The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Andrew Coyne: Is Canadian Democracy Broken?

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Canadians think we live in a democracy, but are our institutions becoming increasingly undemocratic? Andrew Coyne joins us to discuss his new book, "The Crisis of Canadian Democracy."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, OnPoly people, it's John Michael McGrath. Join Steve Paikin and I for a special live taping of the OnPoly podcast at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto on May 28th at 6.30 p.m. Visit onpoly-live.eventbrite.ca for tickets. How solid is our democracy in Canada? Well, according to our guest tonight, we may have one in name only. From unaccountable leaders to disempowered MPs, to what extent have our democratic institutions become increasingly undemocratic?

Andrew Coyne explores these issues in his latest book. It's called The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. And the Globe and Mail columnist joins us now for more. I shouldn't actually have said your latest book. I should have said your first book. My first book. I can't believe you're like, I know how old you are. Why did you wait so long to write your first book?

Well, finding the right topic, getting over the hump of what a large project it is, you know, it was a learning experience. Usually I write an 800 word or 1500 word verse, so this was an entirely different animal. It was more than that. Let's do an excerpt from the book. Sheldon, if you would bring this graphic up and we'll get started. Here's Andrew Coyne. Far from a democratic example to the world, our parliamentary system is in a state of

advanced disrepair. So advanced, it is debatable whether it should still be called a democracy. Put simply, we do not live in the system we think we do. We have the form of a democracy, but not the substance. The rituals, but not the reality. Because we preserve the forms and rituals, people find it hard to accept how far the substance has been eaten away. But at some point, the facts become unanswerable.

Every chapter of your book is basically, you know, putting a different aspect of our democracy under the microscope. So let's take our time and go through subject by subject by subject the things that you find particularly egregious. And I like the question you ask fairly close to the beginning, which is, what if we had a parliament that mattered? What doesn't matter about our parliament today that we need to fix? Well, virtually everything.

When we think about what we send MPs to do to parliament, what do we think? Well, we think they're going to propose legislation. We think they're going to debate legislation. They're going to scrutinize it, carefully make amendments. And ultimately, they're going to vote on it. And when they do all these things, they're going to be representing us in our right.

That's, I think, when we're thinking good thoughts about our democracy, that's what we think they're going to do. Well, go through each of them in turn. MPs don't propose legislation. The number of private members bills that get through in a year is maybe two or three in a given year.

Most MPs will never pass one at all. Scrutinize legislation. Well, yeah, that's great. But when you have bills coming through in these omnibus bills with dozens of separate pieces of legislation yoked together into one thing where they have to vote up or down them at all. Very little actual scrutiny relevant to the size of the package actually goes on. Sometimes they get passed in a few days.

So that is increasingly a misnomer. Voting on legislation. We have the tightest system of party discipline in the democratic world. The Samara Center did a study. They found MPs vote with their party 99.6% of the time. And even the biggest mavericks? The biggest mavericks may be 2 or 3%. And there's only a couple of them. That they're offside with the party. That they're offside with the party. And of course, as experts will tell you, it's not even about voting discipline anymore.

It's about message discipline. So even the idea of MPs standing up and asking questions in the House or making statements in the House, they only do so if they are approved by the party leadership to ask those questions, to make those statements. As often as not, they're written for them. These days, everything they say publicly is written for them. Their tweets are written for them. These days everything they say publicly is written for them. Their tweets are written for them. So all the things that we think we send MPs to do, they're not really doing. So let's come back to the question. What if we had

a parliament that mattered? How would our lives be better? Well why do we have a parliament? Why do we send people to Ottawa to hold governments to account, to call them out when they have either put bad legislation forward or misbehaved or their employees have done so. Again, we have very little ability to do so. We've had scandal after scandal under both the liberals and conservatives over the last 10-20 years where essentially nothing happened. You know, we had the Mike Duffy thing. No real price was paid by anybody in government by that.

We had the SNC lab one. We had the Wee charity. We had all these things, one after another, where the committees that were supposed to look at these things were basically stonewalled, couldn't even get the documents they were demanding. And if there's one power, ancient power parliament, that everyone agrees is undoubted, it's the right to demand documents. Well, apparently, governments can get away with just telling them we're not giving them

to you. So those are some of the functions. But ultimately, it's to decide whether or not the government has the confidence of the House. You cannot, under our system, you're not supposed to be able to govern unless you have the support of the majority of the members of the House.

We've seen governments even get away with basically ignoring the confidence of the House. Either there have been actual votes that scholars will say were confidence votes, as with Paul Martin in 2005, where they just kind of hum and haw and spend a few days trying to trolling for votes on the opposition benches so they can get somebody to cross over.

Which they got. Which they got in the end. Belinda Stronek. Or what we've seen under both the Harper and the Trudeau governments, you prorogue when you look like you're about to lose a confidence vote. Proroguing in itself is not a scandal, but if you're using prorogation to basically escape accountability to Parliament, something's seriously wrong.

We are six, not even six months into this year, and we've had in the province of Ontario anyway, two general elections already, a provincial and a federal. Do we not have free and fair elections in this province and country? We do. And so by some standards, we do very well. Our paper balloting system proves it's worth time and time again.

There's no funny business. You can't game it. You can't scam it. You can't hack it. Yeah, nobody is prevented from voting by physical force or fraud, all these sort of baseline things. But we need to ask, how representative

is the parliament that elects? We've talked about the degree to which it can't represent us in a rise, but how representative of us, even in totality? The parliaments that we elect look nothing like what we voted for, whether in the aggregate or at the subregional level. So for example, the liberals were having a big to-do now about potential separatist uprising

in Alberta because, my goodness, we elected the liberals again and nobody votes for the liberals in Alberta. Well, actually, 30 percent or close to 30 percent of the public voted for the liberals in Alberta this time. And got two seats to show for it. Best they've done since 1968 in the popular vote, they got two seats. This happens time and time again.

It creates this absolutely distorted picture of who we are as a country. It exacerbates and exaggerates our differences. I mean, I think it is fair to say, I'll be a critic here, that the liberals over the years have not shown a lot of attunement to the concerns and interests of all. If you're a liberal, you say, well, why should we?

We can't win any seats there. Or you could flip around, even more cynical, and say, we don't need to win any seats there. We've already racked up our majority in Ontario and Quebec by the same process of distortion flipped on its head, where you get 30% or 40% of the vote and you rack up 80% of the seats. If we had an electoral system where it was more,

use that word, proportional, and by that, in particularly this context, I mean where you could win seats in Alberta with the proportion of the number of seats, the votes you got, therefore parties could win seats in all part of the countries, and all parties had to win seats in all part of the country, then we'd have actual national politics,

which we don't have now. What we have in our elections is a series of regional elections contested by basically regional parties. You know, the Liberals have not won a majority of the seats in Western Canada since 1949. The Conservatives have only won Quebec three times since 1887. So we do not have national parties in this country, at least in terms of the representation in the House.

So if we had better representation, you'd see liberals being elected in Alberta. You'd see more conservatives being elected in Quebec. You'd have more conservatives in the big cities. You'd have more liberals in rural Canada. So these divides, that again, they're real enough. There's actual existing divisions that matter. But they wouldn't be so stark and so exaggerated.

And again, parties would have an interest in bridging those divides rather than making them worse. Now as you know I mean you've written probably dozens of columns on this kind of thing we've done probably dozens of shows here on this kind of thing the trouble is getting people to come to some kind of a consensus on how we ought to change our winner-take-all first-past-the-post to something that as you say is more proportionate. What do you like? What system do you like? Well, the one I prefer is the one that British Columbians voted 58% in favor of in the first referendum, which is a remarkable result. But not enough. Because the

government, the government that won, I think, 43% of the vote set the bar at 60%. They had two bars. Remember, they had to win the majority in the majority of the ratings. I believe they won it in 75% of ridings, but they didn't get the 60% overall. 58% though, in this country, we were so averse to major changes. It's remarkable. And that system was basically combined multi-member ridings, which is the thing that is germane to all proportional systems is you have multi-member rides. Why is that?

Because what makes our system disproportional is it's only one member per riding, as you said multi-member rides. Why is that? Because what makes our system disproportionate is it's only one member per riding, as you said, winner take all. So you get 30% of the vote, let's say, but you get all of the representation. And the other 70% basically go underrepresented. I know that you are, as their MPs, legally and politically and morally they're representative,

but their views aren't being represented. And if their views didn't matter, we wouldn't have elections. So it combines multi-member riding. So therefore, you can spread the representation But their views aren't being represented. And if their views didn't matter, we wouldn't have elections. So it combines multi-member riding. So therefore, you can spread the representation. If you get 20% of the vote in a riding and there's five MPs, you get one of those five MPs.

If you get 40%, you get two, and so on. And the other thing is they use a transferable vote, a ranked ballot. And you combine the two. Sometimes people talk about ranked ballots as if that were a reform. But that's basically still winner take all. It's just a little less, you still have to get like a 50% of the vote, but you're still

leaving 50% unrepresented. That's called the single transferable vote. It's the system in place in Ireland, in Malta, in the Scottish Parliament. I think in the Australian Senate, it's proved its worth. It's the simplest to explain, I find. The other contender that we looked at in Ontario a few years back is the mixed member thing,

where you elect half the MPs the way we do now, and half by proportional representation from party lists. I find, even though I think lists are misunderstood, people think they're manipulated and controlled by the party brass. They're usually not. They're usually open to the voters

to decide who gets in off them. But people in this country don't like the sounds of lists, and I don't think they really like the idea of these two different types of representatives. So for my purposes, I find the single transferable vote much easier to explain. It was certainly easy enough to explain to British Columbians. Will it happen?

What may happen is we bring in ranked ballots first, and then we add multi-member writings later. Well, here's the trouble. We had, at the municipal level, in a few municipalities in Ontario, more than seven years ago, we had the opportunity to have that ranked ballot opportunity at election time. Doug Ford's party won the election in 2018. He came in, canceled all that stuff. So we're not moving towards the Jerusalem you want to see. We're actually moving further away from it. Well, this is the problem, of course, with all of these reforms and all these problems is,

the only way you can change the system, whether you're talking about the electoral system, whether you're talking about the powers of the prime minister, et cetera, is if the people in power who got in under the current system agree to change it. That doesn't mean it's impossible. That's the problem facing any time you're making systemic change. But it does make it hard.

I think one of the things that's impeded us from change is whenever the issue arises, I think it's getting better. There's more education. People understand these things a lot better than they did 10, 20 years ago. But it does tend to be a vote on whether you want to live in Canada. You can paint any change as being

some ghastly foreign thing that has never been done anywhere else. You want a pizza parliament like they have in Italy? You want what they've got in Israel? That's one of the things. People think they know about proportional representation, because they've heard a couple of horror stories. They don't know, for example, that more than 90%

of the countries around the world use it, that the most successful countries by every standard, social development, fiscal integrity, economic growth, et cetera, most of them are proportional representation countries. They just think about Israel, et cetera. Well, but the argument I've heard, and oh my gosh, I've got to do fast math here.

1867, 2025. What are we, 158? 158 years old. We've had first past the post for 158 years, not exactly what we have today, but pretty much what we've had today, and we're one of the greatest countries in the world by all measures. So why change? Well, that's right.

So the question becomes, are we that way because of our system or in spite of it? We've also had a system, as I say, where we've been teetering on the verge of national disintegration at various times because of the electoral system. We have a system. You can outline all the deficiencies of first past the post. And people will nod their heads because they're

familiar with it. They're familiar with the phenomenon of safe writings, where it just doesn't matter whether you vote or not. The parties don't even bother to campaign there because it's a foregone conclusion. That's first past the post. They're familiar with these regional ghettos where it's only Tories in the western and only... People know about this.

They know about this. God knows they know about the dilemma of strategic voting because this comes up in every election. One of the bedrock principles of democracy is supposed to be you get to vote for the party of your choice. Every election voters told, no, you can't vote for the party you actually like. You have to vote for another party that you don't really like so you can keep a party you hate from getting it. People when you talk specifics to people, this is the thing.

People were so invested in this idea that we're Canada, we're great, and we are. We're successful by so many measures. But it can blind us to things that we know are true when we get past the idea of isn't Canada great. When we actually look at there's things about our democracy that we know don't work, let's get over this idea that any change means you don't live in Canada anymore and start fixing them. You and I are both old enough to remember that there was a time in this country when prime ministers tasked their ministers with running their own departments. And the prime minister obviously got

involved on the big issues of the day but he essentially left the day-to-day business to the ministers to run their ministries. Okay we just saw a new cabinet sworn in last week. How much of that is going to go on in this government? Very little, I would think. We'll see. I mean, obviously, every prime minister is new. But every prime minister from both parties

has come in promising some version of free votes and cabinet government. And it never happens. In fact, I think experts would agree with each successive government, the system gets more control from the center, including the tightness of the reins on the caucus, but even including the cabinet.

Part of the function of that, as I document the book, is how enormously the cabinet has grown. In the great days of cabinet government, under Lester Pearson, under Mackenzie King, under, you know, Dave McGregor, et cetera, cabinets were much, much smaller than they were now. You have a small cabinet, each one of them is a player. When you get cabinets of close to 40

members, one thing I noticed is you can't find a picture of the meeting. You cannot find a picture of the Canadian cabinet in session. You can find the Italian, the French, the German, the British cabinet, and the British cabinet, which is about 22 members, you look at a picture of that, it's a pretty unwieldy looking group. They can just manage it. Forty, I don't even, I've told, in fact, that there's a timer on them. You're given 30 seconds to make your point. People who've looked at this closely, and I've talked to people who've been in the room,

I've talked to people who've studied it closely, you know, the meetings are basically just to, you know, maybe they're giving the prime minister some feedback, some sounding board. Donald Savoie famously called it the focus group for the prime minister. But it's basically to look at questions that are going to be decided by the prime minister and his staff, maybe with the finance minister, but you know, one or two other ministers. But most of them are there just to either provide some feedback or to be

spokespersons. They're not running their own departments. That's clear. The deputy ministers are doing that. They're not even really setting policy for their departments. That's mostly decided by the center. That's why you see these mandate letters that they're all issued now where their job is to see that the policy is enacted. So yes, send the deputy minister to get it done. But mostly it's to publicize it, to promote it. And that's what most of them are slated. It's a combination of being spokespersons

and being representative. So we've decided that the task of cabinet is not to govern the country, it's to represent the country, which I thought was the job of parliament. But we look, and you can see it with this cabinet stuff that we've just gone through. The first reaction after every cabinet

is, why weren't there any ministers from southwestern Ontario? Why aren't there enough from Calgary? Why aren't there enough of this or that demographic group? We've learned that the individual cabinet ministers, their experience, talents, views, etc., which are the focus in other countries, that's how cabinets are analyzed in other countries is, what does this mean about where the government's going ideologically? Is this person capable of this job or has he

been over promoted? Does this person bring a new viewpoint? In our country it's strictly allies through the lens of representation. Don't get me wrong representation is part of it. We've just taken it to such an exaggerated degree and that's how you get cabinets of 39 members because that's the only way you can make the numbers work in terms of representation. The previous prime minister, Justin Trudeau, appointed the chiefs of staff to all of the cabinet ministers. What do we think of that?

I can't find any example of this in other countries. In fact, I've seen examples, a famous case in Britain where the Boris Johnson government tried to appoint the staff of their chancellor, Jack Kerr, who promptly resigned on the spot, saying no self-respecting minister would accept this. In Canada, it didn't totally start with Justin Jordan. It's been sort of being phased in. The PMO has been getting more and more of its hands into.

But by now, it is very clear that all of their chiefs of staff are chosen for them. And what does that mean? It means this person with whom you're supposed to have the closest working relationship, the person you're supposed to trust with your life, is not accountable to you, is not working for you, is working for the prime minister,

is basically your minder. A spy for the prime minister. That's putting it strongly, but yeah. And so it's both a symptom of and an indicator, a part of this system of centralized control of even cabinet ministers. And you see it, of course, in these memoirs from important, you would think, ministers, the finance minister, Bill Morneau, the justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former

foreign affairs minister, Marc Arnault. And what runs through all the memoirs is, I had no input. I couldn't even get the prime minister to take my calls. Couldn't get a meeting, that's right. Couldn't get a meeting. Yeah, yeah, kind of extraordinary. And if that's what ministers of that rank and status are complaining of, God knows what the minister of amateur sport is dealing with.

One of the things that you, I was going to say harp on, harp is not the right word, but you're really ticked off about it. Emphasize. Yeah. The apparent lack of power that all ordinary, quote unquote, members of parliament have nowadays. I want to push back on you a little bit on this. The conservative caucus has chosen to follow the Reform Act, I guess they call it, in which they have a lot of power to get rid of their leader if they don't like the leader, and

they did that to Aaron O'Toole. The liberal caucus has never signed on to that that and yet they did a pretty good job getting rid of Justin Trudeau. You're not sure, right? You're saying, I mean, eventually. Yeah, eventually. Eventually. Eventually Jean Chrétien was pushed out.

Right. These are extremely rare, first of all. Those are about the only two examples you can think of. You have to go back to McKenzie- Do they have more power than we think they have? They ultimately have power, but I think that the contrast between those two cases is very interesting between Aaron O'Toole and Justin Trudeau. Because the conservatives availed themselves of this power under the Reform Act, which

was the system that we had for the first few decades of our existence, that the caucus chose the leader. We still don't have that, by the way, even in the Reform Act. They have the power to remove the leader but not to choose a new one, which means it's a huge impediment to actually removing the leader because you know that if you do, you're not ensuring a quick succession. You're condemning your party to the next several months of internal fighting and fundraising and everything else while they wait to elect a new leader by the cumbersome method that

we've chosen. But nevertheless, Aaron Atul was removed within the space of two days. Justin Trudeau, it took them two years. This is the difference. Because there's no rules, there's no ground rules, there's no standard of what level of support do you need to bring down the leader, etc., then everything is done in the shadows. No one wants to be the first to put their head above the parapet, and you could see that with Justin Trudeau's last days.

They wouldn't even sign the letters. But Andrew, again, the first guy who picked a set up over the parapet, he's in the new cabinet of Mark Carney. He is. That's Wayne Long from New Brunswick. But Wayne Long was going to resign. Yes he was. The reason he spoke up was, I'm out of here.

Nobody who was planning and running again spoke up. They had a letter that supposedly two dozen would sign. None of the signatures, was it written on an invisible ink? None of the signatures appeared on the document. So that's the thing is the party leader has so much power, not just prime ministers, but party leaders, vis-a-vis their caucus members, that it's very difficult for them to summon up the nerve and gather together

to take them on. And flip that around, of course, not only does the caucus not have the power to choose the leader, the leader effectively chooses the caucus. He chooses them because most of them, again, Semero Center looked into this. We think nominees, candidates, are chosen by their local routing associations

in competitive elections. In over half the cases in recent elections, they were appointed, averaging across the parties. Of those that remained, most of them were elected by acclamation. They ran unopposed, usually because everybody knew who had the party leaves. In the races that were contested, as often as not, there was some kind of shenanigans

where the organizers had put their thumb on the scales in terms of when was the nomination meeting, how long was the race, et cetera. And people would find out a day before. And even in the openly contested races, how are they settled? By busloads of instant members whose memberships have been bought with all the potential for interference we've now seen by foreign entities. So that whole thing is a mess. But the final thing is,

even if you get through that gauntlet, you cannot run. Even if you're a sitting MP, you cannot run again unless the leader approves your nomination. So you put that plus the caucus doesn't choose the leader. The leader is essentially unaccountable to anybody. It really alters the relationship, the power relationship, between the leader and the caucus. And that's why we have such powerless caucuses.

Let's talk about the Senate. You and I have both, I think it's fair to say, met some people who are senators, who are very fine people, who actually are people of quality, they're people of talent. They are working in a system... Well, I'll leave it to you.

You don't like what we've got right now? What would you do with it? Well, in an ideal world, I think there's a place for an upper house that would represent the regions. I mean, I'm from Western Canada and I understand the argument that says we need something to temper the power of the populist centers. We're never going to get, I don't think, to an elected Senate that can do that. There's just too many constitutional legal obstacles. It's hard

to get consensus on what kind of model. What we can't have, in my view, is the system we had, first of all, in the past, which, yes, there were some fine people, but there were a lot of partisan appointments in there. Again, doesn't have to be the case. One of the things I looked into was the record of the House of Lords in Britain versus in Canada. House of Lords, basically around half the appointments since 1958 could be said to be partisan appointments where the prime minister picked a party that you know it's a fundraiser exactly well you were just yeah exactly just same party in Canada it was like 99% so it's

always been a very partisan body and and it's just hard to justify anything Justin Trudeau supposedly brought in these reforms where they'll be nonpartisan first of all it's really, if you look at it. They're less partisan. They're less partisan, let's say. I think they got increasingly capital liberal towards the end, but they were always smaller liberal. They were always reliably progressive.

And the problem is, if senators were previously deterred from voting against the House of Commons because, well, we're not elected, who are we? And to some extent that held. Even then they've been a little friskier than people might imagine. But it was clear that once you decided that they were not partisan appointments but they were chosen on the basis of their personal virtues, a lot of them shed their inhibitions. And there was a period there in the early years of the Trudeau government when there were a lot of conservative holdovers, when the Senate was looking like it might start voting down

Commons legislation. That passed. Why? Because Justin Trudeau filled the House with his own appointees, the Senate with his own appointees, to an extent unrivaled in Canadian history, by the way. So they're now like 90% either Trudeau or Cratchitian appointees.

But if we get a conservative government the next few years, we're already seeing signs that there could be a real confrontation. And I think that's a huge thing. So my answer to it is, and this is not original to me, but it's been proposed by some former senators, is the Senate has the power within itself to solve the basic problem, which

is we cannot have a Senate, an unelected Senate defeating a legislation passed by the House of Commons and their answer is just pass a resolution of the standing orders of the Senate saying words to the effect of you know if a bill from the Commons is not passed within six months it shall be deemed to have passed. So you get a six month suspensive veto you can use that to embarrass the government to point out the defects in the legislation, etc. Maybe win the battle of public opinion, but you don't get to defeat legislation. That to me is it could actually be a quite tolerable model. If we got a Senate that was genuinely

nonpartisan appointments, the great and the good, people great standing in the community, who people respected, who had moral authority, their verdict could be powerful and could be worthwhile assembling a group like that as long as at the end of the day it's moral authority and not legislative authority. Let me ask you about television. We live in a day and age when everything is on television. You don't like television in our legislatures or in the House of Commons. You can't get the cameras out at this stage, can you? No.

I used to be more of a fan. I think I've had a bit of a rethink, partly in the age of social media, where so much of it is not directed. You're not even speaking to your fellow members of parliament. You're not speaking to the viewing public. You're just assembling clips that somebody can manipulate to make your side look good and the other side look bad. But I think there's two things wrong with it right now.

One is just in principle, I think something was lost when the world that you were addressing as an MP was no longer the world of the House of Commons, where it was your fellow MPs, it was the assembled press, it was people who respected and understood Parliament, understood its traditions, et cetera. And there was a certain power that went with that. And I think it meant, I think people

felt a certain sense of solemnity and importance to what they were doing as a result of that. Once the cameras intruded and realized, oh, we're just some little house somewhere that nobody's really paying attention to, or if they are, then we're kind of looking significant, I think it actually shrank the view of the House of Commons in a lot of ways. But the other problem is we don't actually get a real view of the House of Commons. We look at it

through a straw. It's video-handsered. And that's right and but other legislators have different rules. If you watch the British Parliament they have cutaway shots. They have reaction shots and I think you get and obviously you want to be careful how you do this but I think you want I think if we're let the cameras in, we should let them all the way in and have a more fully rounded, three-dimensional view of what's going on in the House of Commons so that we actually understand more fully and more vividly the theater of what's going on. It is theater. It's always going to be theater. But, you know, we don't go to the theater and look down a straw, right? We have the whole surroundings and we can see where people are and how they're reacting to things.

I think that would make it more realistic. Lying. Let's talk about lying in politics. To that end, Sheldon, top of page three, let's bring this excerpt of the book up if we can. Lying to the public has become an accepted stratagem in Canadian politics, all part of the game, like fighting and hockey.

The greatest penalty any politician expects to pay is to be thrown from office at the next election when, he or she may hope, tempers have cooled and the facts have been forgotten. This is not Trump-style lying. These are lies that are plainly intended to be believed. But through sheer repetition, they have had the same result. We've been burned so often with such mounting shamelessness that we now assume they're all lying.

This erosion of truth, not Trump-style lying as you point out, which is just a whole other quality and quantity, thankfully we don't quite experience in this country yet. But the erosion of truth that you're talking about has had what impact on our political life? I think it's corroded trust in politicians when you ask people why they don't vote, which is another problem. We have blipped up in this election because of the crisis that was going on, but generally there's a secular decline and turnout at all levels of government in Canada. And you ask me, well, they're all liars.

It's easy to dismiss that as just populist, anti-politician rabble, rousing, etc. But if you look at the actual record, going back several decades, it's been absolutely shameless. I don't mean stray slips of the lip or a little colorful rhetoric, exaggeration, that blarney the kinds of things we associate with politicians, and that's maybe part of the game. I mean down and dirty, flat out, promises on central parts of your campaign platform that the first thing you do once you get in the office

is you repudiate them. Going back to Pierre Trudeau with the zap you're frozen on on wage and price control, or Brian Mulroney attacking free trade as a leadership candidate and then bringing it in when you came in, or Jean-Claude Chancet saying, we're going to get rid of the GST, we're going to renegotiate NAFTA, etc

etc not doing any of those or Stephen Harper on income trusts and the list is long or just short of it. Yeah, so it the point I'm making is it's not just little slips of the lip. It's not populist cynicism. It's their track record has been on such a scale that you start to say well why should we accept this? We don't accept this in private life. The consequence in public life is, of course, that the people who are telling the truth now have no way to establish the bonafide. Right? Maybe they really mean it, but people are going, yeah, we heard this one. So bad politics is driving it out of

good. We're handicapping the honest politicians by doing this. So one of the things I propose, I've talked about this before, is something you might call a truth in politics act. I don't think you want to have, you know, a flat ban on lying. That'd be very hard to police and, you know, you don't want truth squads trailing people. What I think you want, borrowing from our private sector experience, is a way for politicians to opt into it. The same way you do when you offer a bonded courier, or you swear an oath, or you give a money back guarantee. You choose, in your own interests,

to assume consequences if what you're saying is not true. Is it so inconceivable that we could design something in political life where a political party, let's say, releasing their platform, could say, releasing our platform, we invoke Article 12 of the Elections Act. And Article 12 would spell out what the concepts would be if they were, in fact, did not uphold what they said they would do.

Very clearly, politicians would hedge, would make sure the promises were contingent and conditional. That's fine. I don't mind at all if a party says we're going to balance the budget subject to these conditions. That's an honest, reasonable, practical adult thing to promise. But at the end of the day, if those conditions are met, you've got to live up to your promise. Yeah, but OK, I'm going to give an Ontario example here.

I well remember the Mike Harris government 30 years ago passing a law that said, if you ever want to raise taxes in the future, you're going to have to have a referendum and the people are going to have to give you the green light to do so. And then later in that same progressive conservative, it might have been Ernie Eaves who had come in at that point, Premier Eaves said, okay, we got to raise taxes and I'm going to pass a little loophole to this law saying I actually don't have to have the referendum after all. And then Dalton McVean did the same thing. He did the same thing on the Taxpayer Protection Act,

or whatever it was called. So I guess I say, nice idea, but in practical terms, can it ever really happen? Well, this is true of a lot of things where we try to constrain the discretion of lawmakers. But the whole project of law is to constrain the discretion of lawmakers. That's what the Constitution is about, that's what the Charter is about, and there's a whole

thing in the book about that. So ultimately, there's only so far, short of a constitutional constraint, there's only so far you can constrain a parliament. But the act of passing the legislation, the act of then having to un-pass it, there's at least an embarrassment factor. So yeah, we could pass a Truth in Politics Act, and the next government could revoke it. I'm clear on that.

But at least the act of discussing, debating it, and sometimes what happens is these things don't get revoked at the next annual. They become part of the convention. They become sanctioned by usage in history. And they become such a taboo on overturning them that they stick. So that's the best you can hope for any of these things, is you essentially, over time,

it becomes part of the unwritten, the written law becomes part of the unwritten consensus. I got to the end of the book and I truly, I thought to myself, you know, he's got some great ideas in here and these really should be pursued. And then I read where you said, yeah, but of course the problem is that everybody who's elected today who potentially could do something about this has benefited from the status quo and therefore none of this will ever happen. So why should we not be totally depressed at the state of affairs? Well, there's two possibilities. One, and we talked a little bit about the impact of the Reform Act.

When Aaron O'Toole was tossed out, that was a watershed moment. And it was significant that the conservative caucus, even under Pierre Paglia, who's exercised a lot of control until now, voted to retain that power. And Mr. Paglia was sounding a little more consensual these days with his caucus members. So it's possible you can get incremental change over time. And just as right now we're trapped

in all these vicious circles where the less powerful Parliament is, the less anybody cares about how powerful Parliament is, et cetera, if you can get small changes happening, you can start turning those into virtuous circles. If you start empowering MPs, maybe they'll start to look at some of these other ways to empower themselves. That's one answer. The other is we get ourselves into some monster crisis.

And that's obviously not what I would hope. But we are getting the situation now in this country. We've got enormous changes that we're going to have to make in the next few years. Everybody agrees on defense, on the economy, on trade, dealing with Donald Trump, dealing with this entirely changed relationship in the United States.

I greatly fear that under our existing system, where governments get in with 40% of the vote or less, most of which is from one section of the country or another, that they then use to ram home large changes that the rest of the country might find repugnant, I worry that we're going to really strain the fabric and conventoration. It may be that we get to a point where we're really either hamstrung or deadlocked or in a state of division and People look around they go. Okay We've reached a crisis point where we where we no longer have anything to lose by talking about more systemic reforms And maybe you know

Maybe at that point you get a consensus that crosses party lines and making changes and I say in the book You know the model for that would be confederation. That's exactly what happened to Confederation. They got to a point where they could not move forward any further and then they made the great leap of faith into Confederation. So we need another leap of faith. Maybe. You have given us a lot to think about as you always do in your columns in the Globe and Mail as well. The Crisis of Canadian Democracy by Andrew Coyne. Andrew, it's great to see you. Congratulations on the book. Thanks so much. Onward we go. Thank you.