Where You Sit Depends on Where You Stand

A friend sent me a link to a Spotify podcast that started with the question “Is Canada Broken”? I hear that more and more, although it’s from many different perspectives. Ultimately it seems that Canada is only broken if I’m not getting my way.

While I am writing this post, we are in the midst of a federal election campaign that includes our own sovereignty as one of the ballot box questions. Closer to home, many small villages and big cities have become battlefields between the Hatfields and McCoys. People are becoming more and more polarized, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ have become ossified and easier to identify. The definition of ‘freedom’ has become highly dependent on one’s opinion – freedom from something vs. freedom to do something.

This Canadaland podcast episode is called When the Alt-Right “Infiltrated” a Small Town and it provides various perspectives on how uncivil and abusive behaviour is becoming more common and more strident, and how it’s getting it the way of the provision of good governance and ultimately the provision of programs and services that people rely on. The details in this case don’t matter particularly unless you happen to live or work in this city, but the generalities of what the episode identifies are distressingly common across Canada and beyond.

I co-host a podcast called The Political Trenches, Local Government at Work along with Chris Brown of Cross Border Interviews fame. During each episode, we speak about some of the stories of current news events across Canada. Nary an episode goes by when we don’t speak to some instance where incivility or abuse is at the core of the story.

What We See

My third book, (Un)Civil Society (available from Municipal World), is about incivility and abuse in a Canadian municipal context. Some Australian examples are included to show that other constitutional monarchies are not exempt from what we are seeing. In that book, I discuss what’s happening and why, why it’s getting worse, and perhaps what we can do about it.

While this post is too brief to explore everything in detail, the four examples shown below are some of what I’ve encountered, and what the Canadaland episode echoes. Please know that this is a truncated list and that we could explore each of these points in much more detail.

• ‘Silencing’ individual members of council. Those who are not getting their way are tending to become louder and sometimes more abusive, claiming that they are being silenced by their colleagues. These people tend to be further out on either end of the political spectrum, or they are absolutely self-confident and strident in their correctness, which is what tends to isolate them from their colleagues – but not from external supporters.

• Growing populism. The fondness for decisions that are of short-term benefit has seen more and more people elected for whom there is no long-term vision. Making the easy decision is, well, it’s easy. Making the ‘right’ decision is not always easy at all, and there can be political ramifications for making unpopular decisions.

• Increasingly fractured media environment. People now have the ability to consume content from media entities that have the same political or philosophical viewpoint they do. Whether mainstream, niche, online, or broadcast; the message is focused and society gets fractured. This helps to build the ‘us’ and ‘them’ notion of individuals and groups.

• Direct democracy vs representative democracy. We elect people to represent us every three, four, or five years, expecting them to make decisions on our behalf. This means that we give authority to our elected representatives to make the best decisions possible given the information they have. This information is almost always more than what the average citizen might have.

The demands for more referenda, plebiscites, and ‘common-sense’ voting seem to harken back to direct democracy, when only property-owning men of a certain age could vote. Ignoring the franchise-restricting aspects, the onus on everyone to be present and vote was significant. Representative democracy is designed to let the bulk of the population contribute to society in their own ways.

What’s Being Done

In reaction to some of what’s growing in our increasingly uncivil society, we are seeking reactionary but understandable responses like not allowing comments on municipal social media posts, restricting public participation in open council meetings, or holding council meetings online only.

All of these examples are designed to allow public business to continue, but they also seem to be making the problem worse by only dealing with the symptoms. Getting ahead of the problem is likely the only way for permanent change toward civility to work.

I would be interested in your ideas on how to solve these increasingly wicked problems.

As always, you can reach me at ian@strategicsteps.ca.