Rewards of Citizen-Centred Democracy
Canadians hoping for something better than the ineffectual performance of moribund public institutions focus on the intended purpose of such bodies to emphasize patient-centred health care, student-centred education, and citizen-centred democracy — yet find it hard to dislodge the numb practices of hospitals, schools, and governments with their protectorate of entrenched professionals, dependent service clientele, and self-referencing bureaucracies.
Many didn’t wait for a miracle to refresh Parliament and our legislatures, to revitalize our political parties or the public service, to revamp government programs for health services or practices of the education system. Instead, they sought alternate channels of action: non-governmental organizations to address public issues directly; use of social media to drive attention to a particular cause independent of governance structures and commercial news organizations; and the right to vote on constitutional change and establish, in the bargain, that our Constitution doesn’t belong to those who govern but to the people.
The role of referendums plays just a small part in this bigger drama. However, by recognizing the people as ultimate sovereigns in our multi-layered structure of public institutions and state power, the referendum is intrinsic to citizen-centred Canadian democracy. So inherent, in fact, that referendum use can properly be considered part of our Constitution, which the Supreme Court defined as “the customs, conventions, and enactments of the written constitutional text as well as Canadian political and judicial institutions and processes.” Our so-called “direct democracy” operates within a statutory framework enacted by legislatures and its verdicts are not self-implementing but take effect only through Canadian political institutions and processes.
Ballot questions and concerted efforts by a segment of Canada’s political class to prevent them entwine with turning points in our political and constitutional evolution. Sometimes a referendum has been resorted to out of political desperation, or for trivial matters, or as an unwise exercise of statecraft about an issue not yet ripe for resolution. But annoying misuse of a democratic practice isn’t unique to ballot questions. We’ve suffered opportunistic calling of elections, political delay by appointing royal commissions, and sidelining problematic individuals by parking them in the soft shadows of Parliament’s second chamber. Sometimes such abuse is caused by narrowly partisan motives. Other times, especially in the case of referendums, it has been because the requirements and potentials of responsible government itself are poorly understood.
Yet alongside the inescapable risk of people in power misjudging or abusing this unique democratic tool, referendums bring far more rewards, such as the following Top Ten.
1. Reality Check
All institutions make captives of those who serve them. Even those of us who believe we’re free agents exercising independent judgment are bent to the will and ways of the institutionalized system in which we function: schoolteacher, soldier, union leader, bank manager, priest, journalist, lawyer, member of Parliament. For a decade, I strenuously kept in contact with my constituents, advanced every measure I could to enhance citizen-centred governance, and pushed back against the pressures to conform, admonished by a cabinet minister for independence in Commons voting: “You know the way the game is played!”
I didn’t consider myself isolated from reality, but reading letters from individuals I’d worked with before becoming a parliamentarian, I was chagrined by their critique of some Mulroney government initiative because they just couldn’t see the bigger picture. I didn’t think I was living in a parliamentary bubble, and when the Charlottetown Accord emerged as the mother of all constitutional agreements, I campaigned for its ratification sincerely believing that the position of Quebec was finally being understood even as all related needs and interests from other sections of our country were simultaneously being accommodated. Yet when the Charlottetown Accord failed to win majority support from Canadians, and once everything quieted down, I reread the document in calm deliberation. I felt increasing relief that what I’d campaigned for had been defeated.
Years before I’d written, as part of my democrat’s creed, “Probably nine times out of ten, the collective wisdom of a large body of informed voters will make a better decision than any small group convinced it knows best.” On October 26, 1992, informed voters had reconfirmed a principle for democratic governance: If you can’t persuade others that a major change is necessary, then it is necessary to not make that change.
After I lost my seat in the House of Commons, I reread letters I’d received while an elected representative. Many contained interpretations I now saw in a different light. I’d previously thought my friends and constituents just didn’t see the big picture. However, what I held in my hands were accurate versions of a different reality.
The rawest reality we face in Canadian democratic procedures is not the diffuse electoral process. It is not the temporizing legislative process. It is the referendum process, which gives sovereign people a collective voice, an unfiltered reality check to recast conclusions of narrowcast experts, and when needed, enable course correction.
2. Create Counterweight
Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s well-developed political philosophy about the exercise of state power included the necessity to “create counterweights.” That is what his constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides: an offset to uphold the freedom of citizens against those who would curtail it. He also saw how the sovereign people, through the channel of a referendum on constitutional questions, could be an essential counterweight to the governmental cluster of first ministers.
Brian Mulroney said the threat of Ottawa holding a national referendum on constitutional changes, if the first ministers continued to balk, forced them to make concessions and reach the agreements in the Charlottetown Accord.
However, there are more robust non-Canadian illustrations of the referendum’s power in creating counterweight.
Along California’s spectacular Pacific coast, developers filled scenic real estate with upscale residential projects, with no protest from hands-off state legislators or from municipal politicians, all of whose campaign budgets included generous contributions from the developers. The urgency of preserving unique landscape for public enjoyment in perpetuity wasn’t on the politicians’ agendas. Municipal councillors, in what they saw as win-win-win, approved outlying areas for residential development, slice after small slice, as payback to their election funders, to serve their community by creating jobs for local trades, and to increase tax assessment.
Nobody in office saw the larger picture and had the political freedom to restrain the process of parkland infilling — so concerned citizens signed an initiative petition and forced choice by a ballot proposition. The Coastal Conservation Act of California, enacted in 1976, drew its major provisions from that citizen-initiated proposition, which won majority voter support at the polls. The result, since enjoyed by millions: vaulting cliffs rising from white sandy strands and edged by irreplaceable redwood forests, public parklands forever — thanks only to the people’s vote.
Another compelling example of referendum-as-counterweight is Italian. It’s a bit like Brian Mulroney’s example in which governments constrained by political pressures from taking action can be pushed to deal with an important issue just by the prospect of a referendum. In 1978, under Italy’s initiative law, the Radical Party began collecting signatures on a petition to force a choice about the country’s abortion law. Everyone would publicly debate controversial abortion policy and parliamentarians would be pressed to declare their stance, thereby in many cases reducing their re-electability. To circumvent the intensity of this referendum campaign, the Italian Parliament swiftly approved an abortion law.
Given the unflinching opposition to abortion by the Roman Catholic Church and widespread Catholic influence throughout Italian society, this change in abortion policy wouldn’t otherwise have occurred. S.E. Finer made a detailed study of that counterweight-creating phenomenon. “Without this initiative threat, no such legislation would have been passed.” It was, he concluded, “an instance of how the referendum device can break the parties’ monopoly on issue definition.”1
Similarly, back here in Canada, the result of British Columbia’s 1916 referendum on enfranchising women was also used to leverage extension of other equality rights for women. During the Quebec referendum on separation in 1980, Prime Minister Trudeau pledged major constitutional changes if the No side carried the day. Referendums in the Northwest Territories about dividing the wide expanse and creating Nunavut in the eastern Arctic directly spurred settlement of Inuit land claims. When Prime Minister Harper became paralyzed in moving on his pledged reform or abolition of the Senate, Senator Hugh Segal, Green Party leader Elizabeth May, and others called for a referendum on the unelected and unaccountable second chamber, not because it would directly lead to change but because it would pressure legislators to deal one way or another with our country’s embarrassing colonial relic. After Prince Edward Island’s 2016 referendum on electoral reform, Fair Vote Canada and Equal Voice invoked the results, which supported proportional representation, to push the Trudeau Liberals on their fading promise to replace Canada’s “unfair first-past-the-post” voting system for MPs. The point is that referendums can do more than force a choice; they can provide leverage for democratic politics.
Issue-voting by the people has potential to be a political counterweight to powerful, unresponsive governments. A century ago Canada’s Progressives saw initiatives and referendums as an alternative, or at least a counterweight, to legislators manipulated by lobbyists and hobbled by party discipline. At the core of such thinking is recognition that the principal cause of corruption is concentrated, unaccountable power.
In this respect, Canadian referendums take on importance because the great power of contemporary government is no longer effectively counterbalanced by the people’s elected representatives in the Commons or provincial legislatures. However, except in British Columbia, the “initiative” exists only for limited applications. The ability of citizens to trigger a ballot question, rather than waiting for government to hold a referendum, is a missing ingredient of responsible government that members of today’s legislatures might well add to the toolbox of a citizen-centred democracy.
3. Mandate Clarity
When the Liberal Party formed a majority government in 2015 with its explicit pledge to change the electoral system, it floundered because the Trudeau government’s replacement model for electing MPs had never been specified, and none was proffered even after a year in office. A cry went up from diverse Canadians for a referendum on the issue. Once again the ambiguous nature of a general election mandate, in this case pertaining to “Canada’s unfair electoral system,” leaves too much that is too important to mincing interpretation and political opportunism.
That is why the “specific mandate” provided by a clear ballot question can break through deliberately spread political fog that obscures the issue and delays action. Whether to give women the vote in British Columbia, build a bridge from Prince Edward Island to the mainland, prohibit use of beverage alcohol or reinstate its availability, impose Daylight Saving Time, or ratify an aboriginal land claim treaty — nothing else clarifies an issue like a referendum campaign when all interested and eligible citizens participate directly and produce a collective deliberative verdict.
Clarifying a public mandate through a properly framed ballot question entails three dynamic elements. First is discovery. Just as an election campaign is “unpredictable” because events nobody anticipated emerge and take centre stage, a referendum campaign causes a shakeup that can bring new light and fresh insight to something that not long before seemed fixed on a set course. Colombia’s 2016 referendum campaign on its peace accord drew out issues needing more satisfactory resolution than had been achieved during five protracted years of negotiations. When ratification of the accord failed, the urgent new imperative overtaking all concerned led to working out better solutions for problems clarified through citizens debating about how to vote.
Second is using a ballot question to clarify the mandate. The benefit of this reward is often denied by those in power, who prefer to interpret a vague general mandate from voters the way it suits them. Once the election is over, many leaders and their advisers break faith with the electorate. Within contemporary Canadian politics, elastic “electoral mandates” and the exercise of governing power by leaders who lie undermines the credibility of the system.Even if the leaders can be replaced, however, the willing violation of their pledged word dissolves the legitimacy of democratic government itself. That, once gone, is irreplaceable. To counter this, the role of ballot questions to clarify mandates is part of a multi-faceted democratic country founded on “responsible-government” accountability to the people.
The third dynamic element is how a specific mandate is implemented. This is where statecraft comes in. Although the voting produces numbers pro and con a measure, that might or might not lead to implementation of the majority view. Prime Minister Laurier could see, as could all Canadians, that prohibition would be better handled through the provinces rather than through Ottawa despite an overall majority favouring a national law. The very night of his constitutional referendum defeat by an overall majority vote, Prime Minister Mulroney could announce that “the Charlottetown Accord is history” and in those five words bring down the curtain on a process that, despite herculean efforts and the deep resolve of so many for so long, had been a path wrongly taken.
Seasoned prime ministers know that reading voting returns requires more than arithmetic, that sometimes the way to deal with an issue is to stop dealing with it. This, too, is how referendums bring clarity to a public mandate.
4. Safety Valve
Pretty well every Canadian would agree that for a democratic society such as ours it is better to ventilate a public issue than bottle it up. The way a referendum allows this to be done is one of its most significant rewards, because more than each individual expressing her or his views, we get to hear the collective voice of the Canadian people.
The bum rap given to referendums — that issues are “oversimplified” by forcing a choice between Yes or No — overlooks the practicalities of free speech, open dialogue, developing a case, debating a proposition, and reaching consensus. Form and structure facilitate reasoning. A process for presenting pro and con arguments makes it possible for citizens to be heard instead of their voices being drowned out in an un-orchestrated cacophony. Student debates are structured to argue the negative and affirmative of an issue. Law courts are set up and operate within rules for lawyers to present the opposing cases of plaintiff and defendant. Broadcasting rules allow for the leader of the Opposition to also have airtime when the prime minister takes to the airwaves to make a major policy announcement. Elected representatives debate for or against a motion or bill, then vote either Yes to approve or No to defeat the measure.
A referendum, especially when the sides are organized by Yes and No umbrella committees to present content in an intelligible fashion, offers structure for ideas and arguments, a context in which it is possible for everyone interested to ventilate their ideas about the issue.
Every now and then contentious issues confound legislatures, split parties, and divide cabinets. Keeping big issues bottled up in representative institutions can be politically perilous for all concerned and can disrupt other necessary operations. Our history shows, at that point, the benefit of advancing to an all-inclusive referendum process — the safety valve of a democratic state.
5. Crash Course
Education about a ballot issue is probably as important a reward from a referendum as the actual vote tallies at the campaign’s end. A referendum forces us to think about an issue, reflect on possibilities, and together make an informed, collective choice about something central to our lives. And to help with this program of continuing adult education, the news media, in tandem with the Yes and No campaigns, ensure we have plenty to study and inwardly digest. It is a crash course because there’s limited time before voting. It is not abstract learning because there is a specific question that must be answered on the fast-approaching date.
This incentive to learn about the ballot issue is rewarding not only for individual citizens but for the country or province as a whole because a population aware of a public measure’s complexity and far-reaching effects will generally become more understanding of the multi-layered nature of issues politicians grapple with. The educational component of a referendum campaign, followed by deliberate casting of thousands or millions of ballots, has an outcome nothing else can match.
Some contend that ordinary citizens shouldn’t vote on issues because they simply don’t understand them the way experts do. Many major decisions in Canada have been made by a small number of people unaware of all the complexities, sometimes out of touch with changed conditions, and often influenced by vested interests whose power behind the scenes was never openly acknowledged. Are such decisions more valid in a democratic self-governing country than ones reached with the involvement of informed citizens?
People might not be fully up to speed on an issue the day a referendum is announced. They’re the ones Canadian television networks seek out for “streeters,” the selectively edited on-camera comments by pedestrians who blurt out something like “I don’t know anything whatsoever about it!” It’s part, witting or unwitting, of how those who like to control the Canadian storyline are readily dismissive of a democratic process to which they believe themselves superior.
However, by the time the campaign’s tutorial ends on the eve of voting, the people certainly are up to speed. A voter entering the polling station to mark a ballot on a single issue probably understands the voting consequences better than he or she does in a multi-faceted general election. Getting ready to vote in a referendum is like studying for an exam with only one question — and when you know in advance what that question is.
Just as a general election is our trusted method to select between personalities, programs, promises, and performance, an educational referendum campaign, which culminates in answering a ballot question, is our focused means to choose a particular policy. It is often preferable because it provides clarity that an electoral mandate does not. It is, occasionally, the only suitable means for bridging an impasse. And in its wake, people are better informed about something important.
6. Citizen Buy-In
Consent of the governed is the glue that holds Canadian democracy in place. There are a number of ways consent can be given, but any short list of them would include the referendum because the deliberative process and orderly public steps of issue-voting permit a reasonably objective evaluation by citizens and the formation of community consensus about an important issue at a particular time.
Opinion pollsters ask a “representative sample” of voters about their intentions, but a referendum involves everyone. Opinion sampling is usually an out-of-the-blue call, but the marking of a ballot is a deliberate procedure that comes at the end of a period of debate, education, and reflection. Opinion sampling generates a percentage of people for or against a measure today, a partial statement that another poll might contradict tomorrow. In contrast, a referendum is a public ritual. It entails each citizen creating an artifact through the marking of a ballot and then depositing it in a secure box or mailing it to the referendum office for counting. This individual act, repeated thousands or millions of times as each eligible voter comes forward, forms part of a serious collective exercise. It is a right of citizenship equal to all. It produces an outcome that generally puts a contentious matter to rest — because all concerned know they’d had their chance to pitch their strongest case to others, and because of Canadian understanding that in a democracy, while respecting minorities, the majority rules. There is no other way, certainly not through commercial opinion polling, to so effectively achieve community buy-in for a measure, or even community understanding of it when a majority rejects the proposed measure. There is never “consent” when those in power merely assume that a new policy or program is acceptable to the people.
7. Political Accountability
The concept of “responsible government” introduced in the 1840s to British North American colonies was carried forward into the 1867 constitution for Confederation. Responsible government fused the elected assembly of people’s representatives with ministers of the Crown in the same legislative body so that the former could hold accountable the latter for policies and practices of the government. The relationship established unequivocally that those wielding state power in the name of the monarch had to answer to the ultimate sovereign, the people, through their representatives.
This relationship is still embedded in the Constitution, but we’ve begun to refer in common speech more to “democratic accountability” than to “responsible government.” The new term resonates better with contemporary Canadians. It connotes a clearer, even edgier, meaning. It implies that governmental accountability entails far more than what transpires in the Commons during Question Period or when MPs scrutinize and vote to approve the government’s spending estimates for the upcoming fiscal year. It isn’t limited to elected representatives in legislatures holding cabinet ministers and public officials to account. Democratic accountability includes the crucial role journalists, public policy organizations, and empowered citizens play in following public events and inquiring about them to spread word to others. It includes getting issues of governance before courts and tribunals for adjudication. Democratic accountability in Canada today broadly means that anything done by government must be answered for.
Rising awareness of the need for more accountability in the workings of government, both in Ottawa and in the provinces, gave renewed prominence to the auditor general, creation of new roles such as the parliamentary budget officer and ombudsmen with specified jurisdictions of vigilance, Access to Information statutes, registration of lobbyists with rules to curb and publicly disclose their activities, a “Sunshine List” exposing to daylight every year the names and salaries of high-pay civil servants, and online disclosure of spending by public office holders. The quest to achieve a citizen-centred democracy is part of this larger tapestry of accountability measures, which is also the context in which referendums, especially any initiated by citizens, make the constitutional concept of “responsible government” a working reality for Canada’s sovereign people.
This need for democratic accountability emerged in the mid-1800s, with the visceral urge of colonists to get better control over local decision-making in Nova Scotia, Lower Canada (Quebec), and Upper Canada (Ontario) — the autocratic refusal of which led to armed insurrection in the latter two colonies by 1837. That revolutionary unrest provoked London to extend “responsible government” by 1840 to Britain’s North American colonies that hadn’t already overthrown the Crown and reconstituted themselves as a republic — the United States of America.
Part of our own story is reflected, with that point of departure, in how those Founding Fathers went to such lengths to institutionalize “limited government” in the American Constitution. The Americans crafted numerous checks and balances over executive power, institutionalizing separate roles for elected representatives and for the judiciary to each veto and restrain those wielding executive powers of government, and to initiate laws in the case of Congress and to strike down laws as unconstitutional in the case of the Supreme Court. In keeping with this constitution and the political culture it created over time, ballot propositions became a robust part of democratic governance at both state and municipal levels in the United States, with citizens generally having the legal and even constitutional right to initiate votes on a broad range of issues.
What we got with “responsible government” was the British monarchical system as it had evolved constitutionally by the mid-1800s: to integrate the legislative and executive functions of government, rather than counterbalance them; to integrate two sources of sovereignty by making the Crown and the people confusingly appear as one, rather than establish a single sovereign power in the people; and to enshrine as a stabilizing constitutional goal “peace, order, and good government,” rather than the egalitarian principle that “all men are created equal” and a citizen-centric constitution whose goal is to enable “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In history’s laboratory of democracy, Canada is the control, America the experiment.
The long view of Canadian history also shows that our use of referendums ebbs and flows in measure with our ambivalent embrace of democracy. When rising interest in ballot-issue democracy appeared during the 1970s, as if a new generation of Canadians was discovering for the first time the possibilities of being a political democracy, Agar Adamson smiled and published a 1980 article in Policy Options entitled “We Were Here Before: Referendums in Canadian Experience.” He sought to teach Canadians enchanted by direct democracy’s novelty that ballot-issue voting hadn’t just been invented. He revealed our long-running connections with referendums, and that we have more history of forcing choice through ballot-box verdicts than most folks realized.
This mechanism for public accountability results from the same democratic instinct that drove our forebears to fight for and achieve responsible government. It is but one of many instruments in the toolbox of democracy. It is infrequently used because, like any untested tool, its unique purpose is poorly understood. Citizen voting on issues isn’t institutionalized the way that our legislatures and courts are, nor constitutionalized the way that many of our other democratic rights are. Yet properly recognized for what it is, the referendum’s reward is how it contributes to the ability of citizens to live in freedom while keeping an eye on what those entrusted with power of government are up to.
8. Democratic Vitality
The willingness to participate, to be self-reliant, and to accept that our future is in our own hands and not entrusted to “the system” are three hallmarks of a vital democratic society. Political scientists have additional indicia, even grids, on which to track a person’s political psychology, ideological identity, or adhesion to the political system. But no matter how one calibrates it, most folks readily understand that a self-governing democracy like ours needs the fuel of human energy, emotion, and ideas. Passivity and lethargy won’t let us realize our potential.
So the variety of ways individual Canadians can today become active in the community, and why others withdraw from involvement to the point of ignoring public issues and not even voting, makes a compelling inquiry into the health of the body politic, since that determines our capacity for self-government.
When examining cause and effect, a physician or forensic scientist not only studies the conditions that are present but looks for telltale signs in what might be absent. When looking for evidence for “democratic vitality,” it is just as important to consider those who don’t vote as those who do; to register which issues aren’t on the public agenda instead of only those that are; even to see the ballot questions that are noticeable by their absence, the referendums that never took place to force public debate and collective choice on metrification of the measurement system, the Meech Lake constitutional changes, or dozens of other important questions affecting a positive principle of our country’s government and the nature of a citizen’s life that people never had a say in.
Here we see the threshold barrier of no referendum-enabling law on the statute books. Here we find the generally non-existent right of citizens to initiate ballot questions. Here we observe governments in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island setting higher levels for majority approval by the people to change the electoral system under which they got elected than they require for approval of far more sweeping measures they themselves enact in their legislature. Here are heard the voices of the political establishment and its coddling chorus who decry referendums and celebrate this void.
Absence of a normalized role for citizens to help make specific choices on transcending issues is the portrait of democracy in our country. We need to add this missing element to complete the picture, the way a detective sees not only what is present but especially looks for what is absent, to discover truth.
Recognizing this missing element, and others, in the operations of our democratic state is a way to begin remedial action. Getting to the root of why people turn away from politics and participation makes clearer what needs to be done. A particular “reward” of this is that it allows us to glimpse the irony of Canada’s governing class purring in public about the democratic ways we honour, while behind the scenes ensuring that hurdles prevent those ways ever becoming robust.
9. Governance Partnership
The heart of “representative democracy” beats in the House of Commons, our provincial and territorial legislatures, and our local councils. Here the few, elected by our votes, represent the many. Invariably, those elected by their fellow citizens are impressed by the honour, feel the bond first forged in an election campaign and then sanctified at the ballot box, and in almost all cases strive to give worthy public service.
From the era when representative assemblies were first elected in the 1700s in colonies that today are part of Canada, down to the present era, just about everything in this link between electors and representatives has been transformed many times over. The growth of mass society, the speed of communications, the array of issues now the purview of public life, the year-round (rather than a month or less) sittings of legislative bodies, opinion polling’s “representative samples” of the population’s views and values that elected representatives heed, and the rigid control of political parties over candidates during elections and over elected representatives in the legislature submerge local interests and thereby mute the voices of electors. The bleak result is that today’s “representatives” are mostly unknowns, and not just MPs. Who can name all thirty ministers in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, or Canada’s ten provincial and three territorial premiers?
Referendums are absolutely no magic cure for shortcomings of contemporary democracy in the age of Internet politics and the obliteration of social and geographic boundaries. However, they are a macro part of “representative democracy” — the part when the many represent and speak for themselves. Referendum experience in Canada shows ballot-question democracy can sometimes maintain or restore genuine connection between citizens and elected representatives, at least when the public issue is big enough to be important to both. Elected representatives have a role in the issue being transferred directly to the sovereign people to force an open choice, take some role in the educational campaign and efforts of persuasion prior to voting, and will somehow be responsible for addressing the people’s verdict delivered through the ballot boxes.
One elemental reward for a self-governing democracy is to experience that connection between governed and governors as tangible and two-way. This communal awareness, which can come with a referendum as well as in other ways, is found in the compatibility of decision-making that melds elected representatives and citizens in an interconnected process. This governance partnership is something specific and purposeful, its voting more potent than the diffuse focus of a general election with its numerous indirect linkages.
10. Popular Sovereignty
Despite the risk of this democratic tool’s misuse, placing issues before citizens to force a collective choice has, overall, rewarded political life. Both directly and indirectly, referendums play a constructive part, sometimes even an indispensable role, in helping a self-governing people address issues not satisfactorily resolved through any other available means.
The free-floating ambiguity that impedes Canadian political life, much of it stemming from having institutionalized contending sovereigns — the People and the Crown — has resulted in politicians becoming tantalized by referendums and taking preliminary steps toward them, only to retreat into politics’ amorphous twilight zone rather than use the device. They have no problem asking the sovereign people to give them the reins of power in a general election but balk at asking the same source of political legitimacy for ballots to help break a political impasse or to ratify a major change.
Premiers Walter Scott of Saskatchewan, Tobias Norris of Manitoba, and John Oliver of British Columbia all won elections a century ago promising referendums on legislative measures and giving the people a right to initiate ballot questions themselves. In Saskatchewan, Scott oversaw enactment of the Direct Legislation Act in 1912, but then had doubts and put the referendum statute itself to a ballot question for ratification. When it failed to get enough support, he repealed the measure and made no further attempt at connecting the people with the work of their elected legislators. In British Columbia in 1914, Oliver fulfilled his electoral promise to enact a Direct Legislation Act, but then, retreating in doubt, never had the statute proclaimed in force. In Manitoba, Norris in 1916 implemented his promise, too, with the Direct Legislation Act. However, he also backpedalled, referring his own government’s enactment to the courts to opine on its constitutionality, and by the time the Law Lords in England were through, they’d found a technicality to strike the measure down. Meanwhile, Alberta Premier Arthur Sifton, no political wimp like the other three, fulfilled his promise. The legislature in Edmonton enacted the Direct Legislation law in 1913, which was virtually the same as the others, under which Albertans voted on a number of ballot questions during the following years. Success rate in honouring the sovereign people: one in four.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proposed a national referendum as part of his arsenal of measures to counteract a ballot question in Quebec on that province breaking up Confederation. A prime consideration was that all Canadians, not only those residing in Quebec, should vote on a crucial province seceding from Canada, because such dramatic change would affect everyone in the destruction of our country. Trudeau also envisaged a national referendum for a different purpose: public ratification of new constitutional provisions his government was developing. But the prime minister failed to match words with action, because the Canada Referendum Act, which had been introduced in the Commons, wasn’t proceeded with and died on the order paper. The PM also sought a national referendum to ratify constitutional changes and incorporated such a provision in drafts of the amending formula being negotiated. It wasn’t a stretch: Australia had done this in 1901. But in a quagmire trying to reach agreement with ten different premiers, each advancing their own agenda and several opposed to a referendum, Trudeau caved in. He removed the referendum requirement for citizens to ratify constitutional amendments. When he subsequently hit new snags with the premiers over the best procedure for amending Canada’s Constitution, the prime minister lamented with annoyed regret on November 5, 1981, having “not kept in the amending formula a reference to the ultimate sovereignty of the people as could be tested in a referendum.” Prime Minister Trudeau even danced this referendum two-step — first forward, then back again — in 1971 when his government introduced legislation to enable direct votes, run by Canada’s chief electoral officer, on Prairie grain farming issues. The bill never proceeded through Parliament to become law. Attempts to results: four to zero.
Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed decided to get a specific mandate from the people through a referendum that would disclose strong public endorsement for his government’s energy policies, a counterweight against the Trudeau government’s intrusion into the oil-producing province’s energy jurisdiction. Lougheed’s minister of intergovernmental affairs pronounced the Alberta Referendum Act as “an extremely important piece of legislation for this government” when he introduced it in the legislature on October 20, 1980. Yet for the next five months the bold measure never advanced beyond that introductory “first reading” and died on the order paper with prorogation on March 30, 1981. Success rate: zero for one.
Ambivalence about referendums by even strong political leaders, and ardent resistance to them by cabinet ministers, has paralyzed this country’s ability to normalize procedures for the sovereign people; as Brian Mulroney put it at the time of his own belated embrace of referendums, “to do more than get a kick at the can every four years.” He had failed to hold a referendum on the Meech Lake Accord, and only instituted a national referendum because three provinces, where voting on the Charlottetown Accord was happening, forced his hand. Rating re linking government and the sovereign people: one-half in two.
Earlier in the twentieth century, Wilfrid Laurier and Robert Borden wanted public clarity on such issues as sending Canadian soldiers overseas to war and dealing with the unaccountable exercise of law-making powers by Parliament’s second chamber, but in the circumstances of the day couldn’t get the referendums they hoped for, compounded by the fact that the political establishment’s split personality in its relationship with the sovereign people had resulted in there being no enabling legislation for a referendum on the statute books, anyway. The compromise for holding 1898’s ballot question on prohibition was a perfect token to self-doubting democrats: a one-off act that expired after the vote took place. As for the war, after it ended, Arthur Meighen, who’d enforced conscription as Borden’s minister of justice and who’d himself become prime minister, deeply lamented that the issue had never been taken to the sovereign people for a mandate vote. For these three PMs: one notable breakthrough, many missed shots.
The cycles of on-again, off-again interest in direct democracy as a component of our political life are noticeable. Today public awareness of the benefits that can flow from ballot-box democracy is much higher than it was. Holding referendums is more frequent, which in turn brings a familiarity with the process’s risks and rewards necessary for good statecraft. Many opinion leaders today call for referendums on a number of subjects. While it is easier to propose something than to get it implemented, the prospect for reintegrating the Canadian people into decision-making on matters that positively affect us all is not an ephemeral wish but a political imperative. Even if a significant proposal is notionally within a government’s electoral mandate — an increasingly fictitious concept, to be sure — there can be real benefit from a focused public examination, followed by free citizens collectively rendering a considered verdict on it.
Referendums have helped shape Canada’s character at the national, and more frequently, provincial, municipal, and reserve levels of governance. This valuable instrument is neither appropriate nor necessary for issues that can be resolved through the deliberate working of routine Canadian procedures of governance. The referendum’s enduring and symbolic potential is reserved for times when proper exercise of statecraft takes the risk and reaps the rewards of forcing choice, as a mature working of Canadian self-government, about a transcending issue with significant impact on the sovereign people.
Because of our Canadian ideology or mythology about being a rights-based, politically united, multi-culturally rich, socially pluralistic, and behaviourally tolerant country, the profound dislike of referendums by Canada’s political class flows directly from the way a ballot question sometimes exposes how we aren’t all those things. Those comfortably entrenched in power or entrapped by patterns of anti-democratic thinking allege that a referendum “creates” divisions — as if it is the cause of unwanted differences — rather than crediting this democratic procedure for revealing essential truths about our fracture lines. The referendum is the child who points to the naked monarch riding by in splendid procession, a scene adults are either too acclimatized or too fearful to acknowledge, and shouts out, “Look, Mommy, the King is wearing no clothes!”
To more honestly celebrate Canadian diversity, we best see its full extent.