Is Democracy in Canada Sick?

Democracy is not supposed to be a spectator sport, but more and more Canadians are choosing to stand on the sidelines looking in.

Only 58 per cent of all eligible voters cast a ballot during the last federal election, and just under half in the recent provincial contest. Less than 30 per cent of residents in Kitchener and Cambridge went to the polls in 2010. The turnout rate for the City of Waterloo reached just over 40 per cent. If voter turnout is an indicator of the health of a society’s democracy, then ours is sick.

Coming up with a diagnosis is not so simple. When scandals like the robocall story hit news, it’s tempting to blame disillusionment with our politicians. But this alone cannot explain the present degree of disengagement. Canada’s history of political scandals dates back to the days of Sir John A. Macdonald, but voter participation only began dropping to current levels in the mid-1970s.

The last time Elections Canada sponsored a major study into the reasons for dropping voter turnouts was 2003. One of the most thought-provoking findings of the study was that people who voted are also more apt to be engaged in other forms of civic participation, such as attending a community meeting, signing a petition, or sending a letter. It turns out that even reading the newspaper is associated with higher rates of voting.

The idea that someone who is an active citizen in one area of life will also be active in others not surprising. What’s useful about it is the suggestion that it may be possible to foster interest in our electoral system by encouraging participation in other areas of civic life. This is at least one of the learnings gleaned from participatory budgeting experiments in other countries.

Participatory budgeting is a democratic process where citizens decide how to spend part of a public budget directly. It began as an experiment in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989. As many as 50,000 people there participate each year in deciding how to spend up to 20 per cent of the budget for a city of 1.5 million. The model has now spread to hundreds of other cities. Governments in the United Kingdom and the Dominican Republic recently began requiring municipalities to use it.

There are success stories closer to home. Toronto’s public housing authority designates about $9 million annually to infrastructure priorities using participatory budgeting with tenants. Guelph’s Neighbourhood Support Coalition, a network of grassroots community groups, allocates public and other funds to local needs using this model. I’ve seen participatory budgeting used by local governments and community development groups first hand. In both cases, I saw participants deepen knowledge of their communities and of how government works.

Despite its many virtues, participatory budgeting is not a wholesale fix or a replacement for our current democratic system. It might just be a good complement though, that may help us reinvigorate voting rates, and our civic life.

Nelson Rosales works for World Accord, a local charity supporting community development and social innovation in Asia and Central America.