Outdated democracy: We vote, they rule

Perhaps boycott is too strong a word. They didn't actively boycott. They just couldn't be bothered. Which is even worse.

The 61.2-per-cent turnout in the last election was the lowest in Canadian history. Less than one in four Canadians eligible to vote actually cast a ballot for the winning Liberals. Voter turnout has dropped in the past four elections. Younger voters are more apathetic than their parents, which doesn't bode well for the future. Cynicism is growing.

Our political parties should use this election to map out specific proposals to revitalize our ailing democratic process.

I offer two suggestions. The first is for the winner to start exploiting today's cheap and plentiful information and communication technologies and involve Canadians much more fully in the governing process between elections. The second is to overhaul the election process itself. Our current system defies logic, because it almost always elects a government that most voters don't want.

Our country's governing model is best described as broadcast democracy. Politicians broadcast to us -- initially in campaigns -- through ads and TV sound bites. We get to vote. Then they broadcast to us for four more years and we get to do it again. There is no real engagement in the important decisions that affect our lives.

This division of labour -- we vote, they rule --dates back to Confederation. Our ancestors didn't have the education, time, resources or communication tools to participate in the governing process. The system worked only because public-policy issues were simple and evolved at a horse-and-buggy pace.

No more. Many unforeseen issues arise between elections, and it's not credible for the government to assert that it has a voter mandate to take specific action. Moreover, governments lack sufficient in-house policy expertise on many issues. So even if a government commissions an opinion poll to discern the public's view, the polling process doesn't tap into the wisdom and insight that a nation's citizens can collectively offer.

With technologies such as the Internet, we can resurrect Pierre Trudeau's vision of "participatory democracy," but this time, actually make it happen. Citizens could become involved, learning from each other, taking responsibility for their communities and country, learning from and influencing elected officials and vice versa.

New democratic tools could include the following.

Digital brainstorming: Bringing together policy officials and citizens to have real-time, moderated, on-line brainstorming sessions to identify new policy issues or needs.

Virtual question periods: Elected officials would use the Internet for question-and-answer sessions with their constituents.

On-line citizen juries and panels: Citizens chosen at random serve as policy jurors or advisers on a topic. The jury uses the Internet to share information, ask questions, discuss issues and hear evidence.

Deliberative polling: This gives citizens the resources to learn about and reflect upon the issues in a collaborative and deliberative fashion. This would combine small, group discussions on the Internet with scientific, random sampling to contribute more-informed public input in policymaking than instant polling can provide.

Scenario planning: Building scenarios with simulation and modelling software to project future policy needs and to understand the long-term consequences of decisions. Politicians, bureaucrats and citizens could assess the potential impacts on a range of factors, ranging from health to the environment, to the economy.

These tools have nothing in common with the wacky "direct democracy" schemes, where we would all vote on-line after watching the evening news. That may be a good way to choose a new Canadian Idol, but it would be a lousy way to run a country. It would be mob rule when what we really want is reasoned opinion.

So we would continue to have elected officials sitting in the House of Commons, where issues would be debated and legislation passed. But this activity would be done under a more watchful, informed and involved eye of the electorate.

Complementing the positive effects of our invigorated digital democracy would be a new electoral system that actually reflects the views of the public. The current system is called first-past-the-post, where the politician who gets the most votes in each constituency is declared the winner. Sounds logical, but it's actually quite corrosive to our democratic spirit.

With the current system, regional tensions are exacerbated as parties are shut out from representing a region, even though they capture a healthy percentage of the vote. Examples abound, such as the many Albertans who vote Liberal federally, yet rarely elect an MP.

Conversely, the system overrewards the successful party, sometimes hugely. This is particularly true of provincial elections. In 1987, the New Brunswick Liberal Party captured every seat in the legislature -- that's right, 100 per cent -- even though almost 40 per cent of the voters chose the opposing parties. Banana republics would be embarrassed with such a fiasco.

Canada has had 16 majority federal governments elected since 1921 -- but only a handful received more than 50 per cent of the popular vote. In the nine other cases, a majority had voted for the losing parties. It's small wonder people become alienated from the electoral process and don't think their votes are worth anything. Most of the time, they're right.

There are a number of workable proportional-representation voting systems used in other countries that we could adopt. With new communications technologies, there now may be new alternatives for organizing our representation. Sounds like a great topic for the first nationwide digital brainstorming. I'm sure we would have lots of ideas. Perhaps we'd even get engaged.

Don Tapscott's new book (co-authored with David Ticoll) is The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business. He headed a research project completed in 2001 on the future of government and democracy, Governance in the Digital Economy, funded by business and 20 governments, including Canada and Ontario.