It’s unusual for voices from opposite ends of Canada’s political spectrum to issue the same warning. Andrew Coyne—a CBC mainstay and veteran establishment journalist—has often defended positions I’ve strongly opposed, from the Freedom Convoy crackdown to the government’s handling of COVID. Yet despite those differences, his recent analysis and mine converge on the same unsettling truth: Canada’s democracy is not what it seems.
The representative Canadians believe they are electing—the legislator who speaks and votes on their behalf—has largely become a fiction. In practice, the system operates in a rigid, top-down fashion that bears little resemblance to the civics-class ideal. The gap between perception and reality has never been wider. That is the real dissonance at the core of Canadian politics. And when people who rarely agree begin to trace the same cracks in the foundation, it becomes clear that what’s being defended as “our democracy” is less a shared possession of citizens than a private preserve of insiders. Or, ...