Continuing Adult Education
Putting a ballot question before electors is no gambler’s toss of the dice because, before voting, those considering whether to answer Yes or No get a crash course on the pros and cons of the issue at hand.
A.V. Dicey discerned how a referendum could motivate education in public affairs. Voting on a specific issue required an elector “to decide public issues upon the weight of the argument, and not on the basis of party loyalties.” This, he reasoned, enabled voters “to distinguish men from measures.”1
Motivation, always key to learning, comes from the issue being one of transcending importance whose outcome, once decided, everyone in the voting community will either benefit from or pay the consequences for. There is minimal risk in a self-governing democratic country like ours, with well-educated people and comprehensive communications networks, submitting any matter to a vote of adult citizens. There is, rather, maximum reward in people becoming more deeply educated about a major issue affecting the course of our public affairs.
Trusting Citizens to Study and Decide
A core component of Canada’s justice system is acceptance of citizen juries hearing evidence and then rendering Yes or No verdicts on the fate of someone’s life. They don’t convict or acquit at the start of the trial, but after they’ve heard and seen everything the defence counsel and Crown prosecutor present as evidence, and even then, only after withdrawing to deliberate on all they’ve learned, and to discuss it for as long as it takes to render an informed and well-thrashed-out decision.
Those chosen for jury duty are regular citizens, and in our system can’t be lawyers because their professional training makes them, even if only subconsciously, subjective “experts” who might overlay the case with their own legal thinking rather than weigh all evidence objectively and take instruction from the judge.
Juries are thus a form of “semi-direct democracy,” too. This right to trial by jury places an accused individual in the hands of citizen peers, not a panel of legal experts. And just as referendums are really “semi-direct” democracy, so criminal trials take place within institutional structures and according to established procedures, channelled in a variety of ways to uphold rule of law, ensure due process, and balance interests. Men and women chosen at random hear testimony and examine exhibits, then decide, under instruction from the judge about how to weigh the evidence, themselves. They ask questions about anything that needs to be clarified.
Clearly Presenting the Arguments of Both Sides
A principle in any judicial process is to “hear the other side,” which also applies to the referendum process. A century ago, when Canadians began to upgrade referendum procedures, one advance was the invention of a “publicity pamphlet” that a neutral public official such as the lieutenant governor, clerk of the legislature, or chief election officer sent to the household of each voter. In that era before radio, television, and the Internet, this printed medium was all-important for clear presentation by both Yes and No sides of their arguments in their own words. Saskatchewan’s 1916 Direct Legislation Act, for instance, provided this key educational component of the campaign. Each side got equal length (five hundred words) to state its case.
This educational practice has understandably been carried into modern times because informing voters about the issue being addressed and the choice being forced is the prime requirement of the whole democratic exercise. The U.K. statute for Britain’s 1975 referendum on the European Common Market included this essential provision. A couple of years later the Quebec Referendum Act, an admirably contemporary statute, replicated the provision. I not only included it in my Canada Referendum and Plebiscite Act, but in addition to the traditional paper-printed “pamphlet” also provided for voter education using state-of-the-art information media.
Journalists Save Us from Twilight Zone Politics
Because a core rationale for a referendum is that citizens will cast an informed ballot, it is vital, as in all other aspects of maintaining a free and democratic society, for arm’s-length information to be in circulation by which citizens can inform themselves.
News media free from government control are indispensable in presenting information about issues. And on an operational level, an election or referendum campaign without diversified media reporting would just not be comprehensible. All participants in the process — leaders, candidates or advocates for Yes and No, organizers, reporters, election officials, and voters — depend on open communication. If television and computer screens went black, radios fell silent, and newspapers vanished completely, the body politic would have no central nervous system. We’d be left in a twilight zone with billboards, leaflets, and people shouting at puzzled passersby with megaphones.
Journalism’s prized role in the twentieth century is being upended by the digital revolution, by “everyone” now able to be a journalist with hand-held cameras and devices to upload and forward “breaking news,” and by a subjective sense of breathless urgency replacing balance, gravitas, and objectivity. Operations of professional journalism continue to be consolidated and trimmed by increasingly concentrated media ownership, and starved for resources in the harsh economics of contemporary publishing. Even so, a free press working arm’s-length from government is what keeps Canadian democracy alive. And the new opportunities of our digital age for deeper, faster, and wider education about issues and decision-making have opened refreshing and radical channels that are rebooting democracy.
We benefit from extensive media and diverse sources of information. Few countries have a higher per capita ratio of media outlets to citizens, even fewer as high a percentage of well-educated and literate people. If the referendum process can’t be a success in Canada, where could it ever be?
Learning on a Need-to-Know Basis
We’re constantly bombarded by “too much information,” so subconsciously block most of it out. The wash of advertising about motor vehicles or mortgages floats past without registering — until the day we’re ready to buy a car or purchase a house, when we suddenly have reason to open our receptors and glom onto all of it. Facing a ballot question likewise prompts a need to know.
Referendums contribute to our continuing adult education the dynamic necessity of absorbing all the information we can that is streaming from news outlets and other sources about a specific issue — because we’re going to have to make an important choice about it.
The need to cast an informed ballot imposes on citizens a vested interest in studying the issue. A looming voting day engenders a degree of attention and achieves public education that otherwise simply doesn’t occur. It’s not that, in theory, we’re uncaring about vitally important subjects. But I’ve never met a courtroom lawyer who prepares for a trial she isn’t going to litigate, a student who crams all night for an exam he doesn’t have to write, or busy people focusing assiduously on public issues nobody ever asks their serious opinion about.
The referendum is the trial, the exam. It creates a rare nexus between the individual and the issue. The approaching deadline for casting one’s vote accelerates the learning curve. Whatever the outcome, that increased understanding about a major public concern enriches our country.