The Trouble With Democracy

Canada's increasingly narrow and simplistic political discourse makes things easy on political parties and the press, but hard on our democracy.

Forty years ago I was visiting an egg farmer near Gananoque, Ontario. After seeing his operation of thousands of chickens, we were standing in a room full of large cartons of eggs. But he took me to a small shed across the farmyard to get my eggs. I asked why he didn’t sell me the ones from the other room.

“I wouldn’t sell you those,” he said. “They don’t taste like eggs.”

He explained that the chickens were given feed to produce eggs with as little taste as possible. The egg sellers didn’t want people avoiding eggs because they didn’t like the taste. The eggs he did sell me were what eggs should taste like, he said, because of the range of feed he gave the chickens.

Twenty years ago, when I was investing in restaurants, I was told a similar story about fast food.

“As much as possible,” the man said, “the dimensions of taste available are reduced to salt and sweet. Taste is such an individual thing that we can’t control that. But by narrowing the range, it all comes down to who can market better. And marketing is a science, and much more controllable.”

Today, our politics have become eggs and fast food, with the range of discourse reduced as much as possible to the equivalents of salt and sweet.

A complex issue like health care is reduced to a discussion of “wait times." Public education is reduced to “classroom size." Health care and education officials know it is a lot more complicated than that, and that such reduction can even be harmful. An all-out onslaught on classroom size might do nothing to improve a child’s ability to learn, for example, if issues of parental engagement or malnutrition are not addressed. But it will divert money from other initiatives.

This narrowing of the public agenda finds support from political parties and the corporate media. For the parties, it clearly defines the battlefield and allows them to marshal resources, all of which can be centrally managed from the prime minister’s or premier’s office. For the media, always under cost pressures, it requires fewer reporters to deploy, fewer bureaus to operate, and a narrower competitive battlefield.

There are losers, though, and the biggest is our democracy. As commentators lament ever lower voter turnouts, postulating it to be the fault of a failed education system, television and video games, immigrants, and a lazy population, they might consider that our political discourse has stopped talking about things that people really care about. Politics might still be played vigorously by those engaged in it, but it is increasingly as interesting to most people as a high school water polo game.

Getting young people interested in political discourse won’t be accomplished by talking about wait times. Classroom size won’t engage the large number of people without kids in schools, or who don’t worry about their kids’ education.

A vigorous public discourse engaging politicians and the media should talk about vital everyday elements of community life, like getting and keeping good jobs; having a transit system that connects people to work, school, shops, and the soccer field; an accessible local health service that treats illness but also helps us stay healthy; good and affordable homes; and turning our neglected lake- and river-fronts into centres of community life.

Political discourse is too central to a high-functioning democracy to become the exclusive preserve of politicians and a client press. Outside of a few elites, Canadians have walked away from our politics, abandoning our democracy. Our politicians need to work at giving it back.