July 2001
Democracy at Home and Abroad
by Filip Palda
At the recent Quebec summit on North-South trade, Jean Chretien lectured Latin American countries as though they were misbehaving children. Either they must sup at the table of democracy, or forget about trading freely with the grown-ups in North America who believe in the vote and the rights of mankind.
Delegates from developing countries are used to this sort of remonstrance and look on it as the price to pay for a week of cocktail parties and high-level schmoozing. The latter are more fruitful activities than trying to explain to leaders like Chretien that democracy is akin to those frozen home-cooked meals some mothers carry on visits to their grown children: it travels poorly over long trips.
On one level, it is hard to blame Chretien for spooning out advice with the assurance of a Mary Poppins administering medicine. Think back to the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiannamen Square. The Western world swooned at the sight of students agitating for democracy in China, and the feats of student demonstrators such as Wang Dan recalled Shakespeare's Agincourt speech from Henry V that "This story shall the good man teach his son."
The Chinese politburo, apparently unaware or unimpressed by Shakespearian analogies, put down the students. Except for dissidents, no one in China rose in protest. Despite a flood of ink on the event in the Western press that a Three Gorges Dam project would have had trouble containing, few suggested that the Tiananmen Square protest did not spark a revolution because, perhaps, the Chinese were not ready for democracy.
What it means to be "ready for democracy" is an open question, but Dan Usher, an economist at Queen's University, attempted to address the puzzle in a celebrated 1981 book, The Economic Prerequisites to Democracy. Usher was not fazed by the Western conceit that democracy is the best system of government for all people at all times. Before we can have democracy, he argued, we need a "system of distribution" which a strong majority believe to be fair.
Capitalism fits the description. Hard work and a bit of luck translate into money, and those who have earned money deserve their slice of the pie. If people can accept this peaceful system as their main way of determining who gets what, they will not try to use government muscle to rob each other. Instead, they will look on politicians as professionals working for the public good rather than looking on them as Milo- sevic-style gangsters in three-piece suits who take from the many for the profit of the few.
Without a fair system of distribution, democracy becomes a means by which different groups in society use the power of the state to rob each other, or, as Jacques Parizeau put it in a recent exhortation to his people, to seek "booty."
A quick look at Pakistan shows the perversity of grafting democracy onto a society where government is an agency for theft. Benazir Bhutto was a hit in the West because of her praise for democracy and her crisp Oxbridge accent, but once elected to power, she presided over an empire of corruption. Her husband, known as "Mr. 20%" for the kickbacks he took from government contracts, became a role-model for students of payola and for budding baksheesh- mongers. A military dictatorship put her out of office to curb these excesses.
Prominent givers of advice are seldom the ones to whom we should look as role models for our own behaviour. In 1988, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart railed in his television sermons against lust while seeking out prostitutes during his lunch breaks. Jean Chretien preaches democracy abroad, but on his home turf has manoeuvred to squelch free election speech. Last year, his government passed Bill C-2, which severely limits what independent citizens can spend during elections to advertise their views.
This "gag" law is just the most recent installment in what Canadian political scientist Helen McIvor has documented as the attempts of those in power to establish a cartel on politics. The efforts of this cartel may explain why the last great innovation in Canadian democracy, suffrage for women, took place in the era of buggies and horsewhips.
Chretien is wiser in his actions than in his words. His reign has seen almost no changes to government's flagship social programs, nor to the structure of our tax system. Brezhnev would have been impressed by such political immobility. Perhaps the prime minister recognizes that our government has become a giant cow with millions of udders, and that one way of restraining interest groups from sucking government dry is to limit democratic freedoms. A more challenging way of restraining these groups would be to pare down government. Instead of lecturing foreign countries on democracy, Chretien could start rebuilding democracy at home by reminding Canadians that the best place to slice society's pie is down in the market place, and not on Parliament Hill.
Filip Palda is Professor at l’École Nationale d’Administration Publique in Montreal, and Senior Fellow of The Fraser Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
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