Reality show

With the serial TV drama that is the American presidential election —now joined by major blockbuster disaster flick, Meltdown On Wall Street—monopolizing the airwaves, most Americans are unaware of our political smack-down to the north. That’s hardly surprising. How can puffin poop and skinny-dipping N-Dippers compare?

There’s the ongoing saga of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who said recently she thought mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went bust because they’d gotten “too big and too expensive to taxpayers.” (Neither entity receives public funds directly. But, hey—details.) There’s Senator John McCain, proposing to fix the Wall Street mess by calling for the Bush Administration to fire the chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox—an appointee of his own party. And of course, there’s Senator Barack Obama, No-Drama-Obama, fighting off accusations last week that he called Sarah Palin a pig.

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The whole adds up to a circus so colourful, discussion of issues gets relegated to a sideshow. But that is bad news for everybody concerned, given this country, and the rest of the world, have to deal with the fallout of the American electorate’s decisions.

Meanwhile, up in Canada, despite the best efforts of sweater consultants and language trainers, both principal party leaders are about as engaging as a government communiqué. Two middle-age white men wearing ill-fitting suits duke it out over whether to hike green taxes now, energy prices be damned (the Liberals) or duck the issue in favour of putting billions of taxpayer money towards burying our collective carbon problem later (the Conservatives).

On the plus side, there is a clear choice, which is a welcome change from the Liberal-dominated elections throughout the ’90s. So go ahead, pick a position on your preferred opaque issue du jour—and cue the usual abysmal levels of voter engagement.

Marshall Ganz teaches public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. A political junkie and sometime-consultant for the Obama campaign—though definitely not a campaign spokesman—he has also spent a considerable amount of time in Canada. Ganz has an interesting take on why American politics so often revolve around personalities, whereas Canadians focus more on issues. It’s called the way things are set up, or, in more professional parlance, the electoral process.

“Americans have the least democratic system for changing a national chief executive of anyone in the developed world,” explains Ganz. “It’s anything but majorities speaking. Consider, if you live in California, your vote counts one-fourth of what it counts in Iowa. The states with the largest populations often miss out. It’s just the flakiest and most capricious and most random way of selecting a chief executive of any system I know.”

Ganz believes the party caucuses, local organizations that select the delegates who will support candidates at the national conventions, are the closest the United States gets to issues-driven democracy. “The role of the caucuses is wonderfully democratic, in that it is a mechanism that rewards collective action,” he says. “It rewards the power of numbers. But the problem is that there normally are so few people participating that that capacity is wasted.”

The primary system, by contrast, is a drain on democracy, in Ganz’s view. That’s because participation is so costly—Hillary Clinton is still digging out of the US$22.5 million in debt her campaign reportedly ran up during the primary season. And it’s not just the primaries that are expensive for candidates—Senator Barack Obama spent US$56 million to Senator John McCain’s US$47.6 million in August alone, according to figures in campaign finance filings made to the Federal Elections Commission, and released this past weekend.

What this creates, argues Ganz, is a “thin” form of democracy. Voters make decisions in response to massive onslaughts of advertising, rather than through an informed understanding of the issues. And ad-driven politics, of course, showcase a candidate’s personality, because it’s almost impossible to get into discussions of policy in a ten-second sound bite.

By contrast, the Canadian system, being so party-focused, is “much more about building a collective movement towards a collective goal around particular issues,” Ganz says. Unfortunately, such an emphasis on collective decision-making tends to produce balkanized results, such as the recent string of minority governments.

The short-term nature of Canadian elections, however, also helps keep campaign costs down. By October 15, Canada’s national debate over the way forward will be over, whereas the Americans will have another two weeks of Election 2008. Tight, focused elections mean it is easier for candidates who lack gigantic war chests to make a run at high office—and actually have a realistic hope of getting elected.

Clearly, there are a few things Canadian elections do have over those of our razzle-dazzle neighbours to the south. And with politicians this boring, you’re likely to hear more about how each candidate actually plans to govern the country, than about, say, who preaches at Stephen Harper’s church. While that may make for bad television, it’s a good thing for the quality of debate.

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