Article published in the Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 2000
Some libertarians think that we must be a nation of statist idiots to elect a Liberal majority government. 30,750,087 statist idiots? I want to take strong exception to such statements. Consider who is “we.”
Some 66% of Canadian residents were registered to vote, the rest being too young, or non-citizens, or absent from the permanent voters’ list for other reasons. Of the registered voters, only 63% did cast a ballot. Of these, 41% voted for the Liberals, i.e., 5,223,339 persons. Thus, 26% of registered voters gave (or sold, in return for future tax-financed consideration) their votes to the Liberals. In other words, 17% of the Canadian population elected the government – make it 20% if you don’t want to count children. Out of five persons you meet in the street, only one voted for the Liberals.
Why can a minority of 20% impose its will on the rest of us? Compare with how other minorities are treated – for example, smokers who make up 23% of the Canadian population. The smoking minority cannot force the majority to smoke. They even cannot forbid restaurants and other shops to discriminate against themselves. Actually, the apartheid works the other way: smokers are prohibited by law from patronizing “smokers only” restaurants (or flights, or businesses, etc.). Why is a small minority – the Liberal gang – given the power to coercively impose its preferences on everybody else, while smokers – a larger minority – are forbidden to peacefully express theirs? Why are 20% allowed to dictate to 80% how to live their lives, but 23% cannot decide for themselves what they will consume?
Obviously, this kind of democracy does not make sense. Alexis de Tocqueville called it “tyranny of the majority”; as we just saw, he was pretty generous. Bertrand de Jouvenel talked about “totalitarian democracy,” which is closer to the mark. The point is that no political system can solve disagreement on fundamental values by leaving the decision to 50% plus one, let alone to 20%, of the population – except by force. Democracy is a workable system to run small governments; not to decide what every individual will do with his own life. The more is left to individuals to decide for themselves, the less conflictual politics is, and the better democracy works.
In more than half of the 16 federal elections from 1896 to 1957, the winning party obtained less than 50% of the votes. In many cases, the runner-up party had received higher electoral support. In 1925, for example, the Liberals won with 40% of the popular vote, while the Conservatives lost with 46%. This did not really matter because people agreed on a small number of basic values, and left the rest to individual choices. Perhaps Canada was not Paradise on earth, but the political system was workable and, at least in time of peace, individual lives were not the property of the majority, or the minority, in power.
Today, everything that individuals value is up for grabs at the polls. Your children’s education, the way you will be treated if you are ill, your retirement, whether you can have a gun in your bedroom, whether you may drive a motor boat, what kind of herb you consume, whether your culture will be subsidized or attacked – all this, and much more, is decided by somebody else at the voting booth (provided the politicians or the bureaucrats don’t change the agenda). Some gang determines “our values as a society” (to quote the Liberal platform’s pidgin collectivism), that is, which lifestyle to impose on others. Elections pitch the old against the young, the cities against the country, the West against the East, the establishment against the entrepreneurs, the religious against the secular, etc.
In this political war of all against all, there is an paradox: the ordinary people’s interest in politics does not grow as politics becomes more encompassing and the state more powerful. Since 1896, voter turnout has not increased in Canada; actually, the last decades show a downward trend. Until the early 60s, average voter turnout was 75%. The proportion was 70% in 1993, 67% in 1997 and, according to preliminary results, 63% in 2000 (although this number may be artificially low due to the permanent voters’ list). But the paradox is only apparent: the more conflictual politics become, the less implicated citizens feel.
It is thus only a tiny nation of 5,223,339 statist idiots who elected Jean Chrétien III. Those who don’t agree with the “statist idiot” characterization may change their minds if they actually read the Liberal platform with its collectivist naïveté, its Parti-Québécois brand of national-statism, its condescending paternalism, its inflated, hilarious style. As they say in chat rooms, “LOL, ROTF” (laughing out loud, rolling on the floor).
This gang made of 20% of the population should leave us alone. Let them pick their own pockets, and make, and enforce, laws for themselves. Tolerance is a Canadian virtue, and we and shall let them live as they want.