Meagan Campbell, age 18, of Halifax, Nova Scotia has won a 128GB 11″ MacBook Air laptop for her entry:

The Resilience of Our Democracy

If we were to start an alphabetical list of the challenges faced by our democracy, we might get to ‘party discipline’ by late afternoon, ‘voter apathy’ by midnight, and ‘yes-men’ by the early morning. With a decreasing public concern for politics, the integrity and transparency of our democratic system seems to be feeble and dying. However, despite the temptation to give way to cynicism, we have just as much reason to take the opposite approach. Indeed, the resources of Elections Canada, the public’s access to technology, and our ability to learn from practices abroad mean that our democracy is wholly and thankfully resilient.

The typical argument that most optimists make states that democracy will survive because it has been ingrained in our value system since the dawn of Canada. However, this reasoning overlooks the fact that values change. Homophobia was arguably ingrained in our society in the 1900s, but we now flood the streets in pride parades each year and unanimously pass legislation that prescribes equal treatment. With this in mind, the fact that democracy is a tradition deserves nothing more than a mention. The real reasons that our democracy is resilient stem from current public and private resources in Canada, as well as ideas we can apply from elsewhere.

Canada invests millions of dollars to ensure transparent and representative polling in each election. In Nova Scotia, where I am writing from, there are twelve ways to vote, including requesting that an election official bring a ballot to your doorstep. We can view these measures not merely as a sign of desperation for democratic participation but rather as evidence of our system’s ability to adapt to an older, busier, and less politically focused population. Perhaps the epitome of Elections Canada’s efforts is seen right here in Democracy Week (although ideally, we’d have an annual Tyranny Week and dedicate the other 51 to democracy).

Canadians themselves have more ways than ever to hold elected governments accountable. The Internet means that transparency no longer relies on Freedom of Information requests, and voicing our opinions no longer depends on letters to editors. We can constantly stay updated on the decisions of our MPs and can tweet directly at them or the rest of our social networks even while the House is still sitting. As journalist Matthew Ingraham puts it, publishing used to be a business; now it’s a click. Canada is also full of organizations and media that promote democracy. We have grassroots initiatives like the Springtide Collective, which hosts panel discussions with politicians, and Equal Voice, which encourages more women to enter politics. Despite the decline in newspaper sales and funding to the CBC, online subscriptions are increasingly contributing to pay for investigative journalism. Considering that the number of Masters of Journalism programs offered in Canada has tripled since 2000, we may have a generation of Snowdens in our midst. As a journalism student myself, I can testify that persistent research and verification is constantly underway.

While Canada’s first-past-the-post system ensures that parties appeal to a wide portion of the population, we can look for polling practices oversees that could make our system all the more democratic. Mandatory voting has not proven to be particularly effective in Australia, but we can look at the systems in places like France and Scandinavia, where turnout is among the highest in the world. Perhaps children should learn about Parliamentary structure in school or go to the polling stations with their parents; perhaps members of Parliament should be required to raise an issue in the House if they receive 50 concerns from constituents about the topic, instead of the current requirement that they receive 100. Technology means that we can easily access strategies used elsewhere, and our resources give us the ability to implement them. Though our system faces a seemingly endless list of challenges, it can by all means persist. Indeed, we could just as easily start listing the strengths of our democracy though it would, no doubt, take even longer.