Item 1: Back in February of this year Donald Trump, just getting comfortable in the White House again, began proposing that Canada should become the United States' 51st state. At the time, Canadians were preparing for a federal election where the Conservatives were set to form a majority government [1] displacing Justin Trudeau, whom they had vilified relentlessly for years, in the Prime Minister's office. They were led by one Pierre Poilievre, Canada's answer to Donald Trump.

Two things happened as a consequence of Trump's musings. First, Trudeau was rapidly replaced by Mark Carney, a Canadian expat famous for steering the Bank of England through Brexit, who went on to lead the Liberal Party to victory in the general election in April. Poilievre even lost his seat.

But it was another even more remarkable thing that really caught my attention: Canadians decided to boycott American products. Nobody told us to, we just did. It was spontaneous and unorganized. We started looking at the labels in the supermarket. We stopped going to the States. Stores reacted by putting little Canadian flags on labels for local products and big Canadian flags at the entrance. McDonald's Canada pretended to be a Canadian company.

Item 2: The Canadian province of Alberta where I live had the misfortune of discovering that it sat on an ocean of oil in 1947. For decades the oil industry grew, not only showering riches on remote shareholders, but creating well paid—at times ridiculously well paid—employment and derivative business opportunities in Alberta. Alongside the oil industry the conservative party established itself as its political champion, and it also went uncontested for decades. This made Alberta a bit of a conservative island in Canada, which suited the conservative politicians and voters just fine. They cultivated an image of rugged individualism, personified by the cowboy, symbolizing a previous era when another industry, cattle ranching, made a few people in Alberta filthy rich. A dispute in the 80s between the government of Alberta led by Conservative Peter Lougheed and the government of Canada led by Liberal Pierre Trudeau, about which corporations would get to extract the oil (the big multinationals won) led to a feeling among those rugged individualists that being in Confederation with the rest of Canada was a bad idea.

The separatists have always been a minority, but you can imagine how they felt when Trump proposed that Alberta should become the 51st. state. The rest of us reacted with horror. When the separatists began talking publicly about organizing a referendum on secession from Canada, one retired politician (a conservative one, but one who would be considered moderate by today's standards) took it upon himself to preempt that by organizing a referendum on the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”.

Which finally brings me to the point I wish to make. To get the chance to have the question posed to voters in Alberta you have to petition the government and get a minimum number of signatures, which for this petition was about 300,000. And that is a very tall order [2].

To my surprise, and to a lot of other people's also, the response from Albertans was huge. Thousands of volunteers enrolled to collect signatures, leastaction and their spouse among them. We sat at locations strategically chosen to intercept as many people as possible, and boy were they enthusiastic. It turned that our neighbours were fervent members of Confederation and were delighted to find each other and talk about it. Who knew.

Again the success of this citizen initiative was entirely due to the spontaneous collective action of ordinary people, our neighbours and friends. And I will emphasize the word spontaneous. Although the phenomenon was triggered by the individual decision of the applicant, and the whole thing was impeccably organized, it would have amounted to nothing had it not stirred something deep within the souls of hundreds of thousands of people that would otherwise have gone undetected.

So spontaneous collective action, although rare, does happen. Why? I think it has to do with identity. In both cases Canadians reacted strongly against an affront to their Canadian identity. You don't mess with people's sense of who they are.

A sense of shared identity brings people together. You just have to sit at a little table with a couple of Canadian flags and a clipboard and perfect strangers will come up to you and talk your ear off.

A shared identity transcends divisions created by politicians. Collective action requires non-partisan issues.

But beware: a shared identity can be a dangerous thing. If I can convince you that you are something, a Canadian, a Christian, a conservative, a rugged individualist, a law-abiding gun owner, your identity can be weaponized. And they know it.

[1] In a parliamentary system, having a majority of seats allows you to pass any legislation you want. [2] In fact, we ended up collecting 456,000.

#Democracy #CollectiveAction

What if the different political parties were represented in Parliament in proportion to the number of votes they got? This is called proportional representation. It implies that everyone's vote has exactly the same weight. This is only fair, which is why it is also called fair voting. Fair Vote Canada is a national organization devoted to promoting the idea of fair voting. They have a lot of information which you may find interesting.

More specifically we can ask how many seats each party would have ended up having if the number of seats was proportional to the number of votes. This is not a difficult calculation, and the result, which I will show you in a moment, is very revealing. There is a subtle little difficulty, which is how do you assign a small integer number of seats in proportion to very large numbers of votes. It can't be done exactly, but there is a way to come as close as possible, called the D'Hondt method. I wrote a little Python notebook to calculate the seat distribution using this method. (Let me know if you would like a copy; my email is in the Contact Me page. It's very easy to adapt to any parliamentary election, just plugging in the relevant numbers). Elections Canada hasn't yet published the numbers, but I found the number of votes each party had on the Global News website, except for the People's Party of Canada which I found on Wikipedia. I haven't included other parties or independents, assuming that their numbers would be too small to alter the results significantly.

So <play drum roll here> here are the results:

A couple of things jump out immediately: The Liberal Party got 17 seats more than they should have, and the NDP got 14 seats fewer than they should have; and the Bloc and the NDP should have got the same number of seats, having got practically the same number of votes, and yet the Bloc got roughly $\pi$ times as many seats as the NDP. Had the NDP had its proportional share of the seats, there would be no question about losing party status.

The comparison between the Bloc and the NDP illustrates perfectly a major flaw with First Past The Post: it is heavily biased towards geographical concentration of votes. The Bloc only runs candidates in Quebec, with about 6.5 million electors, while the NDP competes nationally, with about 37 million electors. Another extreme example is the Green Party. They only won a seat because Elizabeth May is very popular in her own riding, but the rest of their supporters are spread too thinly throughout the country to be able to win a single seat.

OK, you say, what about the previous election in 2021? It's very easy to plug in the numbers into my little program, and the results are even more shocking.

OK, first of all: The LPC got 48 more seats than they should have? I am no fan of the Conservatives, but can you imagine getting more votes than the Liberals and 41 fewer seats?

And then, the NDP. They got nearly two and a half times the number of votes of the Bloc and three quarters the number of seats! At 61 seats for the NDP and 112 for the LPC, the NDP could certainly have demanded a coalition with seats in cabinet, and not a very grudgingly conceded small confidence and supply agreement.

As for the Liberal Party, it is very clear from both elections why Trudeau was willing to pay the political price of promising to end First Past The Post, and then breaking his promise as the parliamentary committee on electoral reform held public hearings and received submissions from all over the country, overwhelmingly in favour of proportional representation. The Liberal Party gains the most from FPTP, and the NDP, their rivals on the progressive end of the political spectrum, loses the most from FPTP. Trudeau's preferred method of instant runoff is not proportional, and in fact produces very similar outcomes to FPTP.

This calculation shows the failings of FPTP from the point of view of the parties. There's another simple calculation we can do that shifts the spotlight onto the voters themselves: let's calculate how many votes it takes to elect an MP for the supporters of the different parties. This simply requires dividing the second column by the third in the tables above. Here's the result (not including the PPC because they didn't win any seats):

The violation of the principle that everyone's vote should be equal is painfully evident. It takes over three times as many voters to elect an NDP MP compared to a Liberal or Conservaitve MP; and it takes nearlly five times as many Green voters to do the same. It's also interesting to note that from the point of view of the voters we don't have a two-party system as we often hear, but a three-party system. The Bloc has been able to buck the natural trend of FPTP to produce just two big parties by only running in their home province of Quebec.

Canadians have been discussing electoral reform and fair voting for a long time. Notably the Law Commission of Canada, an arm's-length commission designed to advise Parliament on law reform, released a report on electoral reform titled “Voting Counts: Electoral Reform for Canada” in 2004, after two years of research. In it they proposed mixed member proportional representation, a system used by, among others, Germany whereby voters get two votes, one for their local representative and one drawing from a party list to top up the number of seats for each party so that they are proportional to the number of votes. This system satisfies both the requirement of proportionality and that of local representation. Stephen Harper shut down the Commission two years later.

It is high time that we abandon the blatantly unfair First Past The Post. We cannot call Canada a democracy until we do.

#Canada #ProportionalRepresentation #FPTP #Voting #Democracy

In July of 2023, Bluesky made an initial offering of shares for \$8 million, which was followed in October of 2024 by a \$15 million offering. Eyebrows were raised when the second share offering was led by a firm called Blockchain Capital, especially because the new CEO, Jay Graeber, is a software engineer coming from a blockchain and cryptocurrency background, having previously worked as a developer for cryptocurrency called Zcash.

And now I learn that a much bigger, secretive deal is in the works now that a significant migration from Twitter has happened, led by a company called Bain Capital:

Who is Bain Capital? It's a private equity firm founded in 1984 by Mitt Romney (former US senator and governor of Massachusets, and the Republican nominee a thousand years ago in 2012) and associates. Private equity firms are notorious for taking over companies not precisely for the benefit of society, but to wring as much money from them as possible whatever the cost to other people, including their customers and employees, and the companies themselves. You remember the buyout and bankruptcy of Toys “R” Us? That was Bain, together with a couple of other predatory investment companies. During the 2012 presidential election campaign, Obama criticized Romney strongly for the practice of Bain companies of shipping jobs overseas.

I am very wary of a social media operation run by crypto and private equity bros. And I am very skeptical about the image that Bluesky has created of itself as some sort of democratic alternative to X. Especially when there is a truly democratic, decentralized alternative in the fediverse.

Discuss...

#Bluesky #Fediverse #Democracy #Corporations #SocialMedia #Enshittification

At the same time, I can't help feeling that the polls have a lot of influence on how Canadians will vote.

I wrote a thread on Mastodon about how this might work. The Conservative Party's messaging consists simply of repeating “Justin Trudeau is a horrible person and he should resign”. This is spread both by conventional media and corporate social media as news and commentary.

Then one day you get a phone call from a polling company asking whether you agree that Justin Trudeau is a horrible person and he should resign”. What are the odds that you will say yes, if you've been exposed to the statement repeatedly?

Polls are viewed as representing the most probable outcome of an election “if it were held today”. But that probability is only conditional. It is the probability that you will vote one way or another given that you've been exposed to a certain propaganda. I am sure that if in a parallel universe where the Conservative Party of Canada has not been hammering the message about Trudeau for years a similar poll was conducted, the result would be quite different.

But there's more. The poll itself has an influence on the election outcome. One reason is what is known as “social proof”. Gil Duran has a great post about this in The Framelab. He writes

People tend to copy what other people do. If something is popular, we tend to trust it more. When many other people buy a product or follow a trend, we tend to assume it’s good. Our brains are wired to look for clues from other people’s choices. It’s a basic human instinct to follow the crowd. “Monkey see, monkey do.”

If you see that a majority of your fellow voters will vote Conservative, you are more likely to do so yourself. Marketers know this very well.

The poll may also have another effect on the outcome of the election: If you are not a Conservative voter, but you are convinced that the Conservatives will win, that makes you less likely to take the trouble to vote. The poll becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I see propaganda as a process, where a certain political message is spread to as many people as possible and then polling is a feedback mechanism that confirms that the message is true. Polling skeptics will scrutinize the methodology and the statistical methods, and I have been one of them, but I believe now that that is missing the point. The polls can be quite accurate in that they reflect popular opinion, and yet be a key component of the propaganda process.

#Democracy #Elections #Statistics #Propaganda

Don't depend on corporations to grant you rights. Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you're on one).

In July of 2023, Bluesky made an initial offering of shares for \$8 million, which was followed in October of 2024 by a \$15 million offering. Eyebrows were raised when the second share offering was led by a firm called Blockchain Capital, especially because the new CEO, Jay Graeber, is a software engineer coming from a blockchain and cryptocurrency background, having previously worked as a developer for cryptocurrency called Zcash.

Naturally investors will seek a return on their investment, so Bluesky will have to find ways of making money. They promise not to do it through advertising, but instead offer subscription services. Right now they offer a way to create a personal domain, and they are also musing about things like charging for higher quality video.

The goal of Bluesky, like any other social media company, is to make money, and as much of it as possible, for those investors and shareholders. The platform for you to share your thoughts with others is not the goal. It's the mechanism.

Cory Doctorow, who has done a lot of thinking about the evolution of tech corporations, which led him to the concept of enshittification, explains why he won't join Bluesky here. Sure, Bluesky is cute and refreshing by comparison to Twitter, but so was Twitter scarcely ten years ago.

The web was not built to be fragmented into walled gardens that are delightfully simple to enter but practically impossible to leave. Quite the opposite, in fact. The web is designed for democracy. We owe it to ourselves to use it in that way.

#Corporations #SocialMedia #Web #Enshittification #Democracy

The story of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people's campaign to remain autonomous is so bizarre to western eyes that one could well question what lessons could possibly be drawn that would be relevant to us. (Oracles falling into a trance? Rebirth? Seriously?) But this story is in the end about issues that are universal: power, equality, autonomy, security. It allows us to see these issues from a completely different direction, and thus perhaps lead to entirely new ideas about our perhaps too familiar western liberal democracies. So humour me please, as I try to draw some conclusions relevant to you and me from this strange story about Tibetans following a beloved monk across the Himalayas by the thousands.

On authority and power

It is clear that the authority of the Dalai Lama—and I am referring here to the centuries old figure, not the 14th Dalai Lama in particular— is never under question. He is respected and loved. People are willing to give up their lives for him. He consults with advisers and ministers, and even oracles, but in the end the decisions are his. That's how the system works, and that's how it's worked forever and will continue to do so.

It might seem strange that such a system does not descend into authoritarianism. But there's a good reason why this doesn't happen. The antidote against authoritarianism is built into the system by ensuring the Dalai Lama truly works for the benefit of the people. That's what happens when you isolate and carefully educate someone from the age of two.

“Democracy”

Compare this with what we understand as democracy today. This is a system born out of popular uprisings against the authority of an absolute monarch: the French Revolution and the American Revolution at the end of the 1700s, and the gradual shift of power from the monarch to parliament that we might call the British Revolution, which includes a period of civil war in the 1600s.

These revolutions in turn inspired similar movements in other countries, against their own monarchies or remote colonial masters, displacing the power of a few into power of the many. Or at least presumably that was the intention. With variations, the resulting system is essentially the same: an elected legislature with the power to make laws, an executive with the power to send bills to the legislature [1], and most importantly to regulate and implement the law, and a judiciary that settles disputes and punishes law breakers. And last but certainly not least, an armed police to enforce the law and keep everyone in line: we must not forget that a police force is an essential component of the system. Without one, it doesn't work.

In such a system, power is delegated to elected representatives [2]. The citizens themselves are reduced to voting for someone every few years. They have zero power.

Electoral democracy is a mechanism for allocating power (hopefully) without bloodshed

What grew out of those violent uprisings against absolute monarchies was a compromise to allocate power by some means that could be deemed to be fair, and hopefully non-violent. This is why there is such horror today of contested elections. It will take Americans a long time to digest the events of January 6, 2021 when the Capitol was stormed by a large and definitely violent mob.

But the process is still intrinsically adversarial and competitive, and winner-takes-all. This is key: the winner is handed near-absolute power; the result is essentially a dictatorship. The only thing that distinguishes electoral democracy from absolute power is term limits: every few years, there is a vote.

Who actually gets the power?

Not the citizens. The citizens have zero power. And anyone who has lived in such a system for a while knows that, with very rare exceptions, the people who get into power as their representatives do not represent the best interests of the community. Rather, they represent specific interests, generally revolving around money.

The battle for power never ends

There is no end to the competition for power. What we call democracy is simply an eternal competition for the minds of the voters, waged with all the marketing techniques crafted by the rich experience of sellers of things, with a prize to be awarded every few years. It is a substitute for the hereditary system of kings, interrupted only by the occasional palace rebellion or bloody popular uprising.

“Democracy” is not a system of government. It is the same ancient competition, just with rules to prevent bloodshed.

So you see my fascination with the politics of Tibet: There is simply no competition for power: No warring political parties, no campaign rhetoric, no false promises, no lies.

However, as we have seen, this is not enough. There is another requirement: the state should be run for the benefit of the citizens, and no one else.

The antidote to authoritarianism

There is a way for the citizens to gain power in a “democracy”, albeit indirectly: they can vote in true representatives who will act according to the best interests of the people. Again, we see this with the traditional role of the Dalai Lama: by careful training from an early age, he is guaranteed to believe only in serving others. By the time the Dalai Lama reaches adulthood he has fully internalized the bodhisattva's vow to live for the benefit of all beings. Including of course his fellow Tibetans.

Very occasionally an electoral democracy produces an Olof Palme or a Jacinda Ardern , but the system soon reverts to its natural state of bitter competition between people not at all driven by a will to serve the community, and protect it from the ambitions of this or that special interest. Jacinda Ardern burns out, Olof Palme is assassinated. Liberal democracy has no mechanism to ensure the people's representatives really represent their best interests.

The challenge

So maybe the Tibetan model is not easily transferable to other societies. But the question still remains whether real democracy, without the quotation marks, can still be achieved. What Tibet teaches us is that we have to

• move beyond the eternal, never resolved, adversarial competition for power, and

• find a mechanism for assigning power to people who are guaranteed to represent the best interests of the community.

I don't have a complete and satisfactory answer to this challenge, although I have a few ideas which I will explore in the future, and maybe you do too. But I am certain of one thing: I am not going to waste my time clinging to the illusion that “democracy” is the only possibility.

#democracy #politics #DalaiLama

[1] In a parliamentary system, the executive is part of the legislature, but the idea is the same.

[2] But not always. In a republic, the executive chooses their own ministers, who are not elected. This is a serious vulnerability in the system, if the ministers are powerful enough.