No offense to John Ralston Saul, but I have to disagree with his assessment that Canada has been the longest uninterrupted democracy in the world. It's not just because I'm a jaded youth either. The statement is just a mess of signification, because in order to make it, one must first assume that Canada's democracy has never wavered at any time, and second, one must believe that democracy truly exists. Again, it's not because I'm a jaded youth that I believe that. It's because I know my Canadian history to even a marginal degree that I know how to complicate both of these very attractive assumptions: Canadian democracy was born in decidedly un-democratic company, we still consider the Queen to be our head-of-state, and democracy itself is, in practice, un-democratic.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines democracy as "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state , typically through elected representatives". I love this definition because it is simultaneously ideological and oppressive in the same explicit instant. Democracy is, by definition, not reflective of the whole of society but through the process of election and so-called eligible representatives. For the sake of simplicity in this response, I'm not going to focus on pre-Confederation Canada, because it was not technically a democracy but a monarchy. In fact, the argument could even be made that Canada is still a monarchy, because the Queen is still regarded as our head of state.
Ralston Saul's definition of democracy differs somewhat from the OED. He sees democracy as a system of government by the people, for the people, of the people, and the people, for him, are a great mix of ethnicities and cultures. We are Metis, he writes, individuals of both European and Aboriginal descent. The foundation of our country's government lies in the colonists, not the colonials, and currently, our government is varied and representation of all the people. I can appreciate Saul's re-reading of history to include a more sympathetic view of our origins, and I also appreciate his ability to redefine power structures in society, recasting Canada as the centre of our national ideology rather than Britain. However, I can't imagine how he thinks that Canada is a democracy, let alone an uninterrupted one.
Canada's origins as a democracy begin, as I've stated, at Confederation (unless you believe that Confederation maintained Canada's monarchical links, in which case, stop reading here). Yet Confederation itself was not a democracy by Saul's definition. Everyone in the rooms of both the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences were white, upper class men of European descent or nationality. They aren't elected officials as demanded by the OED. They weren't even necessarily the most eligible, what with two major groups in the population - women and Aboriginals - completely left out of the proceedings. Democracy in Canada was therefore born out of an event that was decidedly un-democratic.
A democracy born in exclusion cannot possibly be a democracy, but let's pretend for a moment that Confederation actually did represent the birth of a democratic government in Canada. That government spent the next century-and-three-quarters continuously oppressing the people it excluded from Confederation in the beginning. They even started oppressing other minorities when immigrants began arriving in Canada. Even today, the government is not representational of all the people in Canada.
So if Ralston Saul would like to make the assertion that Canada is the longest uninterrupted non-democracy, I would like to agree; I think a lot of countries fall under that category. But for all its fairness, for all the reasons I am proud to be a Canadian, democracy is such a loaded term that I don't think adequately describes our current political climate.
No comments:
Post a Comment