Planking - Ikanocracy Style

Do you think we should get tougher on crime? Are you in favour of longer prison terms for offenses, mandatory minimum sentences, tougher penalties for drug possession,  or an end to house arrest? These are a few of the features on the Federal Conservatives Omnibus Crime Bill. All of this despite (1) falling crime rates, (2) over 90% of Canadians reporting they feel safe from crime, (3) at least a half a billion dollar a year price tag (estimated, since the government will not give the actual costs), (4) almost every expert saying these policies will make Canada less safe, and (5) similar policies acknowledged (even by conservatives) to have been a failure in Texas and other American states.

The Conservatives won the last election, and the Omnibus crime bill was part of their platform, and so they say they have a "mandate" to make these changes. However, they won only 40% of the popular vote, and every other party in Parliament was against most of the measures in the Crime Bill so what kind of mandate is that?

Some might want to make an issue of the fact that voter turnout was barely over 60%, but the 40% of Canadians who declined to vote had their chance to be counted, and cannot be now assumed to be in one camp or the other.

This Omnibus Crime Bill is a sad example of the distortion of democracy that is caused by the "first past the post" system of representative government that Canada employs, but there is another failing of democracy here as well. That is the "plank-mixing problem".

Consider the typical political platform. It consists of planks, or positions on issues. There may be planks on the economy (taxes, trade, government spending, etc), the environment (climate change,  clean air and water, population growth, etc.), social issues (crime, gun control, the death penalty, socialized medicine, abortion, gay marriage, drug policies, etc.),  and so on. Is every voter going to totally agree with every plank in some party's platform? That seems very unlikely. What is more likely is that a voter decides on the one or two high-priority issues that are important to him or her, and then votes for the party whose platform most closely aligns with his views on those key issues. Was the Conservatives Omnibus Crime Bill was that high on many people's priority list. I don't think so. So what kind of mandate do they really have?

I already can guess at the counterargument to the "plank-mixing problem". That plank choices are not independent and that an entire platform for a party is the logical offshoot of a few key ideas, and  agreeing with these leads to to acceptance of each plank in the the platform. There is some truth to this, but people are more complex than that. There is so much diversity of persons and opinions in modern society that it is impossible to compartmentalize peoples into two or three camps.  Which camp is for the anti-abortion, libertarian, climate-change activist? Which camp is for the gun toting, pot smoking, fiscal conservative farmer and his same sex partner?

In  a dictatorship, there is one camp chosen by a one person, and everyone is forced to live in it. In a democracy it is better. There are two or three camps, and the competition between them forces them to try to make their camp somewhat livable, but in the end one of the two or three camps is chosen. In Ikanocracy, you get to mix-and-match. Each aspect of the camp is designed by a competitive process, where persons who have displayed proficiency in aspects of camp design have more input. In Ikanocracy we can take our planks, and instead of building one or two pre-fab camps, we can build a mansion.