Abstract
Ambitious projects of social construction can require fundamental changes in constitutional law and political institutions, as already shown. This chapter outlines some further changes that could be needed in the future to consolidate Canada’s identity as a model of progressive multicultural integration and to ensure the adoption of appropriate practical measures of minority accommodation. These changes include reforms in the conduct of elections, a more inclusive definition of citizenship, a more valid and reliable method for distinguishing different grades or classes of citizens, a new procedure for the appointment of Senators, and the modernization of the office of the Governor General.
What is to be avoided at all costs is the existence of “first class” and “second-class” citizens.
Naturally, the actual detailed measures justified by this principle have varied greatly, and have often been controversial…. But through all the differences of interpretation, the principle of equal citizenship has come to be universally accepted.
Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”
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Notes
- 1.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Harvard University Press, 1999), 12.
- 2.
The basic idea is clearly explained by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, the co-chairs of Quebec’s Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (the CCPARDC), in the final report of their commission. As they say there, the legitimacy of our political system reposes on the complementarity of its liberal element, the guarantees of individual rights and freedoms upheld by various independent courts and tribunals, and its democratic element, the sovereignty of the people (exercised through their elected representatives in parliament) as the ultimate holders of power. The two principles of legitimacy represented by these two elements—inalienable rights and sovereign popular preferences—are kept in balance, they say, by separating the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government and requiring that all three be in balance, with a dialogue between them. Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 105. Political theorists in a more theoretical mood sometimes imagine a modern, fully participatory democracy that would engage all of its citizens as active parts of its decision-making apparatus. Enthusiastic engagement in a meaningful public life can even be imagined drawing the youngest citizens away from their meretricious pastimes (pornographic videos, drunken dancing, violent movies and computer games, etc.) into the clearer light of sound political values, revealing the folly of the cynicism they now so often betray when asked about politics. In such an imaginary “participatory democracy,” the sense of isolation and alienation that so many now feel would find no sustenance, as it does today, from a “system” that many see as offering only the semblance of democracy. Instead, in such a genuine “dialogue society,” as Charles Taylor called it many years ago, we would all have an unprecedented way of exploring the questions that matter most to all of us—what is right and what is wrong—and of coming to grips with what gives meaning to our lives. See Taylor, The Pattern of Politics (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970), 98, 103, 126. Cf. Mark Kingwell, The World We Want: Virtue, Vice, and the Good Citizen (Toronto: Viking, 2000), 12: “What we need is a new model of citizenship based on the act of participation itself, not on some quality or thought or right enjoyed by its possessor. This participatory citizenship doesn’t simply demand action from existing citizens; it makes action at once the condition and the task of citizenship.”
- 3.
Cf. Michael Adams, Could It Happen Here: Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit (Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 58: “Canadians expect newcomers to be good citizens which means obeying the laws, participating actively in their communities, treating others with respect and being tolerant of those who are different.” This revealing definition of good citizenship rightly requires participation in communities (attendance at events, volunteering, donating, etc.), but not participation in politics.
- 4.
Territorial dispersion might be overcome electronically, but the time limitations implied by large populations seem to me insurmountable. The point is sometimes driven home by dividing the time available for discussion by the number of people who ideally would be involved in it. Thus even in a new “parliament of all Canadian citizens” that sat 365 days of the year and 24 hours a day, much less than a minute and perhaps less than a second (depending on the age and other qualification for full citizenship) would be available to each citizen annually for making his or her opinions known to all the other citizens on the questions of the day. Extending this reasoning from the national to the global scale, dividing 525,600 minutes by, say, 4,000,000,000 citizens, yields a time/citizen of less than one-hundredth of a second per year for the expression of each individual’s opinions.
- 5.
Again, hopes have sometimes been entertained that the electronic media of communications, particularly television, properly used, could surmount this barrier. Thus, in his early political book, The Pattern of Politics, Charles Taylor suggested that some time might be taken on “all TV channels” to present, in an easily digestible form, “certain basic facts and issues about urban living, price levels, regional development, [and] pollution” (122). Since then, the number of television channels available in Montreal has increased greatly, and it would seem no longer cost-effective to have all the facts and issues presented simultaneously on all 500 or so channels. A few years later, a leading American political scientist and democratic theorist, Robert Dahl, suggested the use of cartoonists and puppeteers to present major political issues and relevant facts to a broad audience. See Robert Dahl, Controlling Nuclear Weapons: Democracy Versus Guardianship (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 79. Although programmes modelled on Sesame Street might not be much help in increasing popular understanding of the risks of nuclear technology, it occurs to me that the agitated and sometimes intemperate debate about genital modifications might be greatly improved by the kinds of clarifications of the concrete meaning of different modifications that instructional television could provide.
- 6.
Another simple expedient, popular in some parts of the United States, is to adjust the boundaries of constituencies to favour the election of candidates from particular groups. This is called “gerrymandering” when done for simple partisan reasons, and “majority-minority districting” when done to improve the representation of minorities. American reformers, mainly concerned about a single large and often highly segregated minority, have found this an attractive technique, since only a little cartographical ingenuity is needed to define many districts in such a way as practically to guarantee the election of the right kind of representative. (A classic example was the 12th Congressional District in North Carolina, which for a time stretched for about 150 miles along Interstate 85, from Gastonia to Durham, going in and out from the highway as necessary to capture black voters.) In Canada, however, given the number of relevant minorities and the different patterns of their concentration and dispersion, this simple remedy has had little appeal, except as a possible way of increasing aboriginal and/or female representation in the House of Commons. A generation ago, a large official inquiry into elections and party financing (the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, chaired by Pierre Lortie) gave some attention to the adjustment of the boundaries of northern constituencies and even to the creation of Aboriginal Electoral Districts (with only aboriginal voters) as ways of increasing aboriginal representation. The representation of women would be favoured, they noted, by halving the number of constituencies, each of which would then be represented by two members, one male, the other female.
- 7.
The Lortie Commission mentioned above received a number of suggestions from women’s groups of ways that public funds could be used to increase the number of women elected as Members of Parliament. For example, “the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women recommended that reimbursement of campaign expenses be raised to 75 percent for men and 100 percent for women candidates and that parties whose candidates are at least 50 percent women should have their campaign expenses reimbursed at a rate of 50 percent rather than the current level of 22.5 percent for all parties eligible for reimbursement.” Reforming Electoral Democracy: Final Report, Vol. 4: What Canadians Told Us (Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1991), 45. Other interveners suggested public funding of nomination races as a way of lessening the financial barriers to women’s participation.
- 8.
See Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Harvard University Press, 2001), 77: “It is clear that a country which does not have an inclusive definition of citizenship cannot by definition be a democracy, because the set of people who have the full range of legal and political rights constitutes only a subset of those whose fates are inextricably bound up with the functioning of the country’s institutions. Citizenship has to be available to all permanent residents in order to satisfy ‘the basic liberal principle of equal concern and respect for everybody who depends on a government for a guarantee of his or her rights’.” The internal quotation is from an article by Rainer Bauböck.
- 9.
The right of all legally resident foreign citizens to vote and stand as candidates in national, regional (or provincial), and local elections is one of the indicators used in the Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) developed by the Migration Policy Group (MPG) in partnership with the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and more than 35 national partners on four continents to rank countries by the number and quality of their integration policies. Canada’s denial of electoral rights to legally resident foreign citizens is one of the reasons for its surprisingly low ranking on this index, after Sweden, Portugal, New Zealand, Finland, and Norway (MIPEX 2015).
- 10.
See Elizabeth F. Cohen, Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2009) for a scholarly attempt to come to terms with the reality of different degrees and kinds of citizenship and some progressive practical suggestions. Looking further ahead, concern may soon focus on those living creatures like ourselves, with similar emotions, who are currently denied citizenship rights altogether because of our difficulties communicating with them, namely, the animals. The next frontier in citizenship theory and practice may well be to work out practical ways of extending some citizenship rights to various kinds of animals. These rights would obviously have to be unbundled, before any animals (other than humans) could be counted as citizens. The acute sense of smell of some, such as dogs, might be useful when trying to judge the veracity of witnesses in a trial or hearing, but otherwise it would be unreasonable to expect any other animals to participate actively in the more deliberative parts of the political system. Their interests would have to be entrusted to special “advocates” who would be appointed to speak and vote on their behalf, as similar advocates have been proposed for human citizens who, for one reason or another, cannot participate in deliberation and voting. For a provocative philosophical discussion of differentiated “co-citizenship” for different classes of animals (for wild, domestic, and—between these two broad categories—“liminal” animals), see Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 11.
I am borrowing some words here and in what follows from Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto: Viking, 1993), 3–5, which briefly and clearly explains the important contemporary theoretical distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. As he says, “civic nationalism maintains that the nation should be composed of all those—regardless of race, colour, [religious] creed, gender, language or ethnicity—who subscribe to the nation’s political creed. This nationalism is called civic because it envisages [envisions?] the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values.” Ethnic nationalism, by contrast, relies for political unity not on “the cold contrivance of shared rights, but [on] the people’s pre-existing ethnic characteristics: their language, religion, customs and traditions.” Their “blood” or “common roots”—unlike law, “inherited, not chosen”—define the national community and determine those who belong to it.
- 12.
For almost a century, psychologists have been working on tests of values, and they have developed many techniques for measuring a great variety of values. Most, however, assume cooperative subjects who will not try to “fake” socially desirable scores on the tests in order to secure whatever advantages may be contingent on being thought to have good strong values. A useful test of civic values would have to take this possibility into account: one that could be faked might create more problems than it would solve. The best example of the kind of test that would be needed is the famous F (for fascism) scale developed by a group of leading philosophers and psychologists in the 1940s to measure “implicit anti-democratic trends in personality.” See Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Bros., 1950), 222–279. Their F scale did not ask respondents to agree or disagree with overtly fascist statements, but rather with apparently innocuous ones (e.g., “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues that children should learn”) that were nonetheless diagnostic of fascist tendencies “at the level of personality.” See H. D. Forbes, Nationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Personality: Social Science and Critical Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1985) for more details. I have not kept up with developments in this intriguing and revealing research tradition, but to clarify what I mean, let me point to the research programme of a social psychologist at the University of Manitoba, which was directed to overcoming response sets in the measurement of “right-wing authoritarianism” (RWA) and which culminated, after the publication of three earlier books, in the publication of The Authoritarian Specter (Harvard University Press, 1996), where one reads the following alarming conclusion: “Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities as a matter of course, enough to stage the Nuremberg Rallies over and over and over again. Turning a blind eye to this could someday point guns at all our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong to right-wing authoritarians. We ignore this at our peril” (306). The most important practical result of the research programme, the RWA scale, which has been validated in hundreds of other studies, could be used to pinpoint the potential threats, with minimal risk of agreement response set bias. For a broader examination of the value of a scientific, technological approach to questions of citizenship and discrimination, see Rainer Knopff, Human Rights and Social Technology: The New War on Discrimination (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989).
- 13.
The test could be treated as pass-fail and the exact scores withheld in order to forestall the development of anything like the Mensa groups, which seem to consist of those with high scores on IQ tests who do nothing with their superior abilities except tell each other about them.
- 14.
A similar idea has been advanced by an influential Quebec intellectual, until recently the leader of the Parti Québécois, Jean-François Lisée. He suggested the creation of an “internal Quebec citizenship” alongside Canadian citizenship, to affirm the existence of Quebec as a distinct community of citizens. Only those who were Quebec citizens (as well as Canadian citizens) would be able to vote in Quebec elections and referenda. Admission to Quebec citizenship would be automatic for those born and educated in Quebec, but for others, including other Canadians, it would require that they demonstrate (a) sufficient knowledge of the official language of Quebec and (b) a basic knowledge of its history, culture, and values. See Jean-François Lisée, Nous (Montreal: Boréal, 2007), 101–105. Given the happier circumstances in the rest of Canada, it might be relatively easy to justify a testing programme for native-born English-speaking citizens, with tests and criteria that would be just as stringent as those applied to immigrants. Cf. Rudyard Griffiths, Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009), 158–160 and 166–167, for a similar proposal, that is, citizenship tests for native-born citizens as well as newcomers, but with a focus on knowledge rather than values, on the old “deliberative” assumption that participation should ideally be based on knowledge, rather than the more realistic “marketing” assumption that values are more important.
- 15.
See, for example, Claudia Chwalisz, “Replace this archaic institution with a citizens’ senate,” Globe and Mail, June 15, 2015. The author does not seem to understand, however, that random selection would automatically ensure “representativeness of sex, age, race, socio-economic status … matching the makeup of Canadian society,” without any need for prior “stratification.” Arash Abizadeh, “Let’s replace Canada’s Senate with a randomly selected citizen assembly,” Montreal Gazette, December 7, 2016, makes a more carefully reasoned case for the same basic idea. Abizadeh, a political theorist at McGill University, made a presentation two days later to the “policy dragon’s den” at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship in the Faculty of Law at McGill, which is available online. Random selection, he said, would create a “competent, democratic, and effective” (CDE) Senate for Canada, one that would “reflect the full diversity of Canada and would be able to add to the democratic legitimacy of legislation that comes from the House of Commons.” In Britain, there is a Sortition Foundation that is promoting similar ideas. See Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008) for a detailed discussion.
- 16.
One of the merits of the early sketch of a multicultural society by Roy Matthews mentioned earlier(see Chap. 2, note 4) is its attention to institutional details like Senate reform. Matthews suggested that the Senate “be made into a forum in which representation was based in part on ethnic origin,” but he thought that any rigid scheme for a “parliament of nationalities” would founder on the difficulty of assigning many Canadians to clear, simple nationality categories. “Should a man whose entire way of life is ‘English’-Canadian be appointed as Czech representative in the Senate because his great-grandfather came from Czechoslovakia? Obviously such a practice would be ludicrous.”
- 17.
George Elliott Clarke, in Canada in 2020: Twenty Leading Voices Imagine Canada’s Future, ed. Rudyard Griffiths (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008), 89.
- 18.
For example, Shakespeare’s testimony to the authority of kings, which he puts in the mouth of Richard II: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king. / The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord” (III, ii, 54–57).
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Forbes, H.D. (2019). Culturally Open Governance. In: Multiculturalism in Canada. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19835-0_9
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