’re always right. The other folks are all here for the wrong reasons; we’re all good folks, here for the right reasons. These things are not true, and the beginning of a deceptive approach to politics starts in that partisan caucus mentality. We can’t acknowledge that the other people have anything to say.”

When we talk about partisanship, we’re talking about parties. As a political scientist, I am reluctant to criticize parties because I know they are an essential part of democracy: modern, large-scale democracy does not work without them. And yet, Anne McLellan, former Deputy Prime Minister, citing a recent report by the Samara Foundation, noted that for many parliamentarians “their own party was identified as the reason they could not do the job they believed they were set to Ottawa to do on behalf of their constituents.” Parties have become, as Anderson puts it, “vehicles for obstructing critical thinking.”

The problem is not parties per se, but the fact that partisanship has reached such toxic levels. Again, Carole Taylor said: “I don’t think [politics] should be a bash-bash kind of thing… it should be about the arguments of ideas and different approaches to things, and there should be an arena…where I can say I think we should do this, the other party says this.” In other words, there should be scope for meaningful debate and deliberation. Instead, parties implicitly tell candidates: “Come to me with your good ideas.” But, says Taylor, there is a hidden transcript: “Walk through the door and I’ll never hear your ideas again.”

Taylor is not saying there should be no party discipline: “I do think if you say matters of confidence, money bills, we’re all together, but there is room if it is some issue that’s really, really important to you for you to speak up and express it. If you can’t express it and in some instances you can’t even express it in caucus why are you there? What is the point?” If we make politicians pretend that they always disagree with the other side, and their side is always right, then the political process manufactures phonies.

“You do see some good people who agree to run,” says Taylor. “You know their past, you know what they’ve done; you can’t wait until they get in there. And they get in there and they’re squished because they have to absolutely do what the Prime minister or the Premier says and don’t have any chance to debate. So question period is meaningless – I mean it is meaningless – because everybody is going to toe the party line, so they just yell at each other. There is no chance to say ‘I want you guys to think about this from this point of view—you might change your mind.’”

Of course, not all partisanship is a bad thing. “Democracy,” former BC Premier Mike Harcourt reminds us, “is war without bullets.” Sam Sullivan, former Mayor of Vancouver, also puts it colorfully: “You’re a boxer, you get in the ring,” he said. “And when someone smacks you in the face, it’s your job, that’s what happens.” Politics is clearly not for the thin-skinned! “There is nothing wrong with partisanship about ideas about values” insists Harcourt. As a former criminal defense lawyer, he appreciates the value of an adversarial system, “allowing different values and different ideas to clash.” The problem is when partisanship becomes “becomes a grotesque sideshow, as question period has become. It’s when you get into really vicious negative advertising that is just there to pummel somebody—and it works,” he adds.

So what are the limits of partisanship? Can we be ethical partisans? When does partisanship serve the public good, and when do it hurt it? The answer is, surely, rooted in the very principles that underpin our democratic institutions. And these principles need to be better understood and articulated.

We make ordinary members of parliament irrelevant when we assume that parties are made up of people with a Vulcan mind-meld on all matters of policy. We make matters worse by insisting that parliament is an electoral college for forming government. And we compound the problem by subordinating the role of the opposition to ineffectually criticizing but never getting in the way of government business. We might as well do as comedian Rick Mercer suggests and tell parliamentarians to stay in their ridings rather than go to Ottawa: “Do something useful; help someone fill out a passport application.”

Perhaps the underlying problem is that we have lost the ability to articulate visions of the public good and we’re losing confidence in the ability of our political process to generate them. But our institutions cannot work unless their incumbents are committed to the idea that democracy is about more than voting for elective dictatorships.

As Rick Anderson put it, the purpose of parliament is not to pass the government’s budget or legislation but to decide what they should be! Parliament is supposed to be a check on the power of government to raise taxes and spend public money. It is not supposed to simply do the government’s bidding. And it is supposed to legislate on matters of public interest. But these powers are gutted to the extent that party leaders and their whips control access to cabinet positions, committee assignments, and other resources that are absolutely necessary for parliamentarians to do their jobs.

This is compounded when members of parliament enter office with only the foggiest sense of the job description. And they make it worse when they passively accept the idea that there is no place for free votes and meaningful deliberation in the House.

So how can we make our democracy better? In the spirit of generating an ongoing conversation on these matters, here are some initial thoughts on an agenda for democratic reform that came out of the conference at UBC:

First, the purpose and role of parliament and parliamentarians in our constitutional system needs to be re-examined, with an eye to strengthening our understanding of its essential function in the separation of powers as a check on the executive.

Second, the culture of politics needs to be cleaned up. Independence should be rewarded and celebrated, not punished; leaders should expect less deference from their caucus members.

Third, with the caveat that disciplined parties are essential in a parliamentary democracy, there is scope within the political process for more free votes, stronger committees, and less centralized decision-making.

Fourth, votes of confidence should be used to reinforce parliamentary power over the executive; it should not be a bludgeon used by the executive to subordinate the parliament.

Fifth, the nomination process needs to be better regulated and less controlled by the party leadership so that individual MPs may be freer to act as powerful and responsive representatives of their constituencies.

And finally, for all those would-be candidates out there, here is a further thought. Carole Taylor said “today if I were starting all over again and the Prime Minister asked me to run I would make it a condition of my running that I would be free on very important issues to me to not vote the party line. Otherwise, I wouldn’t go.” Anderson imagined saying: “I’ll run when 50 other people run at the same time – and I don’t care whether they’re left wing or right wing, for this party or that party – but that our common agreement is that we’ll support each other when we break with our party line.”

If you’re asked to run, don’t check your conscience, free will, and ethical principles at the door.

Download the full report on the CSDI conference here.

Watch the videos of the conference on YouTube here.

By Carlito Pablo, November 24, 2011
Straight.com

Many people might be wondering what lessons the B.C. NDP can learn from its farm team, Vision Vancouver.

While New Democrats struggle to shake off their image of being antibusiness, Vision has cozied up to corporate interests and, at the same time, maintained its organized-labour and environmental connections.

With Vision’s decisive win in the November 19 civic election, the question now is whether or not the B.C. NDP can use the former’s formula for success. Political-science professor Maxwell Cameron doesn’t provide a simple answer. Instead, the UBC academic starts by claiming that the NDP is not what it was.

“The NDP now is, like any other party, essentially an electoral machine,” Cameron told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “It no longer represents a mass movement. It has ties to labour that are increasingly frayed. The labour movement itself is no longer confident that it represents an alternative. In fact, many labour movements can be very conservative. And far from representing an alternative society, the perception is that labour represents the status quo. The NDP is stuck with a kind of a mismatch between a conception of itself, its vision for itself, and what it really is.”

Turning to Vision, the director of UBC’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions noted that it provides “a shining example of what a smart, progressive-minded political party can do to win the support of environmentalists who want—whether it’s densification or bike lanes or backyard chickens—those sorts of policies, which cost very little to the business community”.

“Meanwhile, business is also happy with what the party represents in terms of its management of the economy and its position on development,” Cameron continued. “The ability of [Vision mayor] Gregor Robertson to get the backing of major business people just simply reminds everyone that there’s absolutely no reason in principle why a party that reinvents itself along those lines can’t be very successful. The caution is these issues will not always align in the same way. What works at the municipal level I don’t think is necessarily going to work at the provincial or federal level.”

He recalled attending a recent meeting of New Democrats. At that gathering, one participant made the case for eliminating government subsidies for Alberta’s tar sands. A labour person stood up to oppose it, saying there are 15,000 jobs in that sector.

“That’s the kind of discussions you have within the NDP,” Cameron said. “There are areas where there are going to be choices to make between a business approach and an environmental approach.”

According to the professor, those choices are going to be awkward with the NDP. “One, because the NDP wants to persuade business that it is fiscally responsible and pro-growth but also because labour is as conservative as business on these issues—in fact, more conservative,” Cameron said. “So, in other words, one can’t assume that just because Gregor Robertson has been very successful in finding that kind of middle ground that it will always be there.”

Former NDP cabinet minister Bob Williams argued that asking what the B.C. NDP can learn from Vision’s relationship with the business sector is like talking apples and oranges.

“In the city, the corporate interest is mainly in land development,” Williams told the Straight by phone. “And they [the city] are able to create the conditions or the rules or the zoning or the development permits that the corporate folks are looking for, so clearly there’s an interest in getting along with the councillors. That’s a very different ball game than the provincial level.”

The Vancity director also noted that on many issues New Democrats have taken positions other than what corporations are looking for. That includes serious questions about the Alberta-to-B.C. oil pipeline by Enbridge.

“A really cozy relationship between all elements of the corporate sector and the NDP may not be what most people want,” Williams said. “Certainly not me.”

Former NDP cabinet minister Tim Stevenson has been elected three times as a council candidate for Vision. In an interview two days after his reelection, Stevenson noted by phone that although many say B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix is “too ideological”, people are now “finding he’s very pragmatic”.

“You’ve got to be pragmatic nowadays,” Stevenson told the Straight. “People want vision, but they want pragmatism at the same time.”

From The Vancouver Sun. November 16, 2011, p. A15.

Some people say politicians are no good. They’re all the same – they’re only in it for themselves.

Others say politicians get a bad rap. Politics is a tough life, one that demands finding a balance between power and principle, between the interests of the party and the public interest.

Recently we had a taste of this debate when two Opposition New Democratic Party members of Parliament from Thunder Bay, Ont., voted with the Conservative government to scrap the long-gun registry. They were promptly muzzled, removed from their committee posts, and their travel privileges were suspended.

They were punished by party brass for doing what they thought was right for their constituents. This is the kind of thing that turns off many voters.

Getting good people to go into politics is an age-old problem, one that preoccupied ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Confucius. They believed that a well-governed state demanded virtuous citizen and rulers.

The most important virtue in politics is what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” In their book, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe define this as the moral will and skill to deliberate and act on what is right for one’s self and community, and to do so for the right reasons.

The idea that we are ethical problemsolvers has found surprising support in research from a range of fields.

Kiley Hamlin at the University of B.C. has found that babies prefer those who help rather than harm others, as well as those who reward positive social behaviour and punish wrongdoers – even before they can speak!

Neuroscientists have identified oxytocin as a crucial hormone that fosters caring and reciprocity among mammals. It kicks in when we care for offspring or engage in other forms of sociability. As Patricia Churchland says in her recent book Braintrust: “It feels good to do good.”

Evolutionary biologists like Frans de Waal have shown that empathy is part of the evolutionary advantage that humans share with other mammals.

I’m not arguing that moral character comes naturally. We are all capable of appalling ethical lapses.

Fifty years ago, Stanley Milgram demonstrated that experimental subjects were willing to administer lethal dosages of electroshocks to others simply because they were told to do so by a scientist. But my colleague Sylvia Berryman recently argued that even these experiments should not lead us to conclude that practical wisdom is beyond our grasp.

Milgram’s subjects failed to properly perceive the ethical decision they faced and thus acted in ways they would later regret.

But they were nevertheless making ethical choices: to support science, to be obedient to authority.

They just didn’t understand that the experimenter had put them in an ethical position that required them to step outside one role and play another.

We learn ethics through experience, not by reading textbooks or following rules.

As Aristotle put it: “We become brave by exposing ourselves to danger and learning to make light of it.” Similarly, politics demands what Max Weber called a “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life and – [measuring] up to them inwardly.”

We need to pay a lot more attention to how our major institutions structure the roles which shape how we act – and what we experience.

Canadians enjoy some of the best political institutions in the world. But the power of Parliament has been steadily eroded.

Parliament is a place for deliberation and legislation. It is the one branch of government whose supreme duty it is to make the general rules by which all citizens shall abide.

A recent study by the Samara Foundation found that MPs perform a variety of roles beyond the traditional conventions of the Westminster system. The Parliament is supposed to legislate, hold the government accountable and determine the life of the government through votes of confidence.

Today MPs do many other things besides. They have to find a balance between representing constituents and doing what they think is best; between advocating local and the national interest; between advancing the interests of their party and doing what is right for the country; between providing services to voters and developing policy and legislation.

Sadly, parliamentarians increasingly do what party leaders tell them rather than what they think is right. Subordination to the party begins with the nomination process, a typically opaque and poorly regulated affair. Individual candidates often come out of the process more beholden to the party machine than to constituents.

When they get into Parliament, elected officials are often unsure what they are supposed to be doing. It quickly becomes clear that legislation is a small part of their job. Why? The process of making policy has been concentrated in the hands of party leaders, the cabinet, and above all the prime minister.

Parliamentarians routinely vote for bills they don’t like, or don’t understand. To the extent they are involved in meaningful deliberation it is in committees or the caucus. What the media see are the circus antics of Question Period.

The media contribute to excessive partisanship by reporting adversarial theatrics to the detriment of the less entertaining behind-the-scenes work.

Is it possible for Canadians to take back Parliament? Not if we simply tune out. As Plato said, the greatest punishment for those who refuse to rule is to be governed by those less worthy.

A better response is to reward politicians who demonstrate they have the practical wisdom to figure out what is right for their communities and to act accordingly.

Which brings us back to the dissident MPs in Thunder Bay. Whatever one may think of the long-gun registry, surely MPs should be allowed to speak for their constituents without being muzzled.

We the people authorize MPs to legislate on our behalf. Should we allow political parties – publicly funded organizations – to control their votes to the point that they no longer speak for us?

Our system is built on the principle of parliamentary supremacy. In practice we have a partyarchy – the rule of political parties at the expense of our constitutional order. We need politicians with the moral skill and will to restore balance to our parliamentary system.

Maxwell A. Cameron is director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UBC, which is organizing a conference on “Why (More) Good People Don’t Enter Politics” on Nov. 24-25. As Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, he has also organized a colloquium series on Practical Wisdom with additional sponsorship from Green College.

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