Our collective fear of Canada’s housing crisis may have reached a new peak last week. Headlines depicted a not-so-distant, semi-dystopian future in which home ownership in desirable urban areas is not just very difficult to attain, but entirely and permanently out of reach: private firms are taking advantage of the ever-rising housing prices to buy up hundreds, even thousands of properties, and are securing significant external investment to do so. Public outcry was swift and angry: it’s bad enough that housing prices are rising so quickly and eroding affordability—why should the already wealthy investor class be allowed to carry out their plan to purposely drive prices further up, capturing enormous profits in the process? And vitally, what is the government doing about it?
The answer: not all that much, by the looks of it. Though the federal government has allocated funding to grow the supply of housing, this won’t do anything to prevent private hands from gobbling up existing properties in their plot to monopolize supply. This inaction has caused many of us to wonder: why doesn’t the government just do something about it? Aren’t they there to represent our interests, to address our needs?
Sure, in theory. There’s a term called policy responsiveness that I find relevant to this conversation: simply put, it describes the degree to which a government responds to public concerns with real policies. One could use a number of metrics to measure it: does the pile of legislation a government passes correlate to the policy issues citizens care about (versus, perhaps, the issues corporations care about)? How quickly does a government respond to a policy issue that picks up steam among the public? What methods does a government employ to collect input from the public on their concerns, and does this translate into legislation? From my own observations, neither our federal or provincial government is doing an especially good job at responding to people’s policy needs—at least not to the degree that some of these urgent files call for.
How does our political system move towards better policy responsiveness? Several steps could make a sizeable dent in correcting the disconnect. The first—as you may have seen coming from an article you’re reading via Fair Vote Canada—is proportional representation in our electoral system. A core reason why a governing party may not table legislation despite strong public support is because they don’t feel it’s necessary to ensure their continued electoral success. The first past the post electoral system holds voters hostage: within it, the system of political accountability we expect from a functioning democracy is broken. To present an example from my own experience: perhaps I want to see better climate policy, but my riding swings between Liberal and Conservative. Too bad for me: a vote for the Greens or NDP would be wasted—I better strategically vote Liberal to at least keep the party with the worst climate platform out of power, so the common wisdom goes. But to choose between the better of two weak climate plans is hardly a choice at all. Until proportional representation is adopted, voters’ choices are constrained; without proportional representation, we don’t have the political power to which we ought to be entitled as citizens of a democratic state.
The second step we could take would be somewhat more experimental, though not unprecedented in the global context: single-issue citizens’ assemblies. Rather than merely voting every four years and leaving government to their own devices in the meantime, perhaps convening assemblies of citizens to deliberate and advise on all those controversial, sticky, and tricky policy issues could be a better strategy. Naturally, there’s a list of details to work out. Would the government decide which issues deserve their own deliberative assembly or would this be controlled by some minimum threshold of public interest? Would there be a total budgetary limit that would constrain the number of assemblies that could be conducted annually? How would we institutionalize these assemblies so that a future government unamenable to public input doesn’t decide to withdraw funding and shut them down entirely? And, in my view, most important of all: how would we bind governments to adopt policy that’s faithful to the citizens’ expert-informed recommendations produced through deliberation? (And, for the theorists among us, is handing such power to unelected individuals democratically legitimate or desirable?)
At the municipal level, a number of city governments around the world have tested and implemented another kind of democratic innovation: participatory budgeting. For issues that affect us locally, maybe that’s a good option to improve policy responsiveness in our immediate surroundings. But ultimately, our tax dollars flow to the top, and it’s those federal funds that control whether housing is affordable and in adequate supply. For the entire range of policy issues, local to federal, we urgently need reforms to our voting and decision-making systems to ensure citizens—not party or corporate interests—control the policies that shape our lives.
Webinar: Building a citizen-empowered democracy in Ontario!
Ontarians want more say over the policies that affect their lives. It’s time to Make Every Vote Count!
Join us on Monday June 28, 7 PM EDT as we launch our provincial campaign in Ontario with a crucial conversation about building a citizen-empowered democracy.
PROC Discussion & Vote Happening Today!
The Procedure & House Affairs Committee (PROC) motion by Daniel Blaikie to study a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform is set to be discussed – and probably voted on – TODAY at 11 AM!
Join us on twitter @FairVoteCanada #PROC and watch the meeting live on ParlVu here – click the green “watch” button, which SHOULD appear beside that meeting when the committee is live.
Last newsletter’s “Did You Know” mentioned that premier Doug Ford passed a bill to extend political spending limits on third party groups. That same day, a judge ruled sections of that bill as infringing on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In response to the court’s decision, premier Doug Ford last week invoked the notwithstanding clause as a way to force through the bill.
The notwithstanding clause was originally added to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms to ensure that the last word is always held by the elected representatives of the people rather than by the courts. In other words, elected governments (federal, provincial or territorial) can implement a law or action “notwithstanding” — meaning “in spite of” — a Charter right. It allows legislatures to override portions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for a five-year term.
While this marks the first time the notwithstanding clause has been used in Ontario’s history, it is very rarely used in other provinces and has never been used federally.