Bettering Canadian Democracy

Over a relatively short period of time, Canada has become recognized worldwide as an exemplary democratic society that highly values the accommodation of diversity, the protection of rights and freedoms, and the continuous enhancement of the welfare of its citizens.

 

In honour of Canada’s 150th birthday and its many inspiring democratic achievements, in 2017 we set out to broadly explore the state of democracy in Canada. This was an especially timely moment in our history to take stock of how far we had come as a democracy and to “think out loud” about how our system of politics might progress and evolve in the future.

 

In an attempt to fuel our proposed thematic exploration, and in addition to a series of workshops and events that we hosted as part of the Workshops on Social Science Research (WSSR), we put together a special publication project, to be published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2023-24, which includes brief written notes or comments from most of the guest speakers at our special series, as well as other prominent political leaders and experts on politics, democracy, and Canadian society. From a variety of unique vantage points, each of these contributions tackled the very important task of “Assessing the State of Canadian Democracy”.

 

More particularly, the precise questions that we asked our contributors to focus on and react to in their individual chapters were as follows:

1. What, from your perspective, is the state of Canadian democracy?

2. Why do you think the way you do?

3. And, what do you think this implies?