Enabling Participatory Democracy in the Internet Era

So I’ve recently joined the Online Party of Canada (OPC). I’d never seriously considered joining a political party in the past (although I had been thinking of starting a new political party) because as many Canadians, I’ve grown to be disenchanted with Politicians and Politics in general. That being said, I actually believe this one to be different. And that’s what led me to start blogging again.

What’s different about the Online Party of Canada?

I’ll try to lay it out in simple terms. The Online Party of Canada is not your typical party; it has no agenda, no platform, it is neither left nor right winged… it simply proposes a new way of doing things the old way.

To understand the meaning of this last statement, I would invite you to read this simple explanation of the history of modern democracy (written for children):

"Democracy means the rule of the people (in Greek). That is where each individual person has a vote about what to do. Whatever the most people vote for wins. There is no king or tyrant, and anybody can propose a new law.

One problem that immediately comes up in a democracy is who is going to be able to vote. Should people vote who are just visiting from some other city-state? How about little kids, should they vote? Or should there be some limits?

The earliest democracy in the world began in Athens, in 510 BC. When democracy proved to be successful in Athens, many other city-states chose it for their government too. But most of them allowed even fewer people to vote than Athens did: most of the other city-states only allowed free adult male citizens to vote IF they owned land or owned their own houses (that is, the richer people).

Another problem for democracies was that it was very inconvenient for men to always be going to the meeting-place to vote. Most men had work to do, planting their grain, making shoes, fighting wars or whatever. They couldn't be always voting. So most democracies sooner or later ended up choosing a few men who would do most of the voting, and the rest only came when there was a really important vote.”

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/government/democracy.htm

This brief excerpt illustrates how and why we came to adopt a representative democracy in Canada. At the federal level, those “few men chosen to do most of the voting” are our Members of Parliament (MPs). We had to find a temporary solution for the fact that we couldn’t fit every Canadian in the House of Commons. I mean let’s face it, we live in a huge country, geographically speaking, and it wouldn’t have made sense to ask everyone to come down to Ottawa to cast a vote everyday. Therefore, instead of voting on issues, we’ve learned to vote for people (Elections) to vote on issues (Bills, laws, etc.) on our behalf. However, let’s not forget that this model (representative democracy) was originally a substitute for the ideal (direct democracy) due to geographical and time constraints.

Now that the Internet has eliminated those barriers to a true democracy, why are we still stuck with a “modern” representative democracy?

We have become so accustomed to the substitute that we have come to accept it as the ideal. Something was lost along the way. We lost the ability to govern ourselves. We gave this power up and we started specializing in other fields: medicine, law, engineering, business, etc. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with specialization of labour; in fact, it made society more efficient as a whole. But we collectively forgot that “politician” was never meant to be a separate profession. It was originally a civic duty shared by everyone. Every eligible member of a society would have the right to propose laws and vote on them: doctors, mechanics, lawyers, carpenters, etc. would ALL be politicians as well. If you had the right to vote, you were a politician.

Yes, but nowadays people are too ignorant and misinformed to represent themselves!

Since the news of the Online Party of Canada came out, we’ve heard the same comment(s) made by so-called political “experts” and members of the public:

“I would want decisions made [at the government level] by people that know something about politics.”

- Neil Thomlinson, chair of the department of politics at Ryerson University.

“I think the major problem with this is that so many people in the general public are just not informed enough on every issue.”

- JT, comment posted on the Blog of Walker, http://walkersunknownthoughts.blogspot.com/

This is a typical reaction: most people think most people are ignorant, misinformed and incapable of critical thinking (TRIVIA: did you know that most people think they are smarter than most people). Funny isn't it?

I, for one, don't believe it is fair to judge a general public's future hypothetical performance based on present context. True, some people are presently ignorant and misinformed. But the general public currently has no "real" incentive to be informed – intrinsic intellectual curiosity aside. So of course we are “not informed enough on every issue”! Why would we be? I mean, why waste time gathering information and analyzing an issue when you will never actually get to use that information anywhere else than in a blog or a cocktail party?

And saying that people are no longer capable of representing themselves politically is like saying that humans are no longer capable of growing gardens. True, most of us live in cities nowadays and most of us have lost the ability to grow our own food. But we only have to go back a few centuries, before the Industrial Revolution, when most people in society knew how to tend a garden. It’s not that we can’t do it anymore; it’s simply that we have stopped doing it. We would all have the intellectual capacity to learn to grow a garden again, if we really needed to, in order to survive.

With the right set of incentives (e.g. having the opportunity to vote on issues that affect us directly), I predict that we will see an electorate suddenly becoming much better informed on important issues and more engaged politically. And we don’t necessarily need to vote on every single issue; we can focus on topics in which we have a better understanding and let other people specialize on different issues. That way, we would act as Ministers of our own portfolio.

Sure, we'll probably screw up and make a few bad decisions at first but which government hasn’t? (e.g. taxes? who needs taxes?). But sooner or later we'll realize that we actually needed those damn taxes to pave our roads (figuratively speaking.. I hope).

Slowly but surely, we'll start building a better Canada than any Party or Politician could ever have imagined under the current system. But first, we must start believing in ourselves and stop putting down our fellow citizens. After all, we’re all part of the general public.

Visit the Online Party of Canada website today!

I know a lot of you are sceptical of this party's success, I wouldn’t blame you. In fact, many of the greats once were:

"In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and will never exist.”

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762.

Alas, the man who also said that “the world of imagination is boundless” could never have imagined the Internet some 250 years ago; nor predicted the impact it would one day have on society. After more than 2,500 years of democracy, we finally have the technology to take politicians out of Politics and bring the People back in.

Please take a few minutes to visit the OPC website (a.k.a. virtual House of Commons), read up on the issues and see how it all works:

http://www.onlineparty.ca/

If you wish to join the movement and help the OPC register as an official party, simply download the Membership Form found on this site:

http://www.onlineparty.ca/about.php?pt=4

Print, fill and mail it in to:

Online Party of Canada
388 King St. W – P.O. Box 30002
Toronto ON, M5V 1K0

Or if you want, simply send a request to mailto:membership@onlineparty.caand they will mail you a form and a stamped return envelope!

C'mon people, together we can do better than 308 "elected" officials representing our interests!

The Speed of Change

“Neural impulses typically travel along neurons at a speed of anywhere from 1 to 120 meters per second” – that is to say that we, as human beings, can change our minds in a matter of seconds (think of the last time you stood in front of a cash registry debating whether or not to buy a Mars bar or a lottery ticket). When we respond to the cashier’s question: “Is there anything else with that?” we generally speak – or transform our neural impulses into speech – at around 200 words per minute (much slower than our thoughts – which also explains why we can read faster in our heads than aloud). Specific or generalized behaviours, on the other hand, can take much longer to form as can be demonstrated from the weeks of therapy sometimes necessary to quit gambling or the time needed to “get into” a healthy lifestyle. Now, try to imagine the collective mindset of a population and guess how long it will take an entire society to change its mind. Depending on the issues at hand; this could be a month, a year, or even a few decades.

Take the 1989 Montreal Massacre for example; a lone gunman begins a shooting spree at l’École Polytechnique in Montreal killing a total of 14 women. How long did it take for an entire country to change their minds about firearms and gun control laws? The night of December 6th, 1989? Perhaps longer but this doesn’t change the fact that soon “more than 560 000 Canadians [had] signed a petition calling for a complete ban on military assault weapons”, formal groups such as the Coalition for Gun Control were founded and people all over the country were ready for change. Yet, the Federal administration of the 1991 Gun Control Initiative only saw the light of day approximately two years after the tragedy. This is because in order to pass legislations in our country, a bill (Bill C-17 in this case) has to be a read once, twice, studied by a committee, reported back to the House, read a third time, go through a similar process in the Senate, and “once both Chambers pass the bill in the same form, it is given Royal Assent and becomes law”. Needless to say, the general populace has time to change its mind quite a few times – as well as the context in which society is operating - from the point of impact (ex. 1989 Montreal Massacre) to the official institutional change to finally take place (ex. 1991 Gun Control Initiative).

This is a drastic example of a collective cultural shift to say the least. Now, let’s turn to a more “standard” example of the way we usually deal with a threat facing our country; let’s take a quick look at climate change. The brief history of the climate change crisis facing Canada and the world suggests that over the last century, climate change evolved from a once every thirty years topic of discussion to a several times a year topic of discussion. How did this change happen? We can postulate that in the beginning, scientists or even lay people had a mind shift; their neurons started firing differently. They spoke to one another, conducted research and later disseminated their findings to their peers; the raw information which would eventually make its way to a more general audience and their governments (the media playing a major role in spreading the news). By the early 1970s, people had already begun changing their minds, speaking and behaving differently about the environment (marking the birth of the modern environmental movement). However, we would have to wait until 1990 for the Canadian government to finally begin a coordinated approach to addressing climate change, close to a century after the Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius asked the question: “Is the mean temperature of the ground influenced by heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere?”

Finally, almost twenty years after the implementation of the first government strategies and programs to address the climate change, the virtuous cycle of change is still growing strong (and at an increasing rate). More and more people are shifting the way they think about the environment at around 1 to 120 seconds per second; friends and colleagues are discussing climate change issues at roughly 200 words per minute; citizens are recycling and making environmentally conscious choices on a daily basis; interest groups are spawning across the country, eco-friendly faces from all walks of life no longer stand at the extreme left of the ideological spectrum and governments everywhere are finally showing their true commitment by passing legislation to address environmental issues. But are we moving fast enough? No! The current speed of change is simply too slow to cope with today’s demand for quick and comprehensive solutions to our world’s complex problems. We need to start acting as soon as we reach a certain threshold of consensus in our collective mindset (imagine a large switchboard representing all citizens – when the percentage of people who are “switched-on” or “on-board” with a particular stance reaches a certain level, a green light goes off and appropriate actions automatically begin to take place). It’s time to redesign or bypass the legislative process which is slowing us down and give the power back to the people (I believe we, as a collective entity, have long reached the threshold on this issue). In my opinion, this may be the only way to achieve the results necessary for the survival of our planet in a timely manner.