I have written a paper about an alternative form of government which I call Ikanocracy. I would invite people to read the paper HERE.


In this blog I will be commenting on events in politics, government and current affairs and discussing how things would be different (and hopefully better) in a Ikanocracy.


The goal of this blog is to disseminate the ideas of Ikanocracy to as many people as possible and to start a discussion about improving politics and government.

Friday 2 March 2012

Subversion

I am really disgusted by the latest affront to Canadian democracy. Apparently, in the last Federal Election, there was a coordinated attempt to mislead voters by phoning them with recorded messages, claiming to be from Elections Canada, and giving them misinformation about location and times of polls. The persons receiving calls seem to have been supporters of either the NDP or Liberal Party. If even a small part of what is being claimed about this robo-calling scandal is true, we have reached a new low in Canadian democracy. A decade ago, the Liberal Party subverted democracy with the sponsorship scandal, and it has led to their near destruction. Now the Conservatives may have done the Liberals one better) or should I say "one worse".

We also had a local case of subversion of democracy closer to home last year. During municipal elections in a nearby small town, there were rumours that the mayor and council had squandered over a million dollars on a concert that wasn't going to happen. During the campaign, the mayor flatly denied these rumours. The mayor was re-elected, but a number of new councillors were also elected and after the election they refused to be part of a coverup and so it came out that the rumours were true. In my opinion, the mayor's deception during the election campaign was far worse than the actual wasting of the money, because it robbed citizens of something more important than money ... their franchise ( i.e. right to make an informed decision about who governs them.)

The Sponsorship scandal and the Robo-calling scandal similarly robbed citizens of their franchise.

Unfortunately there are many other similar cases of abuse. Remember Watergate? (OK maybe that was before your time... look it up.) What happens when politicians are elected under false pretences, or by employing unethical or illegal tactics? It is very hard to get these abuses exposed and addressed after the fact. As we've mentioned in previous posts, one of the problems of a representative democracy is that representatives often put their own interests ahead of the interests of the citizens who elected them, and nothing is more in a politician's own interest than covering their own posterior.  The elected politician often now has the power to delay, obfuscate or stifle investigations. Even if the abuse is able to be exposed and the perpetrators punished, it often takes so long that the politician gets to serve their term, and meanwhile, the business of governing suffers as the politician is diverted by their posterior protecting, and public confidence in the process is degraded.

These abuses keep happening, and no one seems to have a fix for our representative democracy to stop them. In Ikanocracy this wouldn't be a problem, as in general you are voting for ideas, not people, and ideas have no self-interest.

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