The novelist Margaret Atwood wrote and narrated a short animated video this week on the ways that countries can devolve into totalitarian nightmares. Released by The Financial Times, the video was a concise recap of how, in the 20th century, moments of chaos combined with the weakening of traditional institutions led to horrific dictatorships on the left (the Soviet Union under Stalin) and the right (Nazi Germany under Hitler).
In a bit of cosmic alignment, also released last week was an Abacus poll that found that one-third of adult Canadians cannot recall taking any courses in civics in elementary and secondary school.
Abacus found that those who couldn’t recall learning about how democratic institutions and government work were 10 percentage points less likely to say they voted in the last federal election, while those who couldn’t recall learning about current events were nine points less likely to say they voted in that election.
The survey also found that only one in 10 people said they were taught how to discuss controversial social and political issues in school. (The survey was conducted with 1,919 Canadian adults from Dec. 7-12, 2023. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.24 per cent, 19 times out of 20.)
That survey was tied to another recent survey of Canadian teachers that found that more than 50 per cent of them say they lack adequate training in civic education, and that in many provinces such courses are more of an afterthought than a centrepiece of children’s educations.
The report by the non-profit group CIVIX Canada notes that “calls for civic-education reform emerge almost like clockwork alongside social crises.” But – and here is where Ms. Atwood’s video comes in – we are in a period of history where crises of all kinds are its defining feature.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the trucker protests tore at Canada’s social fabric. Inflation and surging housing costs have left people struggling to pay their bills. Climate change is making them anxious about the future. The use of misinformation and personal attacks on social media is devaluing the common currency of exchange. A growing distrust of democratic institutions such as the media and Parliament (some of it self-inflicted) and of elections (due to foreign interference) risks pulling people further apart.
Add to this Donald Trump’s attacks on the United States’ democratic institutions and conventions, plus the aggressions of strongmen like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, and we are at a point where democracy can’t go a day without being introduced to a new threat.
The upshot in Canada is that people seem in these hard times to have lost sight of how lucky they are to live in this safe and democratic country. At the fringes, there are even those who compare Canada to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, a ludicrous opinion fuelled by either malice, political opportunism or an ignorance of history based on a lack of personal experience for which the holder ought to be eternally grateful.
Ms. Atwood accurately points out in her video that democracy requires a public that has an understanding of how the system works – its flaws included, we might add – in order to withstand the slings and arrows of populism, and to survive difficult moments.
In Canada, that needs to start in school. Teachers need to be properly trained, and provided with adequate time, to instruct their students on how our democratic institutions operate, why it is important to vote, how to get involved in community and how to discuss and debate controversial issues in a civil manner.
The latter is critical to democracy. Teenagers must learn how to express their opinions respectfully, and to respect the opinions of others. (A lot of adults need to learn that, too.)
Education is a provincial jurisdiction, of course. But there is a national interest in strengthening our democracy from the bottom up. Last week, the Trudeau government announced it would hold a national summit on car theft. Nice idea but, as serious as that issue might be, it can’t match the urgency of armouring Canada’s future voters against the erosions of the 21st century.
If anything needs a shared national effort to solve, it’s the state of civic education in Canada. Failing to provide children with an appreciation for democracy is a mistake at the best of times. Doing so today seems self-destructive.