Referendums Reveal, Do Not Create, Divisions
Maryam Monsef, while minister for Canada’s democratic institutions, claimed referendums “have often led to deep divisions within Canadian and other societies.” They do not. There’s a difference between dynamite and a mirror. A ballot question doesn’t create rifts; it reveals existing fault lines.
Such revelation, moreover, is a good thing. An accurate record of how Canadians in the various parts of our country think about a controversial subject has never harmed governance. On the contrary, this insight helped us navigate a mid-course through treacherous shoals of conflict.
Steering the Ship of State by the Light of Referendums
Prime Minister Laurier and the entire country had to come to terms with the drive by well-organized forces hoping to free society from the problems alcohol spawned by getting rid of “demon rum” altogether, countered by an equal and opposite force of many with stubborn attachment to liquor, and the business interests of those who distilled, brewed, fermented, bottled, distributed, and sold alcoholic beverages.
The 1898 vote on prohibition held a mirror to those divisions in Canadian society and throughout the country’s regions. The prohibition vote showed fundamental division in country. The voting, and all the heated debate preceding it, did not create the dichotomy reflected in the ballot counts. The referendum’s accurate measure of deep-seated and pre-existing conditions clarified the need to proceed with caution, a point made in a more dramatic fashion than anything else could. A referendum is criticized as a blunt tool, but sometimes whacking a mule’s rear with a two-by-four is the only way to convey that it’s time to move.
Another benefit of referendums — how they can actually contribute to “peace, order, and good government” — begins to appear only long after the ballots are counted. Those who advocated or opposed conscription in the dire days of the Second World War had to acknowledge, in dispassionate moments as time passed, the sanity of Prime Minister King’s gradualism — “conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription” — because everybody could plainly see in the 1942 referendum results the risk of winning the war and losing the country had he rushed mandatory enlistment for overseas military service.
The division in our society over conscription was certainly not created by that referendum, as routinely alleged. It had existed, particularly between French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians, since the 1860s, when each community had broadly dissimilar views about raising an armed force to defend against military aggression from the United States; it was revived in the period 1914 to 1918, when this deep fault line reappeared in the 1917 general election results amid the First World War conscription crisis, and again came to the fore in 1940’s general election as a pivotal issue on which parties campaigned with heartfelt intensity.
Shallow Grasp of Deep Human Tendencies
Those expressing fears that the use of ballot questions will change people’s fundamental values and core beliefs in short order — the duration of a referendum campaign — have nothing to fear. Past about age eight, and certainly by thirteen years of age, a traumatic experience is required to alter the basic world view and its grounding values we absorb in early childhood. What people express in marking a ballot, whether to answer a question or elect a representative, is a small manifestation of a much larger process compressing their lifetime acquisition of beliefs, values, attitudes, and memories.
Shallow understanding of the process by which humans develop our outlooks and what we respond to in campaigns is matched, in many cases, by how opponents of referendums similarly fail to see issue-voting as part of a much broader process for governance. Those focusing only on the numbers added up on voting night and getting agitated about the newly recorded evidence of people’s pre-existing beliefs and considered opinions miss how the balloting is but part of a much larger phenomenon.
Not to ask a ballot question is to avoid looking in the mirror. A referendum exposes whatever division or gulf of opinion already exists within the community. It clarifies the depth of disagreement. It shows the breadth of consensus. It does so with a conclusiveness opinion polling can never achieve. It provides a deliberated expression of political reality. The direct voice of the people is an irrefutable alternative to the opinions of pundits who fill the airwaves, chat rooms, and columns with suppositions about what the people think and personal opinions on what decision is best for the country.
Referendums in the Age of Opinion Polling
Referendums predated the invention of opinion polls, as noted earlier, leading some to suggest ballot questions have had their day, that to continue issue-voting in our modern era is time-warped politics. This reasoning suffers from the fallacious assumption that ballot questions and pollsters’ questions are essentially the same.
A referendum asks a single question; pollsters pose several. A ballot question gets answered once; a pollster might phone back next week. A referendum vote is proceeded by a campaign of information, education, and debate, allowing time for reflection before voting; a pollster might be at your door or on the line when you’ve just climbed out of the shower, or are immersed in something entirely unrelated to public policy, or not had time to ponder the point he or she is asking about.
A referendum is a formal procedure, like going to mass or a concert, and involves all the voting citizens of our country or province at the same time, the same way, for the same purpose. A poll is none of those things. A poll comes with a margin of error; validly cast ballots present a precise and accurate number. An opinion tossed off to a stranger’s question, with no consequence, is not a marked ballot on which you’ve inscribed your verdict and taken your part in shaping our future. A “representative sample” is not the same as millions of votes. A ballot is conclusive, the way opinion polls can never be.
That is not to say these two realms are unconnected. From the outset, polling’s number crunching has been as intrinsic to referendums as it became to elections — not as a substitute for a ballot question but to determine whether, as Lucien Bouchard would put it much later, “winning conditions” exist. The wartime ballot question in 1942 on conscription was incredibly sensitive, not only for its domestic impact but the international message it conveyed and how Nazi propaganda might exploit the result. As Prime Minister King contemplated a country-wide vote on conscription, he turned to Sol F. Rae (father of the estimable Bob Rae), a senior official at the Department of External Affairs, who had a compelling interest in how Canada was going to raise more troops to defeat Nazi Germany.
To determine, in advance, whether the PM’s prospective venture into ballot-box democracy would help or hinder this objective, Rae invited George Gallup, whose polling organization had been tapping into American public opinion since the mid-1930s, up to Ottawa to discuss conducting one of his “scientific polls” for the Canadian government. Could George find out how the public would respond to a decision by King to turn his back on his promise that there would be no conscription?
The two men reached an agreement. The results had to be kept top-secret by Gallup and reported only to Rae, the prime minister, and depending on what he found, a couple of Ottawa’s most senior civil servants.
The contract first covered conducting the secret poll, then helping develop a strategy to deal with public opinion going into the 1942 plebiscite. This inaugurated the role of pollsters working to determine voting strategy and direct campaign tactics in Canada, for referendums and elections alike, based on their polling. Having started, there would be no end.
The proliferation of polls measures their status as a tool favoured by political parties to gauge public feelings about candidates and issues. The politicians’ belief in the supposed superiority of polls can be gleaned from the fact that pollsters and polling are not denigrated as being “divisive.”