Canada is not a great democracy, but do we care?
The majority of powers the Turkish president gained — the freedom to appoint cabinet ministers and senior judges without parliamentary approval, the power to unilaterally dismiss parliament, the power to decree certain sorts of laws without parliament at all — are all powers the Canadian prime minister already has. Yet no one would claim Canada is less than a full democracy, and it’s worth pondering why.
Any Canadian loudly worrying about the replacement of Turkish democracy “with what amounts to a dictatorship” — in the words of the Globe and Mail editorial board — should take a moment to consider how Canada’s political system would look if a third world tinpot proposed adopting it.
.. We can certainly question the Turkish government’s intentions. President Erdogan has clear authoritarian tendencies and exists in a country with an authoritarian political culture.
.. Yet the Erdogan administration’s official justification for last week’s amendments (and presumably the motive of the 51% of Turks who voted for it), that is, the need to make government more efficient and effective, is a common justification for the more authoritarian aspects of the Canadian political system as well
.. Canadian prime ministers come to power by winning control of the lower house of parliament, an achievement which almost never requires winning a majority of the popular vote. PMs then appoint members of the upper house directly, which means it can be taken for granted that any legislation they propose will quickly sail into law.
.. by the end of his term Harper had appointed seven of the court’s nine justices
.. America, with its feuds between the White House and Congress, and contentious Supreme Court nomination hearings, is often explicitly cited as an example to avoid, a system in which “nothing gets done” because there are too many competing poles of democratic authority.
.. the Canadian system, in which a prime minister is elected once every four years and given more or less free reign to do as he wishes
.. What’s feared is not a political system, but the particular ideologue running it. What’s feared is chauvinistic strongmen, not strongmen per se.