The Senate is an anti-majoritarian institution, which is strictly not a democratic thing. It protects minorities, which is good, and I’m not criticising it for that, but it does counter America’s democratic credentials.
Try to understand I am not criticising the US when I say this. Democracy has to be compromised in certain ways to make a state functional but also to meet society’s values and concerns. A purely democratic state would have no patience for the rights of minorities but would only count the majority as important.
The UK in that regard is more democratic, as it allows the Commons the opportunity to override the rights of minorities if it’s patient enough to wait for the Lord’s delaying power to expire. Swings and roundabouts, strengths and weaknesses.
Like I said, I have criticisms of the composition of the House of Lords but I believe it is still on the whole a force for good and does its job quite well. I don’t think it should be elected but I believe a meritocratic system of appointment would work wonders.
It’s not ineffectual. In fact, since 1999, it’s enjoying a new renaissance of activity. It simply works differently from the US Senate as a delaying, criticising and checking body instead of a co-equal chamber. Believe it or not, but absolute, symmetrical bicameralism in the US style is quite rare worldwide.
Perhaps it was a poor choice of word. I wasn’t saying ‘liberal’ in the left-wing sense, as if slavery is therefore a ‘conservative/right-wing’ value. I meant it in the manner of ‘liberal’ being tolerant, concerned with liberty.
I hesitate to say libertarian, as that itself has connotations of its own.
Because it makes just as much sense to give states as states extra influence as it does to give some to unelected peers (and as far as I know, there are no longer any hereditary seats in the HOL.)
There remain 92 excepted hereditary peers in the House of Lords, although they don’t get the seat by right (they must be voted in by those hereditaries of their party already in the House).
Why would we assume that more democratic == better? The U.S. Contitution limits the democratic choices of the people, and that’s a good thing. Other countries have constitutions, but few if any are as binding as the U.S Constitution.
That’s not what “republic” means. Sorry, this gets me so mad when (usually US citizens on the right of the spectrum) invoke it. A republic can be democratic, or not. A monarchy can be democratic, or not. The U.S. is a (to a large extent) a democracy and a republic. The U.K. is a democracy and a monarchy. I think that most of U.S. Republicans (members of a political party where the name doesn’t signify much in particular) could learn a lot by talking to some republicans in the UK.
The United States is not very democratic at the national level if you use the criterion that the will of the electorate should be accurately represented by the decisions of policy makers. Two main things contribute to this: First Past the Post winning and the Electoral College. Because of these two factors, the vast majority of Americans are completely disenfranchised in national elections and the only people who are truly franchised are independent voters in swing states which some people put as low as 1% of the population. In addition, the US election system is hostile to third parties, meaning every voted is engaged in a forced binary choice.
It’s understandable since America was one of the first countries to implement democracy so it made some poor choices along the way but it doesn’t change the fact that America’s version of democracy is especially poor at achieving its aims.
Figuring out what is ‘democratic’ is very difficult in the first place. For example, you get to vote for a President. I don’t get to vote for a Prime Minister - I have to take whoever the leader of my party is. That may lead to Canada soon electing a millionaire playboy gadfly whose work experience consists of 2 years as a substitute teacher in a grade school. But he’s the leader of the liberal party, chosen in the back room by the elite, and if you don’t like the conservatives he’s your only choice.
Canada also has strong party discipline, which means your elected official is usually not free to vote the wishes of his own constituents, but must toe his party’s line.
Canada’s constitution also has a ‘notwithstanding’ clause which waters down constitutional protections. I suppose you could say that makes us more ‘democratic’.
So is Canada more or less democratic overall? Oh wait - we forgot to consider how much power resides federally vs locally, how free from corruption our elections are, and about a million other factors that can be added to one side of the ledger or the other.
Yes, but “democratic” is an adjective. If I say that, “There’s a sloppy painting on the wall.” Is the thing on the wall slop, a “sloppy”, or a painting?
The fact that there’s an adjectival form of the noun doesn’t suddenly make that adjective take precedence over the word it modifies.
Probably something along the lines that Canada also had slavery (until the early 1800’s IIRC) and perhaps was involved in the slave trade, though I’m not sure about that (they weren’t part of the slave trade triangle afaik).
There was indeed slavery in Canada, but it never really caught on here - mostly because the form that farming took in Canada at the time generally did not favour large-scale slave labour.
In Upper Canada (now Ontario), slavery was “abolished” quite early, in 1793 (earlier than anywhere else in the British Empire) - purely as a result of the fact that it pissed off (or rather, morally offended) Lt. Governor Simcoe. The story goes that some slave-owner was dragging a slave woman off to be sold in the US when she cried out - whereupon the slave owner set about abusing her. This abuse offended the bystanders, who brought it to the attention of the Lt. Governor, who eventually insituted an act to “abolish” slavery. The legislature wasn’t very interested, but slave-owning simply wasn’t a big enough deal to oppose the Lt. Governor over (even though several members of the legislature owned slaves), so it passed.
Sadly, nothing is known about what happened to the woman whose abuse started the ball rolling.
However, the Act didn’t free any slaves right away - it just enacted a scheme for the abolition of slavery over a generation. That’s why I say “abolish” in “scare quotes”. What it did, was represent the victory of abolition as a notion - but with a compromise, so as to avoid annoying existing slave-owners. As a practical fact, slavery as an accepted practice ended, but it was still possible to find the occasional slave in Ontario decades after the passing of the Act.
Further, it boggles my mind the effort spent arguing over the intent of the Founding Fathers. If you were a world renown scholar of the Revolutionary period in American history. Spent your entire life specializing in, say, Thomas Jefferson. Were able to discern his true intent then, make an extraordinary leap of logic to decide he wouldn’t have changed his mind in 250 years of social and technological progress.
For the same reasons we value democracy. When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he did not mean all are of equal intelligence, or moral character, or anything else; he was making an assertion in ethics, not science, he meant only that all are equally ends-in-themselves. Or, as Thomas Paine put it, “The mass of men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor the few booted and spurred to ride them.” Politically, all of us ends-in-ourselves are equal in the sense that whatever government does or does not do, we all have to live with the results; that gives us all an equal stake in the decision-making process. Democracy is not a theory of good government, it is a theory of legitimate government – but, in practice, in terms of good-government outcomes, democracy’s track record is “the worst form of government, except for every other that has been tried.”
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
But he’s the leader of the liberal party, chosen in the back room by the elite,
[/quote]
“chosen in the back room by the elite” here having the idiosyncratic meaning of going up against 5 other leadership candidates in a national ballot of Liberal Party members, and winning close to 80% of votes cast (81,389 of the 104,552 votes cast) and including winning the vote in 303 of the 308 federal ridings: Liberal Party of Canada leadership election, 2013: Results.