Electoral Law's Lack of Citizen Representation
and Representativity
In our presentation to the Chief Electoral Officer we mentioned that we had an objection to the proposals regarding what the Chief Electoral Officer calls representativity, saying that there needs to be gender parity and if the parties do not pronounce themselves on this or make a show of good faith or whatever, then the door is open for their penalization. We object to this on principle because it is a sign of the state's intent to further intervene in the affairs of political parties which it has no business doing. The Electoral Commission is responsible for running what are called free and fair elections and not to establish itself as the decision-maker of who can be a member, who can pay funds and how much, who it can choose as a candidate, etc. State interference in the affairs of political parties in a system which claims to be liberal democratic smells of autocracy and should be ended forthwith. In our proposal that Élections Québec fund the electoral process, not political parties, the need for administrative state control over funding of political parties would all then disappear. Electors would know fully which interests provide which political parties with funding and who they serve, no matter how much propaganda they pay for. Meanwhile Élections Québec would guarantee the right of the citizenry to an informed vote by supplying every household with the information they require about the individuals presenting themselves for election.
All of this of course raises the issue of representation and representativity, which the Chief Electoral Officer does not even bother to address, having reduced this to a matter of gender parity and equated that with representativity. No argument is presented to explain the system of representative democracy – what is it? Does the division of the electoral map into a more or less equal number of citizens mean that every citizen is thereby represented by whoever is elected? How is that the case? How will getting political parties to guarantee gender parity improve the representation of citizens in government – i.e. their agenda, their needs, accountability to them, and so on. No argument is given to this effect. Do we need to go out and count all the voters in a constituency to establish whether there is gender parity? Do we need to debate whether parties are fielding candidates in the right proportion to the gender of the electorate in each riding? Maybe there are a majority of women in every constituency across the country. Should we then only have women candidates because they are the majority?
It's ridiculous and distracts from the essential point, which is that we're talking about the members of the body politic, and that this has nothing to do with beliefs, origin, language, gender, age, etc. It's about the relationship between citizens and the State, not all those things that conceal what we mean by representation.
The
form of representation in Quebec, as is also the case in Canada,
in
fact represents what the sovereign who wields the supreme power
stands
for, not what the people stand for. And in Quebec, as in Canada,
that
sovereign is Charles III of England, not the Legislative
Assembly as we
are led to
believe. It is a form of rule which not only carried out broad
genocide
of the Indigenous Peoples in the past in order to steal their
territories and make them subject peoples but continues to do so
in the
present as well. And lest we forget, it is a form of rule
imposed on
Quebec through the
suppression of its striving for a republican form of rule. The
heroic
and ongoing resistance to this attempt to wipe out members of
the
polity as peoples striving for empowerment is the only thing
standing
between their survival as peoples and their extinction. This
will not
change if we have gender
parity because the system of rule does not include the citizenry
in the
decision-making power unless they cooperate with the form of
rule
designed to disempower them..
The British monarchy was and continues to be enriched by the brutal enslavement and subjugation of people yet Quebeckers and Canadians are called on to be loyal to the King and the system of governance which carries his name because the rendering of history declares that whatever crimes were committed were committed by the British empire in the past, and we are ridiculous if we do not let bygones be bygones. The fact that the crimes are committed in the present in the form of the perpetuation of the constitutional order which permitted their commission in the first place, and today glorifies them, is not up for discussion. The work for democratic renewal is not to touch that subject. In this way, the outlook which perpetuates the constitutional rule is designed to convert everyone into "loyal subjects" of a foreign monarch today and everything that entails where the supreme decision-making power lies is to be kept hidden.
Anyone who does not see that this is germane to the system of elections cannot be taken seriously in the strict sense of the word. The fact remains that the system of elections is designed to get the people to cast a ballot to authorize others to represent them. They hand over their name to another without exercising any control over the agenda orienting that person to speak and act. The person must be true to the system of rule and the decisions taken to perpetuate it. That is the raison d'état. Once the people have no say over the modus operandi of those who take decisions and the cartel party system which operates to maintain it, the rendering of the facts themselves is neither serious nor helpful. It is the fruit of a process of thought given rise to more than 400 years ago following the English Civil War. It imbues the brains of successive generations with nonsense.
The constitutional arrangements condemn us to remain within that realm of thought. The presumptions are to be successfully digested since Confederation imposed a constitution adopted by the Imperial Parliament in 1867 which was patriated holus-bolus in 1982, with the addition of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and an amending formula. None of the foundational constitutional arrangements are ever discussed and nor is the reasoning behind the system of representation called a representative democracy. History lessons describe them but never discuss them. They were never adopted by the people. Quebec, said to be a founding nation of Canada, is not even a signatory to the 1982 Constitution.
On this basis, the Victorian thought material persists and erases the memory of the people, the actual experience of the people is to be forgotten, relegated to oblivion. We are supposed to accept the taboo on discussion and the limitations imposed by the conception of rights and freedoms given rise to by a civil society based on the Victorian ideals of duty, order and civilization.
The current status of Canada as a constitutional monarchy, with a foreign monarch as head of state to boot, is a national humiliation, an embarrassment but this is ignored by the acceptance of the electoral process said to be representative despite the fact that the system of representation is not of the people but of the monarch. If this is a national humiliation for Canadians it is even less tolerable for Quebeckers for whom it is a national humiliation plus.
All
of this came to the fore after the death of Elizabeth II and the
ascension to power of Charles III. It is to the credit of some
members
of the National Assembly that they have raised the point that
the
system of representation as it stands can only make sense for
the
people if loyalty is to
the people, to those who elect the members, and not to a foreign
monarch. This in itself poses problems worth discussing. For
example,
if we say "those who elect them," we are forgetting all those
who, in
the same constituency, did not vote for these members. Some
didn't vote
at all. But by the
magic of the first-past-the-post system, the elected
representative is
proclaimed to represent all voters. While many members have
shamelessly
insisted that this is merely symbolic and unimportant, it is in
fact a
very important aspect. The rules decreed that those who refuse
to swear
allegiance to
the foreign monarch, and a British one no less, could not be
seated in
the National Assembly. This had the makings of a political
crisis seen
to be undesirable since all those who elected these members
would
thereby stand without representation, to say nothing about the
perception that a government
calling itself nationalist was willing to reconcile itself to
swearing
allegiance to a foreign monarch. While some calling themselves
the
popular representatives of Quebeckers to their eternal shame
were
willing to negotiate a deal so long as they would not lose their
seats
in the National Assembly,
in the end a consensus was reached with all members of the
Assembly to
make swearing allegiance to the foreign King optional in
exchange for
swearing loyalty to the people. In this way, the entire issue of
who
the representative democracy represents and the role of
elections in
maintaining this
status quo was swept under the rug.
Now we come full circle and the Chief Electoral Officer is, in our opinion, rightly concerned that the people of Quebec are increasingly unhappy with the system of representation. However, instead of going to the heart of the matter and differentiating what is pertinent and what is not, he is going down the rabbit hole of identity politics. This is not only totally divisive but also diverts from the fact that when speaking about membership in a polity, the basic unit is the citizen and not based on any consideration other than that. The PMLQ believes that talking about gender parity in this context, and opening the door to penalties for parties that don't respect it, is a disservice to those who want to modernize the electoral process.
At the very least, the need for discussion on what constitutes representation and what constitutes representativity, and how the electoral system is construed to have neither when it comes to the people, should be discussed.
A fictional persona is presented to us as being represented by our head of state, Charles III. This fictional persona is said to embody the values which unify the nation. How can values which we do not espouse unify the nation? It is a ridiculous presumption we are supposed to accept because we are supposed to accept that there is nothing we can do about it. We are powerless. The aim of erecting this fictional person of state is to hide the actual relations between humans and humans and humans and nature and what they reveal, which is the need to empower the people. Today, the call of history is to complete the democratic revolution by making sure constitutional arrangements vest the supreme power in the people, not in the narrow private interests which rule over the society for private gain. An electoral system which guarantees power is vested in the people is required. Changes to the electoral law, far from reinforcing an autocracy, must at the very least take a step in this direction.
Any changes to the electoral law which do not take into account who the democracy serves, who decides and the system of elections to make it so are going to deepen the crisis of legitimacy and credibility in which the electoral law is mired, not rescue it. The PMLQ believes that it is unwise to proceed with amendments to the Election Act without taking this fundamental reality into account, and that the Chief Electoral Officer should not proceed with his proposals.
This article was published in
Volume 54
Number 38 - June 2024
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS54388.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca