/ARTS & ENTERTAIMENT/BOOKS-CANADA: Imagine There is Democracy

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Jun 27 2000 (IPS) - “Imagine Democracy”, the title of Judy Rebick’s new book, reminds one of the 1960s and John Lennon’s “Imagine”, a wistful song about a better world.

Utopias are not in fashion these days, but that does not stop this Canadian feminist leader and writer from laying out some practical ideas for social transformation. All come under the heading of new forms of enriched democracy.

Toronto born, Rebick was first involved in the protests against the war in Vietnam before gravitating to the women’s movement, where she led a major fight for reproductive choice rights in Canada. She was a staff member of the Canadian Hearing Society, where she got involved in disability rights.

Between 1990 to 1993 Rebick headed the country’s main feminist organisation, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (or NAC). Currently she hosts a panel on a television show, which focuses exclusively on the opinions of women, as well as writes a weekly online column for the Internet web site of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

It was in the women’s movement with its emphasis on working out a consensus through discussion on issues where Rebick learned first- hand what she calls the “genius in everyday people.” How one can achieve better and more progressive political policies through the involvement of a great number of citizens in decision-making process.

Paraphrasing Thomas Paine, the American Revolution’s major political theorist, she says that democracy has to be designed to allow for the unleashing of the energy and creativity of citizens.

It sounds like a simple idea, and yet it has been seldom tried.

Rebick points out how democratic institutions even in a so-called advanced country like Canada are seriously flawed, with power concentrated in the hands of the elected prime minister and his advisors, with even the elected members of Parliament kept out of the important decisions. Opinion polling constitutes the leaders’ sole means of reading the minds of citizens outside of formal elections every four or five years.

She provides an alternative highlighting how the elected Workers Party administration of Porto Alegre in Brazil, engages this city of 1 million in the process of drawing up a budget. It involves various assemblies of citizens in each area deciding on spending priorities for the upcoming year.

They elect delegates who are trained in municipal finance and then spend time in smaller meetings where proposals are drawn up and introduced to the city council. It is generally understood that the councillors have the final say, but they can only make minor changes to what has been outlined by those at the grassroots level.

Rebick cites another Canadian David Shulman who has similarly been promoting the idea of citizens meeting in small study groups to provide serious input in major political issues.

Canadian government officials already rely on a version of this. They are called focus groups. But civil servants and politicians decide which issues are important. What Shulman is calling for is a more citizen-initiated process from the bottom up.

Participatory democracy only works, says Rebick, if citizens see that their hard work is actually affecting political decisions and is not being manipulated by politicians for their own ends.

She says the basis of more inclusive democracy already exists in Canada with the co-operative movement in areas like housing, agriculture and banking. They suffer from “the same plague of elitism and bureaucratisation as other large institutions,” she says. Nonetheless, for her, co-ops are important sources of citizen activism.

Rebick traces the decline of the social democratic and revolutionary socialist parties around the world to their various forms of paternalism and authoritarianism. It has got to the point where both left and right wing governments mouth the same neo- liberal orthodoxy of privatisation, deregulating business, deficit elimination and social service cutbacks, all in the name of competitiveness.

Furthermore, the loss of support for government and public institutions stem from their own paternalism and top-down “military style hierarchy,” according to Rebick. It is not enough to have good people appointed to boards and agencies.

Taking a leaf from the Greater London Council under Ken Livingston in Great Britain during the 1980s, she advocates that the clients of government, such as the poor, are regularly consulted by the very officials who provide them with social assistance and other services.

Politicians, even on the left, spend more time answering constituents’ problems and less on debating public policy. These constituents often see their particular situation as an individual problem, not as part of a systematic issue. Rebick says that advocacy groups should be funded as permanent watchdogs to play a greater role in defending their communities from oppressive or foolishly enforced regulations.

It was not that long ago in the 1970s and early 1980s that politicians in Canada consulted a variety of groups representing women, the poor, the disabled and other disadvantaged people during the development of legislation. The Canadian federal government under then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau often subsidised their activity.

But this golden age of more open democracy ended in the 1990s when such financial assistance ended for what had been characterised by right-wing politicians as “special interests.”

Only the rich business lobbyists currently have the ear of decision-makers in Ottawa.

When markets rule and countries feel constrained by free trade agreements and international financial institutions from enacting social and economic policies that would benefit their citizens, democracy suffers, says Rebick.

“Imagine Democracy” by Judy Rebick is published in Canada by Stoddart.