Citizens’ assemblies are an idea that was introduced into Canadian politics as a direct consequence of decisions of which I was part and a movement I helped to build; their pernicious effects on Canadian democracy have only increased in the generation since these fateful decisions. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Social Credit coalition, two groups that had been most involved in maintaining BC’s big tent centre-right party felt that their decades in the coalition had delivered little or nothing for them: the Christian Right and the “taxpayer” movement, organized under the aegis of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, a group with few formal members but many supporters, pushing what one might call a “neo-Jeffersonian” ideology.
Both of these groups, now exiled from the provincial government for the first time in sixteen years, went about organizing and members became involved in various projects: organizing more actively at the municipal level, working to build the modern electoral reform movement, working to build smaller boutique right-wing parties, working to re-create Social Credit under a new brand name, building the Reform Party of Canada in BC and participating in processes of intellectual and organizational renewal in right-wing civil society organizations.
Following the first-ever re-election of an NDP government in BC, this work intensified. A consequence of this was the creation of two voting reform organizations: Fair Voting BC, headed by former MLA and anti-abortion activist Nick Loenen, and the Electoral Change Coalition of BC, headed initially by Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party. However, Sanguinetti soon stepped down from this role and was replaced by Troy Lanigan, the BC spokesperson for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
This happened because while Lanigan’s (and, it happens, my) organization favoured a two-stage referendum process as was used in New Zealand, Loenen’s backed a citizens’ assembly, something that had never previously been used in Canada. Loenen’s argument was that politicians elected under first-past-the-post were in a conflict of interest in choosing a new voting system, as their material interests aligned with the current one. Therefore, the process of choosing a new system had to be de-politicized. During his MA studies at UBC and continued political activity in Richmond following his defeat, he, like the CTF crew, had become aware of a new approach to political decision-making that had been pioneered by the Republican Party in Orange County.
The Orange County GOP had, since the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, been the intellectual vanguard of American conservatism producing what is called “Sunbelt populism” and the “Reagan Revolution,” developing language to popularize such ideas as “supply side economics.”
The Orange County GOP had found, as Christian, white and conservative demographic and electoral hegemony had been collapsing with major influxes of Jewish, liberal and LatinX voters, both elections and public consultation processes had been producing non and anti-conservative mobilization and representation. The old solution to maintain elite white power, the idea of “commission government” was not an option because the technocratic, professional class, from which city managers were drawn was also increasingly liberal and non-Christian, even if nearly just as white.
Whereas the process of mobilizing LatinX, low-income or non-white voters tended to move the opinions of those voters to the left, because of the inherent nature of movement-building and mass mobilization, what if voters could be “represented” or “consulted,” through a process that was inherently conservative, individualistic and elite-focused? And so, the citizens’ assembly was born. The technical name was “deliberative polling” but the aptly-named Jefferson Centre trademarked the term Citizens’ Assembly in 1971.
This system of replacing democratically representative bodies with demographically representative bodies was soon tested in other conservative bastions like Richmond, BC. Finally, the neighbourhood busybodies could be cut out of the equation, and the people directly “represented.” This idea had a certain appeal for those on the left too, who resented the over-representation of property-owning, conservative “NIMBYs” in both local government and consultation processes.
The problem is that deliberative polling is not just anti-democratic, individualistic and conservative in character; it is also far less accurate than a focus group, because it is not one. When a corporation empanels a focus group to test products or ad campaigns, these things are already substantially complete, to the point of there being message and product samples available; a focus group is essentially responding to a multiple choice test. But in deliberative polling, a group is often presented with the illusion of an open-ended question. This problem is typically solved through heavy facilitation; those placed in charge of the process wield considerable power.
In this way, the permanent government employees who “support” the assembly are the most influential upon it. In fact, the criteria for being part of deliberative polling is often a requirement to be disconnected from the social movements working on the issue before the group. In this way, those involved in deliberative polling serve no one and represent no one, in the democratic sense.
Yet, beginning in 1997, the voting reform movement chose to back-burner the idea of a two-stage referendum process and instead support the BC Liberal idea of a one-stage process, of an assembly followed by an up or down vote on its conclusions. While, in the case of the BC assembly, this was not a disaster for the voting reform movement—the assembly, for reasons that are still debated, gave us a highly saleable system. The problem was the discourse and theory of politics that it popularized, especially following the progressive take-over of the voting reform movement 2005-07.
Progressives began arguing that being politically mobilized about and committed to an issue was a conflict of interest and tainted the democratic process. Furthermore, because the permanent bureaucratic class, rather than elected representatives did the facilitation, research, etc. and essentially set the table for assemblies, including de facto writing the multiple choice question they were answering, progressives loved the idea of these focus groups because the professional class they typically comprised were running them. A focus group of random people disconnected from social movements, assisted by selfless bureaucrats simply seeking to use their education to create an ordered society was exactly the body that should be making political decisions. In fact, they began to argue that citizens’ assemblies were more politically legitimate than legislatures, that being demographically representative rather than being democratically representative was what gave a body the right to govern.
And it did not matter that, following the lucky strike in BC in 2004, citizens’ assemblies began recommending garbage, unsaleable voting systems in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. An important characteristic of these systems was their use of “closed lists.” In most systems of proportional representation, voters choose which individuals will benefit from their support for a political party. Whether open list, single transferable vote, single non-transferable vote, cumulative vote or whatever, in most PR systems, parties end up with the same share of the vote as their share of the seats, and their caucuses are composed of the party members who are most popular with the electorate and, consequently, bag the most individual votes.
In the majority of Canada’s citizens’ assemblies, guided by technocrats, populated by disconnected people, the consensus was to choose closed-list systems, the only proportional systems that share first-past-the-post’s defect that if a voter wishes to vote for a party, the party and not the voter chooses which of their candidates benefits from that vote. To be fair, this was not just a response to top-down leadership and disconnection from social movements. It was also the result of many progressive Canadians telling assemblies that, given a choice, Canadian voters would not choose female or non-white candidates to be beneficiaries of their votes, and therefore needed elites to direct their votes to the women and minorities whom voters were not wise enough to choose.
Because focus groups being guided by selfless technocrats to come up with more efficient means of imposing political order and social control is essentially the utopia imagined by the progressive managerial class, the orderly assembly and not the chaotic and diverse legislature has become the fetish object of the electoral reform movement. In this election, Fair Vote Canada is not endorsing, as it has in the past, legislation to immediately enact proportional representation. Instead, it is calling for a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform; it is not even demanding that its terms of reference restrict it to examining kinds of proportional representation. The goal of FVC, today, is no longer the enactment of PR, on which it was founded in 2001. The goal is to achieve whatever kind of voting system technocrats can facilitate a focus group consensus on, irrespective of whether it is even proportional.
This fetishization of neo-Jeffersonian, anti-democratic decision-making is not limited to voting reform anymore. Now, progressives are proposing it to solve all kinds of political deadlocks and disappointments that should be solved through citizen mobilization.
