One of the debates among those who like to debate is whether or not the recent and dramatic change in the polls is due to a backlash against Mr. Harper’s decision to prorogue parliament, or a combination of other factors. All interesting debates, I agree, but more interesting is what I believe is grabbing hold at a more fundamental and democratic level.
The people, and it’s still too early to tell if this means a few thousand people or the masses, are discovering a tool in the form of social media that may effectively prove as reason for individuals to once again care.
Widely understood and generally accepted are that decreases in voter turnout result from growing political cynicism. People increasingly don’t believe their ballot vote makes a difference and don’t see the difference between politicians and parties. Further is the belief that once in power parties and politicians are basically all the same. The more recent and correct assessment would be that governments are about one thing only, politics. Everything revolves around power; the getting of it, keeping it and pouncing on any and all opportunity to affect who has or doesn’t have it.
While Canadians are perceived as not particularly effective, organized, or boisterous in their opposition to juvenile political behaviour, this does not mean Canadians haven’t all along been paying attention and recognizing what federal politics has become. Until now, voter apathy among Canadians of all political persuasion was based on exasperation, a belief there was no hope, no voice and no method for effecting real change.
Today and in the days ahead, depending on how the prorogation issue plays out, will determine whether or not digital democracy has hit a tipping point. My instincts tell me it very well may have.
This isn’t to say Mr. Harper’s justification for proroguing parliament wasn’t – in his mind – justified or well intentioned. Mr. Harper surely sees the prorogation tactic as no worse than the more under-the-radar tactics Liberals play in the Senate or that all parties play at Committee. Mr. Harper’s bigger problem, as Bruce Anderson has very correctly written about in his piece How to make prorogation stick, has to do with perceived arrogance and the sudden realization that voters have, just as suddenly, come to understand they possess a relatively new tool, literally at their finger-tips, which they can play with to much affect.
Mr. Harper is by no means the first politician to show some level of arrogance, much less contempt for his own arrogance. Pierre Trudeau was, at times, every bit as arrogant if not more so. PET’s quip “watch me” is but one example. However, Mr. Trudeau and all prime ministers before and after him until Stephen Harper did not live in a world whereby public opinion and the widespread instant communication of public opinion could be instantly measured, instantly controlled, and further instantly re-communicated.
Mr. Harper’s war-room counter-attack may be factually correct that parliament has been prorogued 100+ times in the past and perhaps even for equivalent partisan gain. But never before under the watchful eye of something like Facebook. It’s not so much that Mr. Harper has twice in the past year used prorogation for partisan gain nor are Canadians much more aware or truly more informed. At best, Canadian’s merely have an instinct, albeit shaped by the media and the media’s use of polling results to affect yet more polling results.
Instead, the current blip in Mr. Harper’s radar has to do with a digital vehicle over which Mr. Harper has less control, and through which Canadians can teach all politicians, not just Mr. Harper, a lesson.
I suggest that many who are today joining Canadians against proroguing parliament are doing so not because they are truly very upset the government isn’t sitting, but rather almost entirely because they’ve been given access to a new and very powerful toy that teaches politicians a lesson.
Many, I suspect, are joining the Facebook effort because of the power and thrill they derive from knowing what the numbers, if they continue to grow, may accomplish. Mr. McGuinty learned the same lesson when, in a matter of hours, Facebook caused an about-face in planned legislation affecting younger drivers’ licensing privileges. This isn’t to say Mr. McGuinty’s planned licensing policy wasn’t the right one for society in the long term, only that it could be summarily defeated.
While this digital democratic power, in healthy doses, is a good thing, Canadians are well-advised to be careful of what they wish for, for as the saying goes, they may get it.
Keep in mind, the jury is still out on whether or not it’s a good thing to be governed by a government that reacts to every blip in short term and by public opinion that is largely manufactured and manipulated, as opposed to true statesmen and visionaries who govern for the long term. Arguably the GST when it was introduced by Mr. Mulroney’s majority governments is largely credited for erasing Canada’s deficit. Had Mr. Mulroney at the time been minority governed by among other social factors, Facebook, or rather by what can, overnight, be created on Facebook, I very much doubt Canada’s fiscal improvement would have been so swift.
True, there is something to be said in support of greater representation in our current political system and climate, but there is also something to be said of equal and perhaps greater importance for being given a fair chance to make your mark and to be judged by it. This is not to be confused with the very real dangers associated with yielding, from one instant to the next, to the pressures of socio-partisan micro-management.
On another occasion I will argue that polling can be used, and is used by some not simply to measure public opinion, but to effectively reshape it. At the time, Jeffery Simpson’s piece, Prorogation will not loosen the PM’s grip was likely accurate. But a mere two days later more accurate were Bruce Anderson’s arguments about arrogance. And today we have the arguments set forth in this post that public sentiment, properly manipulated across a social media such as Facebook, can play havoc with conventional and tactical political wisdom.
It’s a good thing, yes. But tread carefully would be my cautionary advice.
