The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: The Crisis of Canadian Democracy

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

We are a long way from a fully functioning democracy, according to Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. That's the main argument in his new book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, in which Andrew points to the many ways our political system is broken: a dysfunctional parliament, MPs whose party loyalty is valued more than their constituents' concerns, and elections that reward regional interests at the expense of national unity. Andrew offers thoughtful and substantive solutions for how Canada can change course and make this country's democracy work for the citizens whom it is supposed to represent. Find out how to purchase Andrew's book here.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're in the middle of what is widely acknowledged as an existential crisis with, you know, our nearest neighbor menacing us now and threatening to annex us and all kinds of other things and economic potential recession coming, et cetera. But for the last five months and so, the parliament hasn't sat. It's been dark and nobody seems to care. Rudyard Griffiths here, the chair of the monk debates. Welcome to this, our continuing conversations with Globe and Mail journalist Andrew Coyne. Today we're going to be talking about his new book, Canadian Democracy in Crisis, quickly on its way, I'm sure, to being a national bestseller, an important and in-depth look at a lot of the institutions that we care greatly about here at the Monk debates, from your vote to parliament, to how we together as free citizens make decisions collectively. Let's bring Andrew Coyne into our conversation virtually today. Andrew, congratulations on the publication of the book. Well, thank you very much, Roger. So tell us, Andrew, this book, where did it come from?

What drove you to put pen to paper for whatever hundreds of pages you've done here? This is no small feat, and I know it was greatly anticipated by your many followers of your column and writing over the years. Well, thank you for asking. I mean, I guess I've been writing about various aspects of this question. question, you know, all my career, whether we're talking about the role of MPs in Parliament or the role of Parliament itself, how we conduct our elections, how we run our campaigns, powers of the Prime Minister, the powers of the Senate, et cetera. These come up again and again because there's so many problems in them. And I guess I was chatting with Ken White, my publisher,

familiar to a lot of people as the former editor of the National Post and then editor McLean's and I guess he was the one to suggest that tying all these different things together. You could write a whole book about each of the subjects in this book and people have. So if there's anything I've contributed, perhaps is tying them all together and just the totality of it after a while,

you sort of sit up straight after a while and you say this is really problematic. We're a long way from a fully functioning democracy. You know, our self-image, And it's hard for us to break out of this, is that we have one of the world's exemplary democracies. And obviously, in some ways, we do. We just had a campaign in which, you know, the voting system worked as it should. And nobody questioned the results legitimacy.

And nobody was a victim of corruption or fraud or force in the election. So on the sort of surface level, procedural level, you know, it's all fine and dandy. But it's when you look at it in substance, you know, how, how, how, really. real is the parliament that we elect? What real power does it have to represent us? What real powers do the MPs have individually to represent our writings? How representative is the election result of how people actually voted? There's a lot of these more substantive questions that, as I say, if it was just one of them, you might say, okay, not so much, we'll fix that. But when you add them all together, I think we've got, that's why the title of the book is the crisis of Canadian democracy.

Yeah. Well, let's start with Parliament because I think many of us feel that this is the institution that resides at the heart of our democracy. It's the place where our duly elected representatives come together to respect and reflect our interests. You paint a picture in this book, Andrew, of a parliament that's not simply under assault that's had its power eroded. You paint a picture of a parliament that effectively has ceased to exist as a parliament. as a relevant and functioning political force in the country? Yeah, I mean, as exhibit A, just look what we're going through right now. We're in the middle of what is widely acknowledged as an existential crisis with, you know, our nearest neighbor menacing us now and threatening to annex us and all kinds of other things and economic potential recession coming, et cetera. But for the last five months and so, the parliament hasn't sat. It's been dark and nobody seems to care.

You know, usually in a crisis, that's exactly when you want to have our representatives standing up in a public assembly and voicing our concerns and asking what's being done about this, that, and the other thing and suggesting the ways forward and debating these things. You know, usually in a functioning democracy, that's what people would normally expect their parliament to do. Here, when you do suggest, my goodness, isn't it too bad that parliament isn't sitting, people look at you like you got. got two heads and say, well, what do you think Parliament's going to do? It'll all just be grandstanding and who cares anyway. So Parliament, part of the problem with a lot of these questions is they become self-fulfilling prophecies. The weaker Parliament has become and the weaker members of parliament have become, the harder it is for people to conceptualize why they should care, what they're missing. And it's been happening for so long and it's been getting weaker and weaker

for so long that it really does become, it feeds into itself. If people, we're more attuned to how important Parliament is. They'd be more up in arms each time something is done to reduce its powers. But what's happened over the years is that a number of conventions and rules of the House have been allowed to fall by the wayside one by one. And maybe people put up a fuss initially, but after a while, they give up. So, for example, one of the most famous episodes in parliamentary history was the pipeline debate in 1956. And what kicked off the ruckus there?

Why was that such a big deal? Because the government had the nerve, had the temerity, rugged, to invoke closure, to cut off debate in parliament in peacetime. And it was such a shock to the system that they nearly ended in fisticups. It was a huge ruckus. Well, now, of course, we invoke something close to closure called time allocation. Every other day, it's become particularly under majority governments, it's become almost routine.

And nobody bats an eye anymore. And nobody raises a fuss anymore. Similarly, there was a famous episode in Parliament, the bell ringing episode, and I think it was 1982. That was a big fuss because the government had put forward an omnibus bill where they had gathered together

a number of different bills of very different purpose and meaning and forced MPs to vote in all at once. And this was such an affront to parliamentary's dignity and MP's rights that they, rather than enter the parliament, when the bells rang to assemble them to vote, they stayed out and left the bells ringing for days on end.

Well, now, of course, gigantic omnibus bills are almost the norm. Every year, governments, whether the liberal or conservative, bring in a bill with 600 pages, 800 pages, vastly more than anything we were ever seen before, and people grumble a bit, but it's not considered the norm now. So omnibus bills that force MPs to vote up or down on 29 pieces of disparate legislation at once

and make a mockery of any attempt to properly scrutinize it. And then the bill, as often as not, will be passed with the benefit of time allocation. So there's only a few days of debate on this massive bill. That alone, you can sort of see how Parliament has been kind of neutered. Then you add in things like governments implicitly or explicitly saying every vote is a confidence vote. So you can't possibly have the nerve to vote down the space of legislation. Because if you do, we're going to regard it as a matter of confidence. We have to go to an election.

Well, that's not how parliaments in other parliamentary democracies work. It's not considered a terrible thing. If the government happens to lose on this or that bill, it doesn't mean that parliament has voted no confidence in the whole government. But it's a very effective mean of once again of riding herd on people and preventing them from actually representing the constituents. You can go on and off. the degree to which are committees, which are supposed to be the jewel in the crown of parliamentary

government, the committees themselves have become essentially rubber stamps, toothless talk shops, particularly during majority governments. Minorities, they get a little more interesting. But even under minority governments, we've seen time and time again on this central privilege and right of committees, which is to send for documents, to demand the government, produce documents, particularly on matters of the government would rather not be exposed to light. So think, for example, of the S&C. Lavlin affair or the we charity affair or any of the number of scandals that the last government went through. Time and again, Parliament was prevented

from getting the documents. It demanded, even during minority government when supposedly Parliament would have more power than under a majority. So you can see just on that one subject, the numbers of ways in which they've become attenuated. Yeah. One of my favorites, Andrew, is that, you know, the Speaker of the House used to, have, until quite relatively recently, have the ability to recognize members of parliament who got the speaker's attention. They could ask a question. Well, we've had instead a situation now for many parliaments where, guess what, the speaker gets a list of who's allowed to speak from the respective party whips who now choreograph the back and forth in the chamber each

and every day. That's right. And it's the same with members' statements. And of course, not only does the party decide who gets to speak. So this is a second sort of category of the way in which we've fallen away from Parliament democracy. The first was, you know, the Parliament versus the government of the day. The second is members of Parliament versus their respective party leaders. And it's just as bad or, if not worse, on the opposition benches as it is in the government benches. And so, yeah, one example of that being when they comes to asking questions or making member statements. It's not up to the speaker. It's not up to drawing by lots. It's completely dictated by the party brass. All of the parties participate in it. It's completely different than

in any other parliamentary democracy. This is a uniquely Canadian degree to which it's become so centralized here. On top of which, of course, their questions and the statements are written for them as often as not. One of the things really overtaken Parliament in recent years is it's not just about voting discipline anymore. And Canada has, by the way, the most rigid system of party discipline when it comes to voting. The Samara Center looked into this and found that over the last X number of years, I forget exactly how many Canadian MPs voted with their party 99.6% of the time. Wow. Wow. No other parliament comes close. Britain, you see three times as much or four times as much MPs voting against their party.

The United States, they think they've got, you know, party discipline now in the States. It's nothing even remotely close to Canada. But what's overtaken it lately is message discipline. And so not only are MPs required to vote the party line every single time, but they're required to speak the same slogans in every public utterance. And attendance is taken if they don't. So even in things like tweets online or press releases they put out, they'll all be supervised, if not written by party central command.

So nobody's saying we should get rid of parties. Nobody's saying there shouldn't be some degree to which you should be expected to follow the party line in some degree. But we've just taken it to such an extreme in this country. I understand that conservative MPs in the previous parliament were not allowed to travel to destinations in Canada other than Ottawa without, and the riding between the two, without the permission of the leader's office. So, Andrew, how did we get here? As you say, it's important for Canadians to understand, I'm so glad you bring this up, that we are the outlier here, that if you look at the Westminster democracies, Australia,

the United Kingdom in particular, you see way more diversity, way more latitude. you see, frankly, a greater preservation of parliamentary privilege and tradition and all the unwritten rules that guide our form of democracy. Why did Canada become, frankly, so authoritarian in its approach to parliamentary democracy? Well, part of it is sort of cultural, I think. I think to some extent living next to the United States, It's been easy for a trend that's existed in all part of the international democracies, which is to put more and more emphasis on the leader rather than the individual members of parliament,

to take that even further, to presidentialize it. We're constantly seeing this presidential example of the South. And even though they have a completely different system of government than we do, I think it's easy to slip into that trap. Secondly, there's a couple of milestones along the way that altered the relationship, the power dynamic between, members of caucus and their party leaders. One was in 1919 when instead of electing the party leader by the caucus, or formally or informally, as had been the tradition in Westminster Systems, we moved

to assist the liberals were the first party to do it, of electing it by the members at large. And for a long time, for several decades, that was through party conventions, where delegates were elected to go to the convention and elected leader. And lately, the vogue has been for one member, one vote. And I can understand how that would sound more democratic because you're opening it up, quote unquote, to more and more people. And the liberals in the last time when they elected Justin Trudeau took it even further and said, you don't even have to be a member of the party. You can just be a supporter. Right. But I think that's a very pinched and narrow definition of democracy. One of the themes I try to emphasize in the book is democracy is not just what happens on election

day or voting day, it's what happens every day in between. And what happens, of course, is the leader is elected by this college of electors, the members of the party. Again, not even the existing membership, the people who've actually worked for the party for years on end and licked envelopes and knocked on doors, but the membership plus the tens of thousands of new members that are signed up en masse, you know, do that one thing of voting for a leader on one day and then are never heard from again. And oftentimes these are people who don't even have the best interest of the party at heart. Remember Andrew Shearer, when he was elected, a big part of it was played by Quebec dairy farmers who I guarantee you are not part of the conservative base, but who entered

the thing because they wanted to make sure that supply management wasn't going to be written monkeyed about with because his opponent was Maxime Bernier. So this group elects the leader and then dissolves the next day or that minute. And then effective of that means the leader is accountable to no one from that point on. He's certainly not accountable to the caucus. They had no choice in no real say in electing him or her. even though every moment of their working life is controlled by the leader, and their whole career prospects are controlled by it.

They're one of the few groups that we make an exception to. In every other walk of life, we say government with the consent of the government. Whoever is the leader has to be elected by the people he's leading. Well, not for the party caucus. And they are the ones who should be riding herd on the leader. They're the ones who should be holding him to account to make sure he's actually doing a good job. And certainly the liberals are the latest party to discover what happens when

don't have that control function because it was very clear for some time that Justin Trudeau had to go, but they had no mechanism, no agreed upon rules to actually dispatch them. So that was the one element of it was taking away the right of caucus to choose the leader and therefore making the leader immune essentially from any kind of democratic accountability. But then the flip side of that was in 1970, I believe it was. We brought in legislation that effectively said that every candidate, before any candidate could stand for election as the party represented, they had to have their nomination papers approved by the party leader. Yeah.

Which essentially meant the party leader had a veto on the candidacy of every prospective MP, including existing MPs, including his caucus. Yeah. So, you know, you get out of line with the leader, therefore, you can really pay the price. And, of course, the leader has all kinds of other privileges and powers he can bestow or withhold from members of the caucus. but that's obviously the biggest one. So that's really changed the power dynamic

and a lot of other stuff flows from that. The final point I'll just make on that question is, I think the system of what Richard Gwynne called one and a half party rule, where the liberals basically are the default, you know, the natural governing party and every now and then we bring in the Tories when we're just too fed up with the liberals.

So the liberals have won two elections and three going back 120 years. Yeah. I think that has, when you don't have, a fully contestable politics. I think if you look at the besetting sins of the liberals and the conservatives, the arrogance of the liberals and the kind of chip on the shoulder defensiveness of the Tories, I think it stems from that fact that they come into every election with a different

set of expectations and different possibilities. And one further manifestation of that is the liberals have tended to let stuff slide to push conventions to the side, to violate them, get away with it because they can't because people keep electing them no matter what and then when the conservatives get in they wind up doing as bad or worse as the liberals because they tell themselves well we have to we have to level the playing field everything stacked against us that we have to take these shortcuts to be able to have any chance whatever and so it's a very malignant dynamic between the two of them before we get to solutions i'm talking with ander coin about his great new book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, urge all of our monk members to go out buy a copy and

dig in. Lots to go through here. Too much for this interview. But before going to Solutions, I want to talk about what you write in the book of Brown nominations and, you know, the initial kind of moment that we enter into the democratic process by, you know, putting a candidate forward for party Y or party X. And our listeners and viewers, we're not. No, this was a major part of the scandal that we've had prior to the election over the previous two years about foreign interference in this country. And I think it's so important what you're writing about, which is the extent to which this whole process has really gotten out of control. It's become a virtual sham. And I'd like to hear some more from you on that and then,

you know, pivot to the solutions. Like, what do we do to ensure that nominating? nations are more democratic, more legitimate. How does that transfer through to the member of parliament and his or her standing? And then how does that in turn transfer to parliament itself and the relationship of parliament to the executive? Yeah. Well, and so the way in which I think people imagine the system works is, you know, there's a contest at the local riding level, the riding association level, where members of the party meet to decide who they would like to represent them in the election. That currently is the case in less fewer than one in five nominations to taking all the parties together.

So the average is less than 20%. Half of the nominations, over half in recent elections, were essentially appointed by the leader. So no election contests at all. And whoever was appointed might or might not have any real connection to the riding. among those that remained, two-thirds of the races were decided by acclimation. There was only one candidate running, and as often as not because that one candidate had the backing of the party of establishment, and why would anybody think they could beat them? So between appointed and acclaimed, you leave very few actual contested nominations, as I said.

And even in the contested ones and the data on this, it's just amazing. The degree to which the organizers can put their thumb on the scales by playing around with the timing of the meeting, how long the race is. People don't find out until it's too late to do anything about it. So there's a lot of funny business on the organizers side. And even in the quote unquote clean races, how are they decided as often as not by people who can stack the meeting with the most instant members that were signed up or had their nominations as often as not purchased for them, were bust in at the last minute, ha, you know. and surprise, you know, you lose the nomination. And while that's been a sort of cynical entertainment over the years when it was just about, you know, internal party shenanigans,

as you suggest, it's taken on a rather more sinister hue of late because it's become a golden opportunity for foreign powers, if they choose, to interfere in our election process. When you combine these extraordinarily loose rules on the nomination races themselves with safe ridings. And that's a whole phenomenon itself, a function, one of the many ills associated with our first past the post system is it creates not only safe writings, but whole safe regions where the same party gets elected, election after election,

decade after decade. Nobody even bothers to campaign anymore in some of these writings, because they know who's going to win. Well, if you have a safe riding, then the re-election race is the nomination race for the party, the incumbent party. And if the nomination race is so easily gained, including by foreign actors, then you see the entry point essentially to place the pawns of a foreign dictatorship in our parliament. Now, you know, is this a widespread problem? Probably not, but to even have any of them, it's really worrying. And legitimacy. So that's that calls into question people's legitimacy.

That's right. And of course, the fact that the MPs, You know, this is another thing that weakens the MPs is if they were really seen as being the duly nominated representatives of the party, then I think people would be more inclined to say that MP represents me, both as an MP and as my local candidate for my party, and I'm going to see him as a legitimate player and a legitimate actor, somebody who should have agency and should be able to make more decisions independently and should not be seen as simply the creation and creature of the party establishment, the party leader.

So all these things, as I say, feed on themselves. So cleaning up the nomination race. And, of course, leadership races are just bad. Leadership races, again, often involve, they're basically glorified membership drives. And so the parties go out and they do it every time. And every time there's some sort of scandal associated with it where they frantically sell hundreds of thousands of memberships. Without too many questions being asked, frankly, about who and how they got in there.

And we're now starting to see stories emerging about various foreign powers trying to get involved in the leadership races. Because, again, that's the point of entry. You know, our actual general elections are pretty hard to game. The paper balloting system is really secure. It's one of the great achievements of Canadian democracy. We're having, you know, recounts now. People are trying, some of the Yahoo's, frankly, on the right, are trying to inject. some kind of questioning about it, but I don't think they're getting any traction because people

know that the process of recounting, et cetera, is there's scrutiners and everything. It's really, really secure. But the party leadership races and the party nomination races are a joke. Yeah, wide open. Let's go to solutions in our remaining moments, Andrew. You know, often reform requires the very persons or institutions that are in positions of power to relinquish those powers to, you know, advance a good. And we saw, for example, with our previous prime minister, Justin Trudeau, an initial pledge in an election toward some significant reform of the electoral system, which then almost immediately after the election was yanked. I guess all of us wonder, therefore, while we may have ideas about reform, and there are lots of them, and you've had

great ideas put forward in this book, how do they come about in a system where all the incentives for the parties and persons in power is to resist those reforms because the system is so beautifully designed to advance their command and control over just about everything? Yeah, it's a great dilemma. I'm not sure I've got a simple answer to it. I think there's two possible sort of broad answers to that question. One is the sort of incremental one, that just as there's a lot of vicious circles that I've tried to suggest that feed on themselves in the process, if you can move one part of the puzzle, you can maybe turn those vicious circles into virtuous circles. So one, I think, brave attempt, only partially successful, but I think had some impact was the Reform Act that Michael Chong got in 2015, he was the sponsoring MP. it was watered down to the point where it was an attempt to empower the caucus,

but it required a vote of the caucus after each election of each party caucus to decide to assume those powers. And most of them happen because unfortunately the vote, in that matter, is not a secret ballot. And so every party MP knows that the leader is watching them and votes the way the leader tells them to. The exception has been the conservatives. And the conservatives have assumed each of the four powers

that the Reform Act won't get indulged. all of them that gives to the caucus, but the most important one was the power to remove the leader. Right. And they very quickly, once they assume that power, voted to remove their leader then at the time, Aaron O'Toole. And that was a watershed moment, I think. Not going to solve it, but it was a moment. And certainly when you see what the liberals have gone through in recent times, and we may start to see eventually the other parties start to assume some of these powers. Well, if you start to empower MPs, the individual MPs, maybe you start to see them.

asserting themselves a bit more. If the leader knows that the caucus can take him out, maybe the power dynamics starts to change a little bit, and maybe MPs will start to assert themselves another way. So that's one model is the kind of drip, drip, and then you get the ball rolling and you get better results. The other is the crisis model. The other is that we went into some just dreadful crisis where we're finally forced to confront some of the many damages that we've done to ourselves, And particularly, and we haven't talked a great deal about in this session, but the electoral system. The first pass-the-post system has so many different ills to its name. It makes a mockery of the principle of majority rule.

We don't have that. We have institutionalized minority rule in this country where governments with less than 40% of the vote, presume they have a mandate to impose all kinds of policies and the rest. It creates wildly different, effective voting power depending on which party you vote for. parties that can agglomerate their vote geographically do much better with the same number of votes than a party that's spread more even, all these things. But one of the most important is what it does to national unity. So we've just seen an example of this election where the liberals did better than they have it since 1968 in Alberta. They got close to 30% of the vote.

So by any measure, a really successful election for them in the West where they haven't done well historically. But they only got the same two seats that they've ever really been able to get. Albert. They didn't do any better in terms of the seats because of the first passed the post. Well, this disparity between how parties do in the various regions of the country and how they actually get, are rewarded in seats, creates an entirely false picture of the country. If you just looked at the seat counts, you'd say there's almost no liberals west of Ontario. There's almost no conservatives in Quebec. There's very, you know, no conservatives in the big cities, no liberals in the rural country.

And we know that's not true. The voting records are just completely contradict that. It creates these funhouse distortions that aggravate our divisions. If you're looking at it from the liberal point of view, you know, I think it's a fair statement to say the liberals have not been greatly attuned, if you will, to the concerns and interests of Alberta over the years. And if you're a liberal, you'd say, well, why should we be, if you're being cynical, because we can't win any seats there. Right. But even more important, we don't need to win any seats there because we've already racked up through the same distorted process. supermajorities of seats in Ontario and Quebec.

So the system basically rewards parties for not running as national parties, not taking a national view, but taking an aggressively regional view. And so it's not just that we're electing governments with 40% of the vote, it's that 40% of the vote is concentrated in one part of the country, in an already, a country has real enough divisions as it is. And that phony majority then feels empowered to ram through policies that may be completely repugnant to the rest of the country. Okay, we've sort of gotten away with that over the decades.

It's nearly killed the country on a couple of occasions, but we've mostly gotten away with it by agreeing not to deal with some of the biggest problems we have as a country because it would be too divisive. Well, now, because of Donald Trump and because of some other things that have accumulated, we've got a bunch of big decisions to make in the next few years, about defense spending, about taxes, productivity, you know, how we're going to deal with the United States, all these major decisions about trade policy that we've got to make as a result of that. So we've got huge big decisions coming at us.

And my great fear is if we're still saddled with this system that exaggerates and exacerbates our divisions, we're going to face real strains on the Federation. We're already seeing the first bubbling of it in Alberta. You know, the Part de Kippecua could get back in Quebec anytime soon. The silver lining, if I could put it that way, and that is maybe we get to some sort of massive crisis where we say, you know what? we've got to look at the way we make decisions of this country. If we want better decisions, if we want more unifying politics, maybe we have to look at the rules of the game and the way in which it either penalizes rewards parties for behaving in a divisive or unifying way. Andrew, so wise, so smart, such an important book. Thank you so much for sharing a taste of it with our monk debates community. Really appreciate having this conversation with you. Just a pleasure to be with you. Thank you, Roger. It was Andrew Coyne, Golden Mail Journalist, and author of the important new book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy.

We'll put links in the show notes to today's program where you can click through and order your copy now. We urge you to do that and support Andrew and the important messages that he is getting out with this book. So thank you for tuning into this edition of. The Monk Debates here on YouTube and on our podcast channel. We always enjoy your thoughts, comments, and suggestions. Please subscribe to the Monk Debates YouTube channel, write a review about the Monk Debates podcast. And of course, head over to our website, www.w.w.munkdebates.com for all kinds of great debates

and conversations with Andrew Coyne, Janice Stein, and more debates than you can shake a stick at. Please enjoy. and I will catch up with you next time on this program. Until then, I'm Rudyard Griffiths, Chair of the Monk Debates. Bye-bye. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.