The Downward Spiral of Canadian Democracy Democratic government in Canada has been declining – at an accelerating rate. The House of Commons is ineffective. The Senate is not accountable and is scandal-ridden. Decision making is increasingly centralized in the largely invisible staff in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Many who have been active participants have turned off and tuned out because of understandable disillusionment. The result is that actions that undermine democracy can now be taken without much fear of reprisal. This book explains how our democratic governing machinery and operating principles have been undermined and what can be done to reverse this downward slide. It is intended to enrage you and then engage you – in the fight to restore and to enhance our democratic institutions and practices.

Income, education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports; far more than the actions of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers, it is these conditions that make the greatest difference in our health. Drawing on his experiences as a family physician in the inner city of Saskatoon, Mozambique, and rural Saskatchewan, Dr. Ryan Meili uses scholarship and patient stories to explore health determinants and democratic reforms that could create a truly healthy society. By synthesizing diverse ideas into a plan for action based on the lived experiences of practitioners and patients, A Healthy Society breaks important ground in the renewal of politics toward the goal of better lives for all Canadians.

In the 2011 general election, the New Democratic Party stunned political pundits by becoming the Official Opposition in the House of Commons. After near collapse in the 1993 election, how did the NDP manage to win triple the seats of its Liberal rivals and take more than three-quarters of the ridings in Quebec? Reviving Social Democracy examines the federal NDP’s transformation from “nearly dead party” to new power player within a volatile party system. Its early chapters – on the party’s emergence in the 1960s, its presence in Quebec, and the Jack Layton factor – pave the way for insightful analyses of issues such as party modernization, changing ideology, voter profile, and policy formation that played a significant role in driving the “Orange Crush” phenomenon. Later chapters explore such future-facing questions as the prospects of party mergers and the challenges of maintaining support in the long term.

“This global affairs veteran has carved out a solid, mature path, including for ‘flawed democracies’ like the U.S. We’d all be wise to follow.” — Vancouver Sun From the author of the Globe and Mail bestseller, Claws of the Panda, comes a book quite literally for our times. Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence is a thoughtful account of how we can save democracies from the despots and populists who provide easy answers to complicated situations, dumbing political discourse down to sandbox antics. Manthorpe argues that democracy is more resilient than it appears, and is capable of overcoming the attacks from within and without that have sapped its vigour since the end of the Cold War. He begins with a description of the events of 1989, one of the seminal years in modern history. This saw the end of the Cold War, and the apparent conclusive victory of democracy and its civic values. But the view of these changes as a triumph of democracy — as summed up in Francis Fukuyama’s essay "The End of History" — was short-lived. Russia, shorn of its Soviet empire, and the Chinese Communist Party, re-examining its survival after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, began devising ways to counter-attack the West’s triumphalism and these met with considerable success. Internal pressures and contradictions — wealth disparity being chief among them — threaten the survival of many democratic systems. Abandoned industrial workers turn to the repeated platitudes designed to appeal to those left behind without actually offering them the ways and means to catch up. Immigrants, refugees, and the reformist fixations of isolated liberal elites have provided ammunition for would-be despots. Adding to the pressures building on the political norms of our democracies, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought economic and social stand-still for which no country is prepared.

The election of Donald Trump has exposed American society’s profound crisis of hope. By 2016 a generation of shrinking employment, rising inequality, the attack on public education, and the shredding of the social safety net, had set the stage for stunning insurgencies at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Against this dire background, Ronald Aronson offers an answer. He argues for a unique conception of social hope, one with the power for understanding and acting upon the present situation. Hope, he argues, is far more than a mood or feeling—it is the very basis of social will and political action. It is this kind of hope that Aronson sees brewing in the supporters of Bernie Sanders, who advocated the tough-minded and inspired disposition to act collectively to make the world more equal, more democratic, more peaceful, and more just. And it was directly contrasted by Trump’s supporters who showed a cynical and nostalgic faith in an authoritarian strongman replete with bigotry and misogyny. Beneath today’s crisis Aronson examines our heartbreaking story: a century of catastrophic violence and the bewildering ambiguity of progress—all of which have contributed to the evaporation of social hope. As he shows, we are now in a time when hope is increasingly privatized, when—despite all the ways we are connected to each other—we are desperately alone, struggling to weather the maelstrom around us, demoralized by the cynicism that permeates our culture and politics, and burdened with finding personal solutions to social problems. Yet, Aronson argues, even at a time when false hopes are rife, social hope still persists. Carefully exploring what we mean when we say we “hope” and teasing hope apart from its dangerously misconstrued sibling, “progress,” he locates seeds of real change. He argues that always underlying our experience—even if we completely ignore it—is the fact of our social belonging, and that this can be reactivated into a powerful collective force, an active we. He looks to various political movements, from the massive collective force of environmentalists to the movements around Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, as powerful examples of socially energized, politically determined, and actionably engaged forms of hope. Even in this age of Donald Trump, the result is an illuminating and inspiring call that anyone can clearly hear: we can still create a better future for everyone, but only if we resist false hopes and act together.

The news media is traditionally the watchdog of democracy. Today, it is also one of the most pervasive global industries. In this lively and accessible book, Schultz systematically analyses the role of journalism in Australia and the scope of its democratic purpose. She examines key news stories, and looks at the attitudes of Australian journalists themselves. The fourth estate remains the ideal of most journalists, but the reality has been impaired by the increasing concentration of media ownership and by political, ethical and occupational interests. While Australian journalism has become bolder and more investigative, increasing commercialism and decreasing ethical standards have left the public sceptical. Schultz argues for a revival of the fourth estate based on journalistic independence and poltical autonomy, together with increased accountability and responsiveness.

This title was first published in 2002. This multi-faceted account of the transformation of social democracy in Europe provides a unique critical discussion of the normative claims and the key policy initiatives that characterize Third Way politics. Designed to cover a broad range of aspects, this text provides fresh understanding of the transformation of social democratic politics in a globalizing world. Including accounts of the changes in the socio-political environment in which the New Social Democracy operates, the socio-cultural roots of Third Way politics and the underlying political and ideological shift of the contemporary established left, this text offers comparative insights into national case studies and an interpretative framework for the transformation that this political force has undergone in recent years. The reader will benefit from this book’s expert and easily accessible multi-faceted approach to one of the key political issues in contemporary Western societies.

On May 2, 2011, as Canadians watched the federal election results roll in and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives achieve a majority, it appeared that we were witnessing a major shift in the political landscape. In reality, Canadian politics had been changing for quite some time. This volume provides the first account of the political upheavals of the past two decades and speculates on the future of the country’s national party system. By documenting how parties and voters responded to new challenges between 1993 and 2011, this book sheds light on one of the most tumultuous periods in Canadian political history.

This book examines the study of American political history.

The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. It has too many parties, it is susceptible to staggering swings from election to election, and its provincial and federal branches often seem unrelated. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now. In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions underpinning the system. Chief among them was domination by the centrist Liberals, stemming from their grip on Quebec, which blocked both the Conservatives and the NDP. He also takes a close look at other peculiarities of the Canadian party system, including the stunning discontinuity between federal and provincial arenas. For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.