Canada’s democracy is in crisis, but out of crisis comes possibility, says author

We Canadians can be a smug bunch. Often, we like to define ourselves by what we’re not – namely, Americans. As Donald Trump threatens long-held political norms and conventions in the United States, we tend to think of our democracy as relatively healthy, perhaps one of the greatest in the world. The author of a new book wants to deprive us of this comfort.

The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is the first book from Globe and Mail columnist and CBC News: At Issue panelist Andrew Coyne. It went to press just as Trump was about to be sworn in as president for the second time and as Canada’s parliament was prorogued so the governing Liberal party could choose a new leader.

But Coyne says nothing has happened since then to change any of the conclusions he makes in the book.

“Of course, [how] did we get into this fix? Because the Liberals were stuck with a leader they couldn’t get rid of because our system makes it virtually impossible for party leaders, let alone prime ministers, to be removed, which makes them completely accountable to nobody while they’re there,” he said.

Recently, members of the Liberal Party voted against adopting provisions in the Reform Act that would make it easier to recall their leaders. Those same provisions allowed the Conservatives to unseat Erin O’Toole in a matter of days in 2022. Without them, it took the Liberals two years to get rid of Justin Trudeau.

“This is one of the few instruments that could actually make leaders more accountable to their caucus,” said Coyne. “You best believe that [Conservative Leader] Pierre Poilievre is looking over his shoulder now. And you’re absolutely going to be able to see a difference in the relationship between the caucus and the leader, between the Conservatives and the Liberals.”

Coyne says the book sets out to pull together what he calls all the separate strands of dysfunction in Canada’s government into one unholy mess. The main culprit is the growing centralization of power within the Prime Minister’s Office, which Coyne says, among other things, has reduced cabinet ministers to mere spokespeople.

“Sometimes they will have ideas about policy, but they’ll be rudely overruled,” he said. “Even powerful ministers, like a finance minister, like Chrystia Freeland, who had been there for nine years, found that the prime minister was announcing multi-billion-dollar spending programs that she’d never even heard of. That was part of what drove her to resign, along with the appalling treatment of being told she was fired, but she should stay on and fake it for a little while so they can make a smoother transition. I mean, it was all so redolent of what has happened to even what you would think would be very powerful ministers.”

Coyne lays out just how powerful the position of prime minister has become. The PM can choose everything from Supreme Court justices and cabinet ministers to the timing of elections themselves.

He says the aim of the book is to shake Canadians out of their false sense of security, that, just as elections have consequences, so too do decaying electoral systems.

“We have a genuine problem, and we have to stop averting our eyes from it and shrugging or saying, ‘Why are you questioning Canada,’ and realize that we need to fix this,” he said.

Is there any hope of breaking out of this? Probably not, but maybe, writes Coyne. The chief dilemma is, what incentive do prime ministers have to reform a system that has given them so much power in the first place?

“When you get into these kinds of questions, which have been bugging us for years, it’s been clear on a number of fronts that the system has not been working the way it should,” he said.

He suggests it might take a real crisis to drive change, the kind of crisis that led to confederation, for instance.

“The old Province of Canada, the quote-unquote, United Province of Canada, where they were at each other’s throats the whole time, was completely gridlocked. And eventually they got so stuck that unimaginable alliances, people who had been sworn enemies, John A. Macdonald and George Brown, were able to form a grand coalition and make these unheard-of changes that resulted in the federation and the beginning of Canada,” he said.

“Sometimes out of crises come great possibilities.”

The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is a provocative read; a primer on how we got here, but also how we can move forward.

The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is published by Sutherland House.