Editorial

Will Joe Clark's Departure Affect the Crisis of Canadian Democracy?

Citing polls that indicate that his personal popularity has not translated into support for the Progressive Conservative party, Joe Clark announced last week that he would be stepping down as leader of the party following a leadership convention sometime next year. If the much-anticipated departure (voluntary or involuntary) of Jean Chretien materializes early next year, this will mean that every federalist party in parliament will have traded in an old leader for a new one within the space of a little over a year. This represents a desperate attempt to break the logjam of Canadian electoral politics and restore an equilibrium to a political system which has become highly regionalized and is in deep crisis.

Joe Clark's leadership may have saved the Conservative party from oblivion for the time being, but he has failed to restore it as a viable national alternative to the Liberals. However, it is difficult to see how anyone else will succeed where all have failed for the past ten years.

The crisis of Canadian democracy goes far beyond which personalities succeed in highjacking the leadership of a handful of political organizations. It goes to the very foundations of Canada's system of representative democracy. The electoral system in Canada represents an arrangement worked out over a century ago by the political classes of the day - male capitalists and landowners, the economic elites. It was designed to defend the interests of those economic elites, the main one of which was to ensure that the other 90 percent of the population was deprived of political power.

Over the past century the electoral franchise was extended, first to all adult males, then to women and finally to Aboriginal peoples, so that today all citizens over the age of 18 have the right to vote in elections. However, nothing has been done to bring the rest of the electoral system into harmony with this new reality. It remains a preserve of the rich and powerful. Through its control of the mainstream political parties, the mass media and the economy , that economic elite determines who can stand for election and who can succeed in getting elected. And once a government is elected, that same economic elite dictates what policies will be implemented. So, the vast majority of Canadians are excluded from any meaningful role in Canada's system of representative democracy just as surely as if they had no vote at all and this reality has given rise to a profound crisis of legitimacy within all institutions of political power in Canada.

In addition to this underlying crisis of legitimacy gripping Canadian democracy, there is also a very deep contradiction within the economic elites which for over a decade has prevented them from adopting a common strategy to deal with this crisis. Three sections of capital roughly based in Southern Ontario, Alberta and Quebec have for some time been locked in a struggle to determine which will reap the lion's share of the profits from the exploitation of the land and labour of Canada and Quebec. The development and constant sharpening of that contradiction has created a Balkanization of Canadian politics which the ruling class has proved incapable of overcoming.. This in turn is further deepening the underlying crisis of legitimacy and is leading to a full-blown political crisis in the not too distant future.

There are only two ways in which the crisis of Canadian democracy can be resolved. One of those ways is for the Canadian ruling elites to abandon any pretence that there is anything really democratic about Canada's political system. However, that option would destroy any semblance of legitimacy still remaining and is really only an option of last resort. The other way for the crisis to be resolved is for the people to assert their sovereignty and their control over the entire electoral and political system and make those systems truly democratic. Unless and until the people of Canada and Quebec and the Aboriginal peoples take such an initiative and create new arrangements which serve their interests, Canadian democracy will remain mired in crisis, regardless of which political "leaders" come and go.