Notes for comments at Popular Defiance Plenary – World Affairs Conference, Upper Canada College,  February 5, 2019

I am very happy to speak today on the topic of political engagement and social media. I especially enjoy participating in the Popular Defiance plenary. It has the subversive feel of Harry Potter and Dumbledore’s Army about it.

As I look back on my own rather eclectic history of political engagement, the most exciting and fulfilling experiences involved anti-establishment campaigns. Today, the pre-Internet, pre-social media era I started out in seems so antiquated, so peculiar. Linking up then was really hard work.  It took endless hours of making telephone calls and photocopying materials, endless faxing and snail-mailing. Things that took hours to accomplish then, now take only minutes or even seconds.

Social media today is a very positive development in the political landscape. Important issues can get traction, and many more voices can be heard much faster and more effectively.  I think most recently of the #MeToo campaign and so many others.

The vastly enlarged civic space makes it well worth the time and effort to correct negative impacts of social media’s heightened connectivity, and to design effective mechanisms to filter out the bigotry, misogyny, dis- and misinformation; and contain the just plain trivial.

What I will focus on today is how to use social media more effectively to strengthen our democratic institutions and practices, and ensure that it serves the broader purpose of supporting a thoughtful, more-informed citizenry.

Why is this important?

I believe it is accurate to say we are facing a crisis of representative democracy.

Economic and social insecurity has intensified among Canadians. We were promised that globalization would bring prosperity and good jobs for all. Instead many of us are still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis.  The rapid expansion of the gig economy has produced only precarious jobs, and the benefits of economic growth flow more and more to those with higher incomes.

Most Canadians have lost confidence in our governments both to build a fair and prosperous society, and to act in a fiscally sustainable way.  We see only a widening gap between ordinary citizens and the increasingly wealthy.

The bond of trust between ordinary citizens and our elected representatives is broken. The many Canadians who feel left out and left behind are now so skeptical of our politicians that they do not believe anything that political leaders promise.

Our political parties used to play the primary role of mobilizing citizens and constructively guiding public policy agendas. Now they operate sham grassroots organizations, involving at most a mere 2% of the population, serving only as election machines for the leaders and their entourages.

Party leaders tightly control everything: the nomination of the candidates you vote for, the election policy platforms you are presented with, and, if elected to power, the legislative program.

This centralized control does not translate into the bold government action we desperately need to address our economic and social anxieties. Instead, the government’s focus on the four-year re-election cycle leaves no room for long-term thinking and goals.

For example, it is not in the interest of political parties seeking reelection to  implement policies designed to break down the debilitating top-down party control and encourage more collaboration across partisan divides in the legislature, however essential this is. That’s why the majority Trudeau government has rejected electoral reforms that would introduce some form of proportional representation; parliamentary reforms to allow more free votes and eliminate omnibus bills; and other reforms to place party nomination races and party memberships under Elections Canada oversight.

Debate in the legislature is methodically controlled over so-called wedge issues – like carbon pricing or immigration – to attract the short-term attention of voters. MPs dutifully recite prepared talking points. Political parties scrape your personal data off Facebook and Twitter to design micro-targeted messaging, while conveniently exempting their outreach operations from oversight by the Privacy Commissioner.

Little or no attempt is made to implement bold policies that would make a noticeable difference to struggling Canadians.  So, we have to settle, at the federal level for example, for a limited increase to the Canada Child Benefit here, a slight enhancement to the Canada Pension Plan there, and some tinkering of our convoluted tax system.

When there is a majority government, the opposition can do nothing to force change, and there is minimal civic space in which citizens can constructively engage governments with policy-makers. In Ontario, for example, it is already all too clear that any lobbying to change Doug Ford’s plans to cancel the minimum wage increase is futile. And this sense of citizen frustration is compounded by the chaotic dysfunction that exists among different levels of government – federal, provincial, municipal, Indigenous – which produces paralysis instead of the crucial harmonization needed for effective public policy.   

Elections involving a seriously disillusioned electorate produce wild swings from one extreme policy agenda to another. In Ontario that dramatic shift was from Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government to Doug Ford’s Conservatives elected in 2018 on a hard-right platform. A shift where we took one step forward experimenting with a basic minimum income program, then two steps back with the termination of both the experiment and the scheduled increase in the minimum wage. A similar shift may occur at the federal level in the fall.

 What can be done?

Can we restore public confidence in our elected representatives and ensure more responsive and responsible government?  Can we expand the open civic space for citizens to interact with our governments with  more collaboration and consensus-building, and less polarization, around long-term projects and goals?

I believe strongly that the majority of Canadians generally accept that government’s role is to enable all citizens to fully enjoy equality and our rights and freedoms, and to provide the basics of citizenship – law and order, public education, healthcare, clean air, clean water, housing, our parks, etc. We believe government should help build a resilient social economy so all Canadians can meet the real challenges we all face on a daily basis: finding and keeping a decent job with decent pay, raising children in a safe and clean environment, caring for elderly parents and disabled relatives, and ensuring enough food is on the table. At the same time, we also believe that governments must raise enough revenues through various types of  taxation to adequately fund our collective responsibilities. And raising this revenue must be done fairly, openly, and efficiently and once and for all ensure that the wealthy pay their fair share to ensure fiscal sustainability.

To accomplish all this, however, requires governments that are more collaborative, and elected representatives who can carry through on big ideas and bold policies.

 This is where citizen action – popular defiance – and social media comes in.

To continue my earlier Harry Potter metaphor, we need citizen action to get us off the sidelines and establish “constant vigilance” as we navigate some very difficult times ahead.  This, you will recognize of course, is not a solemn quote from Thomas Jefferson or the like, but rather a quote from Alastor Moody, the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Volume 4).

 If you look around, you will see a vibrant world of articulate civil society advocates and activists. There is no lack of citizens collaborating on the ground, outside political parties, to promote leveling the playing field for ordinary citizens and their families. Their activities are varied – from helping Canadians directly with support or legal advice to initiating legal action, challenging government laws or regulations, or raising awareness of underserved communities.

Civil society groups are fighting for a wide range of policy initiatives at local and national levels – an annual basic income, tax reform, public education, childcare, post-secondary education, employment training, healthcare, pharmacare, infrastructure, public transportation, social housing, electoral reform, climate action and sustainable development. These are the reforms that will better prepare us for our real world of technological disruption, deepening globalization, climate change, and nuclear proliferation.

We must encourage these innovative civil society organizations to network with each other much more, and combine their efforts, rather than operate largely out of separate silos. If their collective impact were enhanced, governments might then be persuaded to experiment with bold initiatives, rather than continuing to allow social and economic injustices to persist.

This is what my colleagues and I did when we formed a multi-partisan umbrella organization to oppose the controversial constitutional amendment proposals called the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords in the period from 1987 to 1992. This approach was necessary because all the mainstream political parties, both federal and provincial, supported the accords and provided no democratic outlet for the widespread public concern. (This, by the way, is a serious flaw in our Constitution: that amendments require only legislative approval, not a citizen-based vote).

We carefully built up a broad-based resilient network of diverse civil society groups and individuals across Canada that opposed the accords for different reasons specific to their organization. What united all of us was our shared concern to prevent a serious weakening of the federal government and the Charter, and our shared commitment to building a Canada much bigger than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, in a consultative referendum called in 1992, Canadians turned out in very high numbers to definitively reject the constitutional changes.

Today, at a minimum, I can see common ground among four groups of advocates:

1. Supporters of a basic minimum income that could simplify the confusing and conflicting federal-provincial-municipal income support programs.
2. Tax reformers who want fiscal sustainability and an overhaul of our unfair exemption-riddled income tax system, as well as a better balance between income tax and other taxes such as corporate, financial transactions or consumption.
3. Workers who want to ensure automation and artificial intelligence (AI) is deployed in such a way as to increase, not decrease, opportunities for meaningful work.
4. Climate and environmental activists who support sustainable development.

The challenge is for these organizations to form, well before an election, a coherent network for concrete collaboration, not just for digital communications, between popular movements/organizations.  The network would agree on a joint program, or demands, to present to candidates of all parties in the election. The novel element in this process is that the nominated candidates would not only agree  to support particular policy initiatives, but also agree to actively and independently support certain institutional reforms necessary to ensure real legislative progress. This means these candidates, if elected, would commit to work across partisan lines with like-minded colleagues to find common ground, to broaden the civic space for engaging with ordinary citizens (including citizen ballot initiatives that are working well in California), to insist on voting independently in the legislature, and to support electoral reform involving a  proportional voting system.

Even if only a few such candidates were elected initially, the emergence of an independent multi-partisan democratic caucus could make a real difference and possibly force through crucial reforms. In particular, the introduction of proportional representation would eventually lead to more minority governments which, as we see today in British Columbia and New Brunswick, force more elected representatives to work together across party lines.

In general, such governments ultimately prove more productive and responsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens.   Minority governments clip the wings of party leaders, preventing petty actions like Doug Ford’s cancellation of the minimum wage increase. But most importantly, it will ensure that future governments take more care than Kathleen Wynne did to build the necessary consensus and enact the necessary safeguards required to preserve what is arguably a good long-term policy on minimum wage.

I hold out a lot of hope that all of you here, together with the older Millennials, can turn around the environmental and financial mess that the Baby Boomers and Generation X are leaving behind. You are now officially labelled Generation Z (the Zers), born after 1997, and constitute 17% of the population. One study says that, like Millennials, you are “connected, open and optimistic”. You are also extremely diverse – ranging from values to ethnic backgrounds – and pragmatic, having watched your parents struggle through economic decline. No study has yet tried to predict whether you are prepared to vote, but I sincerely hope you do vote in very high numbers.

Most importantly for this discussion, you are masters of social media at a time when the participatory power of social networks and our unfettered access to data is transforming politics – and democracy itself.  Political influence is shifting away from brokers and elites, and back to the people.  Which is, generally, a good thing.

But remember that to have an enduring impact requires more than merely a digital network.  It requires coordinated, on-the-ground operations and constant vigilance over the use of social media to encourage online participation in thoughtful forums, rather than the instant, reactive kind of exchange that shuts down and/or intimidates constructive civic engagement.

 Social media can serve as an extraordinarily efficient communications and information-sharing tool. And digital networks are very effective at bringing together a diverse range of unconnected citizens. But we are now all too aware of the danger inherent in our instant access to unlimited amounts of information. It often amplifies our sense of insecurity and skepticism, and encourages  disinformation and disrespectful discourse. Some frustrated citizens even drift over to otherwise marginal anarchists, far-right extremists and neo-Nazis.

Digital networks on their own are not effective at translating superficial, fleeting emotional attachments expressed through a “like”, a “comment”, and a “retweet”, into constructive action, or building informed consensus and encouraging collaboration across the divides of opinion. Too often the most thoughtful voices are lost in the noise or drowned in triviality. If we cannot find a way to use our networks to communicate meaningfully across these divides, social media risks simply intensifying the existing fault lines in our society.

When the grass-roots movement in France, involving citizens wearing yellow vests (that they are required to carry in their vehicles), first emerged, it was not connected to one particular trade union, political party or any other national organization. Many assumed the Internet was the way to explain the emergence and diffusion of the protests, that Facebook had somehow caused the protest movement itself.

What observers actually discovered was that the transmission of information via social media was simply an enabler for a variety of organizations, like traditional unions of teachers and transport workers, to join forces around their shared concerns, while reinvigorating their individual organizations’ platforms. This amplified both their collective and individual impacts significantly.

So, behind all the hashtags and virtue signaling in our digital world, it is still the people on the ground and their existing networks that drive social movements. The original yellow vests protests that began at the traffic circles in small communities were organized by people already connected and living together in the same small town. It was an organic popular movement focused on improving the lives of the working class.

Protesting citizens were not opposed to government intervention or even more taxation.  But they were outraged that their decision-makers could increase diesel taxes at a time when people were struggling with fewer and fewer jobs, and with wages that have not kept up with the cost of living. Eventually, the protests had an impact, and President Emmanuel Macron postponed the tax increase and took some action to supplement workers’ incomes.

But, while the original yellow vest movement demonstrated the value of civil society groups collaborating to enhance their collective impact, the very breadth and force of social media that enabled that collaboration also facilitated its hijacking by extremists more interested in disruption and shutting down the opportunities for broader civic engagement.

The important lesson from the protests in France is that organizing modern social movements for change still involves effective on-the-ground networks, while integrating digital capabilities carefully into traditional organization and civic infrastructure.  Popular movements still drive the internet, not the other way around. But there are still persistent inequalities in access to digital activism that reflect broader structural inequities such as class, race, gender etc. And constant vigilance is required to prevent extremist exclusionary elements from infiltrating and subverting the movement’s goals and principles.

As we turn increasingly to social media to help expand our civic space and organize politically, popular platforms like Facebook and Google merit public scrutiny and oversight. Facebook and Google have coercive economic power. They effectively control half of all digital advertising revenue. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer and use discriminatory pricing to keep more of the benefits they would otherwise have to share with consumers. They have achieved monopoly power while also competing against one another.  They can swallow up competitors and use their enormous resources to invade each other’s territories.

In addition, the Facebook and Google business models are built around surveillance. Most of their money is made by creating a more and more detailed profile of your behaviors and preferences and selling that information to advertisers. And the search results and social feeds made by advertising companies are strongly incentivized to push you toward information silos or apps that show you more ads from those platforms.

Companies this dominant – near-monopoly distributors of information – will rarely take adequate action on their own to protect society against the consequences of their actions, especially with respect to privacy and data protection laws. When so many of us are only too happy to give away our most valuable asset – our personal data – in exchange for a free email service or a cute cat video, governments must get involved to protect the public interest.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari calls this meta-challenge “avoiding a digital dictatorship”.  We must regulate the ownership of data to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite – whether it’s Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.  So, national government oversight and stringent regulations are needed to preserve competition, privacy, innovation, and fair and open access to data. Unless we move in this direction, we are abdicating crucially important civil decision-making to large, private, non-governmental corporations instead of to fully accountable governments or governmental organizations.

Any legislative and regulatory oversight relating to competition, privacy and election laws, must apply both to private companies  as well as our political parties. Political parties are in the business of learning as much about you as possible and influencing your choices at election time, yet have hitherto refused to submit to our privacy legislation and the pertinent regulation and oversight. This is unacceptable and must be corrected.  Government must take steps to strengthen media literacy and a truly informed democratic citizenry. All citizens need expanded ethics training around more and more activities. And substantial investment is required for teaching civic and media literacy every year, and at every level in schools, not just for one term in high school.

One final observation: if there was any doubt about the need for serious oversight to hold social media platforms accountable for the civic impact of their activities, Facebook’s record in the past year or so should put that to rest.  Facebook continues to be used as a valuable tool by authoritarians everywhere to control and suppress civic opposition, most recently in Brazil by the new president, Jair Bolsonaro. Mark Zuckerberg only acknowledged after the fact that his routine expansion of Facebook into Myanmar had been manipulated by the military authorities to catalyze the Rohingya genocide. Warnings were issued by activists on the ground, but there was no one listening at Facebook headquarters and no accountability for the negative impact. A similar situation arose in India when inflammatory messages on Facebook’s WhatsApp whipped up sectarian violence, resulting in many deaths. (Facebook has since tweaked the usage rules for WhatsApp).

Clearly, the questions of who controls social media and data, as well as who controls our political parties and democratic processes, present urgent challenges here in Canada and elsewhere. Addressing these challenges will determine whether we succeed or fail to build a more resilient democracy, and whether we fulfill our aspirations to build a Canada of vast opportunity with a vibrant, globally connected population and extraordinary and expanding human energy and potential.