Do political parties have a future as champions of democratic interests? Or are they merely self-interested entities that exist for their own sake and do not serve the will of the governed?
TVO’s Steve Paikin convenes a panel of David Herle, principal partner at the Gandalf Group, Sean Speer, the Hub’s editor at large, David Moscrop, contributing columnist to the Washington Post, and Susan Delacourt, a National Columnist for the Toronto Star, to discuss in this instalment of The Democracy Agenda.
The core issue is whether or not party politics is an effective means for delivering democracy. Or do they just make people angry?
Politics and democracy are seen as intertwined, but they do not need to be, Delacourt says.
“I’d do away with political parties, myself. A lot of the political polarization is fake polarization. It is people deliberately taking extreme views to fit into a political system,” she says.
While this is a legitimate concern, Speer concedes, he believes that we in fact need more parties.
“One of the problems with the current system is that these large brokerage parties aren’t bringing expression to large minorities in our country, whether it’s hardcore progressives, whether it’s pro-life voices, whether it’s those who have misgivings about Canada’s immigration system and yet can’t find expression in our current mainstream politics,” says Spear.
He has been, he says, increasingly convinced of the need for more responsive politics, which would probably entail some form of proportional representation and the participation of even more parties in our system.
