Canada's current Prime Minister, Paul Martin, has made quite a big deal lately about solving the "democracy deficit" in Canada. What a load of garbage.
Let's look at his track record on "democracy". He became the leader of the Liberal party by basically totally back-stabbing the 3 time election majority champ, Jean Chretien. Now I'm no Jean fan as I think he stood for nothing except getting himself elected, but let's face the facts. The "people" elected Jean to govern the country and without any real reason except Martin wanted power, Jean got ousted. How did he go about this?
Leaders of parties are elected by sending delegates to the leadership convention. The way delegates are sent is by having a vote in the riding. The people who vote are the members of the liberal party. In fact, the federal parties are funded in large party by the members paying to join the party.
So Martin pulled a pretty damned good fast one. He got his supporters into the riding associations, and they dominated the associations. Paul worked very hard at convincing folks that he was the next guy and so by and large the ridings went along with this. Now that he'd promised various things to the riding associations, he called his mark.
The predominant way to compete in a riding is to sign up new members. You hustle the street and sign up lots of folks, and then they vote for the "right" person. It's an insanely corrupt process with regular and consistent voter irregularities and fraud. Stuff like "household A" signed up 15 members, but there's only 3 people in the house and they all swore they were going to vote conservative.
The mark that he called was a rule change for competitors: "While Martin's campaign enjoyed unlimited access to membership forms, other candidates were restricted to getting five forms at a time--with many arcane regulations as to when they could access the forms." [1]
Now how's that for "fixing democracy"? You sabotage the entire democratic principle of allowing interested people to vote by making the jump through hoops to get to the ballot box.
Oh but wait, it's better. Then Mr Democracy Paul decides that he's going to overrule various riding associations and appoint his own folks. A candidate goes and does the "right" - which I think is still incredibly corrupt - thing and signs up members to the party. Then there's a vote for who will be the candidate.
Paul then overruled the riding associations in a large number of ridings. And he waged an ugly war against Sheila Copps, the only person who dared challenge him for the crown, so that she couldn't even run in a riding where by all accounts "the people" liked her.
In my own province, he over-ruled riding associations to appoint 5 "star" candidates. At least in one riding in Ontario, they've been objecting. The Liberal riding association decided to appoint an NDP candidate when the vote was overruled!
To a certain extent, I look at this with a measure of respect. Paul has done a lot of hard work and worked the rules and system very well. But to then promise to lead us to "fix the democracy deficit" is just obviously garbage. I wonder if the promise was to somebody else than me as a voter.
Let's look at the democracy deficit fixes that were promised. Senate reform - Nope. Selection of party leaders - nope. Selection of candidates - nope. Ah, here it is. He's going to allow members some chance to vote on their own - called a free vote - rather than what the party tells them to.
No wonder he got a fair amount of the liberal MPs to support him - he promised them that as PM he wouldn't control them quite so much. This wasn't a pledge to us the voters, this was a bribe to his party members to stab their current leader. And it even got passed off as something that I, the voter, should be cared about.
I don't hear much about democracy deficit fixing these days.. Now that Paul has won his parties vote, he doesn't need to sell it to them.
I see Paul Martin's promises of Democracy Deficit fixing for what they are: a bribe to his own party, cleverly cast in Orwellian speak to appeal to me as a voter ("I'm voting for the Democracy surplus guy!"), with absolutely no respect for democracy in his own party.
I'm not buying the democracy deficit fix lie, so better trundle off another. Oh, maybe it'll be about how you are the saviour of Canada's health care because you promise billions to the provinces when you were the guy that cut back the billions in the 90s. Or promising to end corporate welfare when your Cayman registered steam ship company has gotten millions handouts.
Just more lies from another bunch of scoundrels.