The people’s chamber - 2

As a follow-up to last week’s post on Parliament, I’d like to recommend a paper by Joseph Heath at the University of Toronto, who happens to be a co-author with Andrew Potter (who I linked to last week) of a great book on a completely different topic.

Heath has a paper that spends 30 pages discussing some different approaches to Canadian democratic reform and the assumptions made in the different approaches as to what exactly democracy is. From the introduction:

It is certainly the case that Canada has fallen behind the other countries that share the Westminster parliamentary system – particularly Britain, Australia and New Zealand – when it comes to tinkering with democratic procedure. Not only has there been no change in this country, but there has been very little sustained public debate over the relative merits of proposed changes. Some of this is due to the usual sources of failures of public discourse in this country: an excess of provincialism, widespread ignorance of how the Canadian political system functions, and inappropriate reliance upon American experience as a guide to Canadian reform.

I recommend the paper, it’s helpful.

Also, for fun, here’s a great sentence detailing a dangerous fact from the book Potter reviewed last week:

Where once the country’s distinction — in North America at least — had rested in its commitment to pioneering a federal parliamentary democracy, now its defining character was pronounced to rest in values rather than institutions, a transformation of uncommon importance for the future of the people’s house in Parliament.