Canada
Canada is a stable, high-performing democracy. After undergoing a major constitutional revision in 1982, Canada has had very strong constitutional protections of fundamental rights, and an embrace of multiculturalism as one of the guiding values of its legal and political systems. The country is also one of the world’s most advanced economies and has been a member of the Group of Seven (G7) since 1976. However, in the last five years there have been declines – albeit from a high starting point – in a number of indicators of the Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoDI), most notably Effective Parliament and Predictable Enforcement.
Canada’s embrace of multiculturalism is one of its national strengths, but its centrality also highlights some of the enduring fault lines in the country’s political system. The nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries were partly characterized by successive governments’ failure to address the negative treatment of Indigenous peoples at the federal and provincial levels. This has included violations of First Nations’ treaty rights, exclusion from political participation, and even acts that may amount to cultural genocide. A further lasting division from the colonial period is between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians. The Francophone province of Quebec has been recognized as a nation within Canada (a declaration without legal effects), but the appropriate legal measures to accommodate this difference have never been settled. A third cleavage in Canadian politics is between the western provinces (in particular the Prairie provinces) and the centre of the country. This has become even more politically salient in recent years as the federal government has sought to address climate change, while the western province of Alberta’s economy relies to a large extent on the extraction and sale of fossil fuels. These divisions are likely to continue to drive Canadian politics in the coming years.
The fundamentals of democracy are quite sound in Canada. Nonetheless, the trends in Effective Parliament and Predictable Enforcement should be tracked in the coming years. These declines reflect tensions in Canada’s political institutions, highlighted by controversies in recent years around the independence of the Attorney General from political pressure and apparent political vetting of judicial candidates. The decline in Predictable Enforcement alongside a slight drop in Access to Justice reflects an increasing backlog of criminal and civil cases in provincial and federal courts.
Despite the declines, minority governments have been increasingly common in the Canadian parliament (five of the last ten parliaments), and generally offer opposition parties more power to hold the government to account. Additionally, the increased public attention to the judicial appointments process and the efficiency of the justice system provides an opportunity for reform in this important area of rights protection.
Monthly Event Reports
June 2023 | Online News Act becomes law
On 22 June the Online News Act became law. According to the government, the Act aims to ensure a fair distribution of revenue between news sites and social media and online platforms (the latter would have to pay news organizations when their content is accessed on online platforms). As explained by the government, journalism lost major revenue streams from advertising to online platforms. It further claims that the Act will also facilitate the relationship between news media outlets and social media platforms, as well as strengthen media freedom. Because of the financial implications to their operations, Meta and Google have announced that they will cease providing Canadian news content on their websites. This reaction has been criticised, given the proportion of Canadians who access news through social media (social media comes in third after the internet and television). In response, the Canadian government said it would stop advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
May 2023 | Parliament calls on rapporteur on foreign interference to resign
On 31 May, by 174 to 150 votes, Parliament voted to call on David Johnston, the rapporteur on foreign interference appointed by Prime Minister Trudeau’s government, to resign, given the opposition’s claims that he was not impartial after he recommended a series of hearings instead of a public inquiry on the allegations of foreign meddling in elections. According to Johnston, a public inquiry is not possible due to the classified nature of the information that led him to conclude that foreign officials attempted to interfere with candidates. Instead, he suggested hearings on the way in which the intelligence agencies communicated this information to other government institutions. The lawmakers’ motion, which is non-binding, was presented after criticism of the rapporteur’s alleged partiality, given reports of his personal ties to Prime Minister Trudeau. While Johnston initially rejected the call to resign and insisted he has not had a personal relationship with the PM in decades, in early June he presented a letter of resignation, in which he stated he would leave the role of rapporteur by the end of the month.
March 2023 | Court approves settlement with First Nations over residential school harms
A settlement reached in January between the Canadian government and representatives of First Nations whose members were day scholars at residential schools between the mid-1800s and up until the 1990s, has been approved by a Federal Court. The settlement approved a 2.8 billion Canadian dollars payment to an Indigenous-led association that will manage the funds to implement measures to reverse loss of heritage, language and culture. The settlement is intended to address the collective harm suffered by day scholars who attended residential schools. It does not include claims over the death and disappearance of Indigenous children forced to attend these schools.
February 2023 | Report finds that use of emergency powers regarding ‘Freedom Convoy’ was justified
Pursuant to the Emergencies Act of 1988, the Government of Canada established the Public Order Emergency Commission to carry out an inquiry into the use of emergency powers to end the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests of February 2022. The inquiry concluded that the use of emergency powers by Prime Minister Trudeau’s government was justified, as the high threshold needed to invoke the Emergencies Act had been met. The Commission’s report was presented on 17 February, and in it, Justice Paul Rouleau, Head of the Commission, rejected claims that protests were peaceful. He was nevertheless also critical of some of the measures taken by the government, such as the freezing of accounts of those participating in the convoy and the absence of a delisting mechanism for frozen accounts. The report was also critical of the lack of engagement of the Ontario government and Prime Minister Trudeau’s comments characterizing the convoy protesters as a fringe minority. The report includes recommendations to federal, province and city authorities, and was submitted to the House of Commons.
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GSoD Indices Data 2013-2022
Basic Information
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Global State of Democracy Indices
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Factors of Democratic Performance Over Time
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