Ideas - Starting a global conversation to restore civility and liberal democracy

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Civility is under threat, authoritarianism and autocrats are on the rise and there's an erosion of institutional trust. Three pre-eminent speakers join IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed to discuss how Canada and other countries can promote respect and protect liberal democracy. 

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Good evening, everyone.

That's me on stage in Montreal for a discussion put on by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. It was the very first installment of a new annual series about matters of global urgency. The series is called Conversations. But if you look around, the conversation writ large has descended into an intractable shouting match, and it's getting worse. Who here in this room or listening to us right now isn't alarmed by the insults online and in real life, at the threats of violence directed at our leaders, politicians, and judges, the very people who are supposed to safeguard our rights and democracy itself.

How did public discourse, our most consequential conversations, become so debased? Why does it seem that every difference of opinion turns into an existential one, ruling out joint pursuits of common goals, even as benign as a more just and equitable world? If we think of liberal democracy as a kind of faith-based system without the theology, it really feels as though that faith is being undermined from above and from below. And not only in countries where there's a rise of authoritarianism and democratic recession, but in countries that have long prided themselves on jealously safeguarding their democracies, like the United States, the UK, India, Brazil, and here in Canada. In short, we're in a

crisis, a crisis of faith, a crisis of authority, a crisis of civility. So there's a lot at stake, and that's why we're here now, to have a real conversation about how we got here, and how we can restore civility. And by that, we don't just mean politeness. At this point, I invited three guests to join me, one at a time on stage. Collectively, their profile is as weighty as it is prominent, and their influence, both national and international, continues to have a profound impact across law, diplomacy, and the arts. The first was former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Rosie Abella, who now teaches at Harvard University. She was the first Jewish woman and refugee to serve on

the Ontario Family Court, the Ontario Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada. Among her many, many contributions to legal thought and jurisprudence, Justice Abella's definition of equality and discrimination were adopted by the Supreme Court in 1989. Justice Abella. Luis Roberto Barroso is a Brazilian law professor and outspoken jurist. He joined the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil in 2013 and was sworn in as president last September. He's known for his fierce defense of human rights and the independence of the judiciary. He was instrumental in the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that found former President Bolsonaro guilty of abuse of power, barring him

from holding office until 2030. Justice Barroso is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Justice Barroso. Last but not least, Vikas Swaroop is a retired Indian diplomat. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1986 and served in diplomatic assignments in Ankara, Washington, Addis Ababa, London, Pretoria, and Osaka or Kobe. And of course, from 2017 to 2019, he was India's High Commissioner to Canada. Mr. Swaroop is also an accomplished writer and novelist. His debut novel, Q&A, was adapted for cinema as Slumdog Millionaire. It won eight Oscars, as many of you will know, including the award for Best Picture. Please welcome Mr. Swarup.

I'd like to start with you, Rosie, if I may. Justice Rosie. Justice Rosie. I did get permission before we started, Rosie, if I may. Justice Rosie. Justice Rosie. I did get permission before we started. You did. I did. I want to ask you a really simple question. Beyond the idea of politeness, what does civility mean to you?

What's your simple question? Civility. I mean, simple answer. Civility is what we don't have in the United States. And I think the fear everyone has is that the conversations we used to have with each other when there were shared values and an international consensus about what democracy meant,

what human rights meant, what justice meant, has so fragmented, enhanced, I think, by an inappropriate religious obedience to the idea of free speech. And I worry now that Roberto and I have spent some time in the United States, and I don't know how you feel, Vickis, the idea of speech being the towering metaphor for what democracy means without any understanding of the difference qualitatively in the kind of speech is menacing. And I, you know, I remember once hearing Steve Martin say there's a difference between yelling fire in a crowded theater and yelling theater in a crowded fire hall. And unless we make distinctions about what kind of speech we tolerate, which includes learning how to listen to each other instead of yelling at each other,

we're not going to be able to figure out where our common goals are. And I think that's been the main problem in the absence of civility. And it's tied to the concept of liberal democracy because you cannot have a cohesive respect for liberal democracy unless you have a willingness to debate each other about differences of opinion and figure out where to go, given these different points of view, what's the path forward. So right now,

everybody's in silos. People want their silos to go forward, and they don't know how to talk past those silos to each other. They want to win the argument, and that's not a conversation. You've set the stage for us, the macro, and we're going to come back to these ideas over and over in this conversation, but I'd like to look at a couple of micro situations. Roberto, if I could ask you, in 2021, in addition to being a judge in the Supreme Court, you were also head of the Supreme Electoral Court in Brazil, when then-President Bolsonaro criticized you publicly. What happened? He more than criticized me. He insulted me a couple of times. He insulted you? Yeah. Nala, I've had many years of psychoanalysis.

So whenever someone behaves improperly towards me, I know it's the other person's problem. And what happened then, I never took it personal. It was an institutional problem for me. The reason why he was so upset was Brazil has a wonderful electronic voting machine system that has eliminated frauds in Brazil. And he wanted to go back to paper voting, to paper ballots, which in Brazil has always meant fraud in the electoral process. So I opposed that fiercely and I was invited to Congress and I fortunately was able to convince Congress members not to approve going back to paper ballot.

And the president was very upset for that reason. And the president was very upset for that reason. And now I can tell that that was probably the most important thing I've done during my time at the court. Because if, as we learned with the January 8th episode, that those people were able to invade Congress, to invade the Supreme Court, to invade the presidential palace, just imagine what they would have done to the electoral stations where the votes were being counted, where they thought they would lose. So it was a low price to pay, the insulting, because eventually democracy won in Brazil. But it was a first. I mean, you've been a judge for a very long time. Had you ever been addressed with such sharp words? Oh, no. It was even swearing words. It was unimaginable. It's even hard to... These people, sometimes you feel like they live in a different spiritual dimension, to be true. Vicas, as a diplomat, we've listed all the places that you've been based. You've seen, you've had a front row seat to the spread of this kind of thing around the world.

And I wonder, you know, the targeting of people, the targeting of institutions, you've seen a number of examples. What sticks out in your mind as kind of one of the starkest examples? So, Nala, I would say that the biggest threat facing democratic institutions comes from your giant neighbor to the south. The United States is rightly regarded as the mother load of democracy. And yet, there is no advanced industrial democracy in the world today that is more ideologically divided and more politically dysfunctional than the United States today. There is extreme political polarization. It has gone even beyond red versus blue, rural versus urban, to resemble almost something tribal in character.

And as a result, the two political parties are unable to agree on anything, from health care, to climate change, to women's reproductive rights, to even aid to Ukraine. On top of that, one party refuses to accept defeat in an election, which, to my mind, undermines the very basis of liberal democracy and can only lead to further erosion of trust in democratic institutions and processes. And three years ago, the January 6th attack on the US Congress, I think exemplified the dangers of such an approach. Thirdly, we are seeing that the power to set government policy

is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion, with an activist Supreme Court which has become totally partisan itself. And many of its recent judgments, many commentators are saying, itself and many of its recent judgments, many commentators are saying, reflect more the ideological leanings of the justices than, you know, the broader public interest. And finally, you have a concerted effort by some politicians and states to restrict access to voting, to pass laws which particularly target minority groups and marginalized communities. So matters have reached such a point that a very respected political scientist, Barbara Walter from San Diego University, has actually said in her book that the U.S. is closer to a civil war than we could ever imagine.

And of course, this is not going to be a traditional civil war. She says this will be fought really a guerrilla warfare among rival militia groups all across the country. So I would say that because America is the most influential country in the world, it is not only the world's largest economy and most powerful military, but it also sets the cultural benchmarks, technology, culture. So if America succumbs to the erosion of its, you know, democratic values and norms, then I think that will have a very, very deleterious impact on liberal democracy worldwide. So if we stay with the U.S. example, and as I said earlier, you know, faith in liberal democracy is being undermined from above and from below. And if we stick with the attacks from above,

Rosie, another easy question for you. In a nutshell, how did we get to a place where a political leader elected can score points by attacking institutions like courts that are meant to protect democracy? One of the rhetorical tools that have been used by people in the United States and elsewhere, wherever there's an authoritarian regime, is the perversion of the word democracy from what we had originally understood it to be, certainly after World War II understood it to be, as a series of checks and balances that includes an independent judiciary, a strong and independent press, protection for minorities, religious rights,

freedom of assembly and association. It's the collection of those rights with a legislature which is responsible to the majority. I mean, you lose your seat if you don't do what your population wants. And then having another body like the courts, which can say, we don't have to represent the majority. We have independence. We have, in most places, term limits. And so we are free to be unpopular on behalf of interests that may not be popular. of interests that may not be popular. Minority rights, for instance. When that breaks down, and you have, as you have in the United States, a court that is not protecting the interests of anyone other than perspectives of one political party, that's an erosion of confidence in democracy generally. And if we allow the conversation about democracy, if we accede to those who want to say democracy means majorities

and elections, the way Bolsonaro did, the way Erdogan did, the way Orban does, then you are ignoring the fact that that has never been what liberal democracy is. So we have to take back the conversation from those who will not acknowledge the importance of those separate functions and rights, because at the moment, I think the public is confused. They also think democracy means votes. So votes are the beginning of the democratic conversation. You're putting in one of the players, but you need, it's really crucial to have those other protections through the media and the courts to have those other interests looked after. I mean, there are so many factors that go into answering that question that

I was asking, and you've pointed out several of them. There's the social media impact. There's the tone that is set, the tonal dance set by the leaders who are elected by different countries. I just wonder if we could hear from you, Vikas, and also from you, Roberto, about what you think is the primary driver of this, I guess for lack of a better word, uncivility. What is it about this time that makes

that approach so compelling to people? Can I step in on this? Absolutely, yeah. Well, I won't blame polarization because I think polarization has always existed. If you take two modern democracies in the U.S., you had from the beginning the Republicans and the Federalists. If you look at France, you had the left and the right. So polarization is not to be blamed there, I think. What I think that happened was a major change in the way we communicate. And I think the digital revolution

plays a major role in that process. It had a positive side, which is to democratize access to information and knowledge into the public sphere. But on the other hand, it allowed for the unfiltered access to the public space with misinformation, lies, slanders. It created tribes that only talked to themselves, and it brought a crisis to the business model of the traditional press, which was responsible for emphasizing, creating a base of common facts, after which we could disagree, but we would agree on the facts. So the problem that we are facing these days is that people just create their own narratives according to their preferences. And we are not sharing, we don't share common values, as Rosie

said, but worse than that, we don't share the common facts. So people just develop their own narratives. And so we're just talking like this is a blue pen. And after that, you can say, I don't like blue, I don't like imported pens. But if someone says that this is a tire, we lose the capacity of communicating. And I think that's what happened in the world. Vikas, I'd like to explore, take a step from that slightly and go back to kind of the top-down attack and explore the effect of the actual leaders. I just want to read something to you.

A study by the Pew Research Center reported earlier this year suggested that support for authoritarianism across the world is more widespread than one might think. It found that in India, for example, 85% of respondents support having a strong leader who can make decisions without parliament or the courts, or they support military rule. And just so that we don't single out India, this is support that's fairly high in a number of other countries as well.

This is support that's fairly high in a number of other countries as well. What do these kind of leaders appear to offer when they're kind of unconstrained by these checks and balances? What are they offering? Look, I mean, when I first read the results of this Pew survey, I was also astounded because its overall conclusion is that some 31% of people in 24 countries support some form of authoritarian government. In India, of course, it went up to 85 percent, which frankly I find unbelievable. And then I delved deeper into

it and I discovered that they had a sample size of 2,611, which in a nation of 1.4 billion might not be very representative. But are you saying that's not representative? Yeah, because you see, 72 percent of Indians also said that they are very happy with the functioning of democracy in India. And those Indians who are pining for a military dictatorship, well, I have bad news for them. Civilian control over the armed forces is a bedrock of Indian democracy, and I don't think that's going to change.

Other things might change, but I don't think that's going to change. But at the same time, I think the Pew survey does point out to the increasing disillusionment with liberal democracy. And of course, there are several reasons for that. I think one of the primary reasons is that there is a crisis of representation. You know, the ordinary person feels that the elected representatives neither represent him, neither represent his interests or her interests correctly. So that is one.

Secondly, I would say the world is now going through a very turbulent phase. I mean, as a diplomat for 35 years, I can tell you, I have never seen geopolitics evolve more rapidly than it is doing so today. I call it geopolitics on steroids. And as a result, you are having mutually reinforcing shocks that are happening with increasing frequency. First, you had the refugee crisis, which upended a lot of Europe. Then you had Brexit. You had the pandemic.

You had the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which led to energy insecurity, food insecurity. You are having a massive global inflationary impact right now. People's income baskets are shrinking. So at this point in time, when there is instability, people are feeling a lot of volatility. If an authoritarian leader comes in and he says, I'm going to restore things as they were before. I'm going to bring order.

I'm going to end this chaos. Then obviously, there is a certain resonance with the kind of things that they are saying. The other point, I think, we must also not underestimate the cultural and religious sources of populist appeal. You see, in the technocratic world that we live in, many people say, you know, James Carville's famous phrase, it's the economy is stupid, that everything can be settled just on the basis of the economy. But no, I think populists tap into two sources. One,

of course, is the politics of grievance. And this is the politics of people who have been left behind by globalization, etc., whose incomes have not risen, and who feel that, you know, they need a new leader who can drain the swamp and restore order. But they also tap into the politics of hope. You know, I will make America great again. I will bring you back to an golden era. You know, and that is also something that we have to acknowledge, that, you know, much of politics is driven by the politics of hope, of aspiration. People want something that they can believe in, and they offer that. They offer it to them. Rosie, does it surprise you that 30% of Canadians also support the idea of non-democratic alternatives? We don't have plexiglass between our borders. I mean, what happens around the world, I think,

affects people here. But I want to offer an additional observation. That is, aside from the fact that authoritarian governments, as soon as they come in, get rid of the media and the courts, replace it with their own people. So you develop a culture now that you've taken over the government of non-criticism. There's nobody there to tell the government what they can't do. But the other thing that happened a long time ago, and it's fueled now by social media, we cannot ignore the fact that a lot of people don't read newspapers. How are they getting the information that helps them decide whether democracy, as they understand it, is a good thing or a bad thing,

or whether their government is good or bad? as they understand it as a good thing or a bad thing, or whether their government is good or bad. We've become so dependent on the opinions of people who do not have filtered facts, as Vick has said. But let me go even farther back. Somewhere along the way, I think part of the process of democratization, and this may be too theoretical,

but it's something I've worried about for a while, is that we started some time ago, after making an international bargain that we would all protect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the principles that came out of the Nuremberg Trials, the Covenant on civil and political rights we made that bargain that was an international bargain that we made

to protect democracies and people's rights in them and then suddenly one by one democracies didn't comply and what happened to those democracies that didn't comply? Nothing. So we became a global culture that said, you know, who are we to say that democracy is better, liberal democracy? Who are we to say that having an independent media or judges is really so great. And so we allowed the world kind of step back with a sense of misplaced humility, didn't try to enforce the bargain that we came up with

after the Second World War, and started to see acceptance of the intolerable. And here we are now trying to say, how do we get it back? Added to the factual disintegration of those institutions, you have what everybody knows, and that is the screaming and yelling and lying and fabrication that goes on without any way to verify. They have their own pieces of information that confirm their worldview. And so when you say, how come this is all happening? It's because we allowed it to happen. Nobody said, you can't do this. This is against the deal we made when we set up the UN, when we created all of these organizations.

And they exist, and it's frittered away. And I don't know how we're going to get it back, but I do know we have to get it back, at least where we can. Can I just add something here? With this point that Rosie just stressed, This point that Rosie just stressed, where do we get our news from? There was a major change of scale. Like the main newspaper, the New York Times, they have around 10 million subscribers. The Economist has 1.5 million subscribers. But Facebook has 3 billion users. And that added, of course, the freedom to utter any kind of views, being totally

unprepared. So we have misinformation, we have lack of civility, we have conspiracy theories. And one point now I want to mention here that doesn't go to the credit of the human condition. the credit of the human condition. We are much more mobilized by lies, by aggressive, by hate than by moderate speech. And since the social media, the digital platforms, they live out of engagement. And since these bad things bring more engagement, they have the wrong incentives. You're listening to Ideas and to a discussion called The Threat to Civility and the Fight for things bring more engagement, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts.

But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Conversations is a new annual series from our partners at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Joining me in this very first installment of Conversations were three people. Vikas Swarup, a former diplomat who was India's high commissioner to Canada.

Vikas is also a writer whose debut novel, Q&A, was adapted for cinema in 2008 and became a global blockbuster, Slumdog Millionaire. Justice Luis Roberto Barroso joined the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil in 2013. He was instrumental in Brazil's Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that found former President Bolsonaro guilty of abusing power and barred him from holding office until 2030. Justice Barroso is now a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. And former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, or Rosie. Her idea about how Canada should define equality and discrimination was adopted by Canada's Supreme Court in 1989. Early on in our conversation, we talked about how Justice Roberto Barroso was insulted online by then-President Bolsonaro,

who called him a son of something. Rosia, just back to you again about the kind of language that we're hearing from leaders like Bolsonaro's vulgar attack on Justice Barroso and Trump's famous grab-em comment. Philippine President Duterte has a catalog of rape jokes. You know, there's clearly a gendered issue here. I wonder what you think accounts for this kind of behavior by these men who are

in those positions of power. Because they can. And it's done in the name of democratization. All of this social media is part of we can let people say whatever they want. You know, when you talk about the machismo behind some of the language, it's bullying. It's not conversation.

It's the reason that Canada in its Whatcott decision said that you can stop discriminatory speech that creates vilification, a demonization of people so that they are not feeling like they can participate. Because one of the things the decision said was, it doesn't create freedom of expression to allow hate speech, it silences. It makes people who are vulnerable, who are the people who are being attacked, afraid to speak up and do anything in response. Bullying is not a conversation either. But do we stop bullies? And again, you've got the metaphor in the United States where refugees are called vermin by somebody who wants to be president of the United States and has millions of supporters. I mean, that isn't the North America

that we grew up knowing, but it's become too many parts of the world. Roberta, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned social media earlier. What I think is one of the most difficult things about social media is the fact that it promotes certainty. If you could speak a little bit more about how you think that changes the conversation in a place like Brazil, where 57%, we didn't mention the number in Brazil, of people are open to the idea of an alternate non-democratic leadership? Well, I think the first thing we need to do is to recognize that the rise of authoritarian populism flows through the shortcomings of democracy. Democracy did not offer equal opportunities for everyone and prosperity for everyone.

And we have a problem with democracy. Besides that, Nala, I think one thing that happened in the world that helped authoritarian populism was a certain capture by the conservative camp by the far right. And the far right uses as one of its main strategy character assassination, the conspiracy theories, the hate speech. That's a strategy. And if you talk to those people, the reason why they justify this unethical behavior is that they have the feeling that everything is taken, like the communists took over, the progressives took over. So we are dealing with a strategy. And the only thing I can think, besides regulation, is media education is trying to educate people. And one thing that we might have done wrong, we lived for many decades, I would say,

an era of the advancement of human rights, of women's rights, of African descendant rights, indigenous people's rights, LGBT people rights. And many people on the right think they feel excluded. They feel like those were victories from the progressive camp. And one thing we need to do, I think, is to convince them that those are not progressive causes. Those are the causes of humanity, treating everyone equally. Vikas, I wanted to get you in on this conversation as a novelist, as someone who obviously understands plot lines, you create characters. When you look at the narrative that is happening now and the threads that are pulling towards the future, where do you see the story going the way we hold the conversations that we have now?

So the one narrative I'm most worried about is the counter-narrative around notions of truth, as the Oxford Dictionaries reminded us by choosing post-truth as their word of the year in 2016, that we are now living in a post-truth world. And I think, you know, once that objective standard is lost, then I think we lose everything. Because if there are no facts,

if, as Kellyanne Conway said, there are alternative facts, then, I mean, where is the basis on which to agree even if one party is going to invent its own facts? If a pen, which is blue in colour, can be said to be black, you know, without any objective criteria, then really, where is the basis for discussion? And I think, you know, civility is important also because that is the basis of democracy. In a democracy, there will always be plural voices. In a plural democracy, you cannot have everybody agreeing on the same thing.

So what is the essence of a democracy? That we agree to disagree by agreeing on the ground rules for that disagreement. Don't you have to start, too, with explaining to people that democracy doesn't mean you can say whatever you want to whomever you want in whatever way you want? Every judge knows that you will always have people in front of you who feel very strongly that their point of view is right. You have two parties in every case. They come to court believing that the judge should

accept their version of the facts put together by a very well-organized lawyer, and the judge rules in favor of one of the two people. The person who didn't win always thinks the judge was wrong and didn't understand the case. So we know that we're never going to get everybody to agree with democracy, with our values, but we have to figure out a way to create a thirst back for those values. We have to show that there's a transcendent need for global civility, global democracy. And I don't know how you do that when people don't know what they're missing. They don't know what they're missing out. Do we have anybody out there in a leadership position making the case? I mean, I'm looking, we had Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice. To me, it's starting to turn into a pretty menacing circle.

Court, you said that a court's virtue can never be measured by the polls. But I wonder if these increasing attacks do undermine the justice system, if they actually have a long-term effect that is adversarial to everyone. Well, I think if you are a target of harsh criticism for a long time, of course, you lose part of your prestige. It's happened in Brazil. The court was elected by a popular president, former president, as a main obstacle to his government. And of course, everything that went wrong, he had someone to blame. What I would like to stress here that the prestige, the importance of a court of justice cannot be measured in polls, in surveys. And I'll give you an example that might sound clear. I am the rapporteur of a case in which I have invaders in indigenous lands.

So there were 5,000 invaders and 1,000 indigenous there. And I had the federal police remove the 5,000 people. It was tough. It took months. It was very difficult. If you have a survey there, I'm going to lose five to one because there were more invaders than indigenous. So, of course, a court of justice, when it interprets the constitution, it's always displeasing someone. In my country, where we have a very comprehensive Constitution that deals with many more issues than the Canadian Basic Freedom Act and the U.S. Constitution, we are always displeasing either the indigenous communities or the farmers,

either the government or the taxpayers. So being a judge, as I joked before, you need to have a good psychoanalyst because you're always being rejected. And people that support you today will reject you tomorrow. So this is part of our role. And I'm not saying that courts don't make mistakes because they do. What? They do. What? They do.

You're kidding. The other judges. I don't think that's true. It never happens to you. It never happens to me. But even I have written dissenting opinions. Rosie has written dissenting opinions. So democracy is not the regime of consensus. It's the regime in which disagreement

is absorbed in a civilized institutional fashion. And then when I said civility can always be preserved, we saw the gay movement, the women's movement, the black movement, it wasn't through violence. It was through convincing people that it was unfair, that it was not legitimate, that you cannot discriminate for someone for something that he cannot be blamed for. So I do trust civility is the main tool to achieve change in the world. And you've all said that that is the ideal, is achieve change in the world. And you've all said that that is the ideal, is to return to civility. But social media, as we've talked about previously, not only has made conversation difficult, but it has even led to people killing other people.

I mean, Facebook previously. So how do you come back from that? Yeah, so it's going to be very difficult. I mean, I start my new yet to be released novel with the sentence the most valuable thing in the world is not money it is attention have you got a star for your movie yet

I'm retired I now have some time just saying so you see when we had the agricultural economy the most scarce thing was land when we had the agricultural economy, the most scarce thing was land. When we had the manufacturing economy, the most scarce thing was labor. When we had the knowledge economy,

the most scarce thing was information. But now we have a surfeit of information. What we are lacking is attention. And because we are living in this attention-based economy, the business model of the attention-based economy is the social media. All these big tech companies, they are surviving entirely on the basis of our clicks and our likes, which will grab the most eyeballs. So it is the outrage economy. Malcolm Turnbull, the former Prime Minister of Australia, he called it angertainment. You know, that's what

we are living in. And because social media algorithms are designed to promote this kind of a content, it's going to promote even more and more polarization and divisiveness in society. And that is why I think social media, as Justice Barroso said, is the most important building block here. If social media can be brought to heel,

as the Europeans are trying to do through the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, basically telling them that, look, you have to be responsible for the content you put online. But if social media is essentially an extension of people's actual opinions, is it just a symptom of the problem? Is the problem deeper than just shutting down social media? No, but you see, it will address one of the core, what should I say, the drivers of this.

That once you suck out the attention from that attention-based economy, then there is no incentive for them to engage in those kinds of behaviors. I don't disagree with anything that has been said, but I am a little less confident about, maybe it's the Hobbesian in me, but I really have come to believe that unless you require behavior to change, it's not going to happen. If you look at the social revolutions of our lifetime, gay rights, women's rights, indigenous rights, race, it came from law. rights, indigenous rights, race. It came from law. We waited 60 years between Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896, where the American Supreme Court said separate cars for colored people are okay, are constitutional, until we got Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. And in the meantime, while we were waiting for attitudes to change,

blacks in America had to endure segregation. Korematsu, both countries, had Supreme Court decisions that said it was okay for Japanese Americans and Canadians to be put in camps, to be put in camps, dislocated, removed from their homes. We waited because that was the consensus. But unless you have laws that determine what the parameters of conduct are, you're not going to get people to change. What I see social media's failures as representing is we didn't have a solid enough pre-foundation. It was fertile soil that social media landed in and allowed all of this hate to fulminate.

So we do need to say what is acceptable and what isn't and not be afraid to draw those lines so that people know what they can and can't do and say. But we also need to be prepared to put in place the regulatory mechanisms and the legal mechanisms to minimize the harm. Not to stop it, because that's authoritarianism, but to attenuate the impact we know is happening when we allow things to just go unfettered. When the courts have been

very aggressively pro-rights, it has in fact been the case that there's a reaction. So people said, Roe v. Wade, why are you deciding this? People like Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, this shouldn't be decided by the courts. Leave it to time. People will decide for themselves when the right time is. And the court stepped in in 1971 and said, no, it's time to protect women with the choice, reproductive choice. That upset a lot of people, as did Brown. And they waited and waited, and the sore festered. And then they decided they were going to have a different kind of scrutiny for people on the Supreme Court of the United States. And then the Federalist Society was created.

So there is always a reaction. But that's not an argument against judges doing it. It is an argument against creating the kind of environment where the opposition to the expansion of rights is accepted as a legitimate way for society to move forward. That's the extremism that you were talking about. So what we, I think everybody in this room would probably share the values, we're not the problem. I agree with one thing that Rosie said, but I just want to... Just one thing? Name five. Yeah, this is the only one I want to

mitigate it a little bit. I think law is very important, but you need to have a social movement behind it or it won't happen. You can create it. Like, Brown... Can't you create it with law? Brown actually was enforced with the civil rights movement. So you cannot change the world through law or through court decisions. Court decisions help. Like, in Brazil, and I was a lawyer at the time, I was the lawyer of the case, same-sex marriage, it was unthinkable when we filed the lawsuit in 2008,

I'd say. But when it was finally decided in 2011, it had the majority of the court for the reason that the court and the law brought the issue to the public space and to social discussion. So I totally agree that we need law, but law might be the end of the process sometimes, not the beginning, or sometimes it could be the beginning, but it's not enough. You still need a social movement to make it happen.

But going back to the idea that a liberal democracy is a faith-based system without the theology, and if these attacks continue from above and below, if people lose faith in the justice system, if this lack of faith becomes permanent, how can an institution like a Supreme Court still do its duty? Then it becomes even more important that a Supreme Court do its duty. There have always been movements against what Supreme Courts who do their job properly, unlike with, I was going to say with respect, but I don't mean it,

unlike what's happening south of the border where the Supreme Court is eroding and pulling back settled rights and expectations that had been confirmed for Americans for 50 years. That is not the role of a Supreme Court. I think the delegitimization comes from courts not performing their assigned jobs properly. In the American environment, their delegitimization is self-inflicted. I don't think, well, I shouldn't say that. I think half the country may agree with what the American Supreme Court is doing. I just don't think it's the job of a Supreme Court to restrict rights. I think the whole purpose of a constitution is to protect and expand them. So because we never know in advance

whether what we're going to do is popular, and because it never enters the mix, we know what our friends think because we talk to them. But do we know what real people on the street think? I don't think so. So you have to do what you think is best as an institution that guards the Constitution. And if you do it according to what you think is best, then I think you protect the legitimization in the eyes of

time. And I have come to think that a court's judge is time, not the moment, not the agitations of the moment. So we'll see how time judges the American Supreme Court. We know how time has judged what you've done when you've been brave. Will people be annoyed by what you did in getting rid of a government that was corrupt? Maybe. But you had no choice. You were following the law. Rosie, I found it interesting that Nala said democracy is a faith.

And it is. You have to believe. You have to believe in things that you don't see. You don't touch separation of powers. There was a famous saying by an Italian jurist, and he said, justice, like any other goddess, only appears to those who believe in it. And democracy is pretty much the same thing. You need to believe it. And when it fails, you need to try again. Because the options, and I live in a country that has tried the option we had a 21 year dictatorship and the cost is very high so democracy is very complicated very complicated

however the options are much more costly I would say One thing that scares me, though, as a Democrat, is the success of some countries that are not democratic. And that could be an appeal. Like China, I think it's the best example. China did remove millions of people out of poverty. And although I think that could be done differently, there are many people that are attracted to that alternative. Because indeed, to decide things without needing to negotiate, to compromise, it's much easier. But at the end of the day, the price is higher. Do you know the fact that you said 21 years of a dictatorship that you endure, that comes back to the concern that I have. How long we have put up with dictatorships all over the world in the name of democracy. It's not our business to tell you how to do things. But we have laws, rules, treaties, conventions in place

that forbids the very thing that you're talking about, and nobody enforces them. And that needs to be a serious conversation. So I believe in the faith of democracy. I believe that good people will believe and do believe democracy. But I also believe that you have to enforce it and you have to insist on compliance with the laws you've got or nobody's going to believe in law. So I think we've been way too kind to tolerating intolerance in this world. So as a final round, if I could ask each of you, starting with you, Vikas, then Roberto,

and then you, Rosie, just a final thought on what one thing you think that needs to be done to, if it is the right word, restore civility. I believe that incivility, the root cause of incivility is this trolling, etc., that we are seeing. I mean, this polarization of the discourse. There are long-term solutions, of course. You have to use the income inequality within societies, which is fueling the populist...

Which is not a small job. Which is not a small job at all. So that's what I'm saying. There are some long-term strategies that you can use, and there are some short-term strategies. And the short-term strategies are control social media. Roberto? Even the big techs, like using technology to fight a few things. But I do believe in society and in ethical and spiritual evolution,

and I think that's what we should invest on. Rosie, final word. I don't know. I really don't know. The only thing that... I didn't know we had that option. You can have another crack at it if you want. I learned it on the bench.

You can do whatever you want. No, I didn't see it. If faith evaporates, what takes its place? whatever you want. No, I didn't say that. But Rosie, if faith evaporates, what takes its place? Well, I think we need more success stories in this world.

We need more countries like Canada. We need to show the world that it is a good investment to protect democracy because everything they've got in their autocratic regimes security safety

economic development if that's the tangent package that attracts them we have to plus the right to say what you want without hurting other people the right to be a full member of society the right to say what you want without hurting other people, the right to be a full member of society,

the right to aspire to everything that you want for your family, the right to hope. That's part of democracy. And we have to sell it. And we have to stop being shy about saying that it is the best system. Liberal democracy is the best system for everyone, and we've got to stop pretending that there are other ways that are just as good just because they're not ours.

So I would put my foot down and say, enough. I mean, look, is this working for us, this tolerance of intolerance all over the world? So I would start promoting democracy, civility, respect, dignity, all the things that we thought we were doing 75 years ago and bring it back. Wonderful way to end this conversation.

Thank you, all of you, all three of you. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

You were listening to Conversations, the threat to civility and the fight for liberal democracy, recorded before a live audience in Montreal. Special thanks to our tireless colleagues at CBC Montreal, Thank you. Special thanks also to Daniel Beland, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. We'd also like to thank Jonathan Goldbloom and Michel Laforêt. Lisa Ayuso is the Web Producer for Ideas. Technical Production, Danielle Duval. Lisa Godfrey is the Acting Senior Producer. And the Executive Producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly.

And I'm Nala Ayyad.