Canada needs a co-ordinated democracy strategy

On March 30, Canada will participate in the second Summit for Democracy convened by the United States. At the first Summit in 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans for a “Canadian centre for global democracy” to “be there for fragile and emerging democracies with expanded fast and flexible support.” Since then, we have witnessed the continuation of a pandemic, a ravaging war in Ukraine, the occupation of our G7 capital, the first invocation of the Emergencies Act in Canada, and concerns about election interference. Each instance reveals how interwoven domestic and foreign policy are, and highlights the connections between the risks faced by democracies in general, and our democracy in particular. Missing from these Summits for Democracy is a connected research enterprise. The American Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal does not fund science or integrate activities with researchers, nor do any of the other co-hosts. Here is where Canada can lead global efforts: by investing in a co-ordinated research and knowledge-driven strategy which connects our support for democracy abroad with support for democracy at home. It’s not enough to fund a stand-alone research mission, however. To address democratic frailties—abroad and at home, symbiotically—we ought to leverage an approach that co-ordinates researchers in a shared mission with the constellation of productive actors and diverse knowledge-creators already at work for democracy within, and outside, Canada. The business sector benefits from a stable democracy and ought to be a key partner in this strategy. Business leaders understand that democratic practices of inclusion, open collaboration, power-sharing, communication, transparency, and accountability are key to innovation and success. Certainly, our processes and disposition in developing this co-ordinated democracy strategy need to be democratic, too. Anoush F. Terjanian is a fellow of the Human Rights and Research and Education Centre. Photograph courtesy of Anoush F. Terjanian Our public service is also essential, especially as the country’s largest employer. But it needs capacity to facilitate a comprehensive and co-ordinated democracy strategy. In current federal ministerial mandate letters (made public in an often-unrecognized gesture of transparency by the current government), democracy concerns mostly the outward-facing portfolios of Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly and International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan. The minister of intergovernmental affairs, infrastructure, and communities is alone responsible for strengthening our democratic institutions. Adding democracy to the responsibilities of our minister of Canadian heritage, responsible for Canadian values; our minister of immigration, refugees, and citizenship; and our minister for Crown-Indigenous relations and northern affairs, to name a few, would go a long way to cohering our commitments to democracy, and our credibility abroad, too. Taking into account our complex multinational, federal, multicultural, bilingual, multilingual, and multi-juridical legal regimes, this strategy must also address the many exclusions embedded in our system, and move beyond efforts to rescue democracies abroad, by committing to learning the lessons from—and learning with—regimes outside Canada, both positive and worrying trends. We find ourselves fighting, in the words of Joly, an “existential war for all democracies,” while patching crises at home. But a pan-Canada democracy strategy co-ordinating new knowledge with our national and international democracy promotion activities, also opens up unique possibilities to innovate for democracy with partners often overlooked within the Greenbelts of Ottawa and Toronto. For example, our legal commitment to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples invites the possibilities of innovative models that co-ordinate authority peacefully in a context best understood as internationalization at home. Francophone communities in Quebec and throughout Canada also invite us to overcome the national-international binary in policymaking, just as they remind us of our democratic obligations to respect existing laws, like the Official Languages Act. This week’s Summit for Democracy presents an opportunity for Canada to unite our approaches to democracy at this anxious time of democratic recession, and blend research with action. If we are going to offer support and leverage our democracy abroad, we need to attend to it beyond reacting to symptoms of its frailties at home. A co-ordinated “made-in-Canada” democracy strategy which connects our national and international activities, and is informed by a robust research agenda, can enhance our trustworthiness abroad and nurture global democracies, while sowing greater trust in our democracy at home. Anoush F. Terjanian, PhD, is a fellow of the Human Rights and Research and Education Centre, a recent member of the governing council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the founding director of the U.S. Social Science Research Council’s Anxieties of Democracy program. The Hill Times