I would add that in many developing countries, people go into government to get rich. You don't do that in Canada. This is still the pathway to material prosperity, because of corruption, kleptocracy, etc. Tackling those at the source, making it clear that taxpayer stewardship is not a means to personal enrichment.... Only open politics can do that. Only politics that are transparent and accountable, and involve alternation in power and a degree of accountability between institutions and with courts, etc., can do that. Otherwise, you just have this open wound of public money going into private purses.
Open politics should be a leveller, because by definition, they crack up any kind of closed, elite structure in which one tribe, or one family or one party monopolizes political control and steers the economy accordingly.
In Malaysia, one reason you had this extraordinary democratic transition last year is that one party had been in power for 61 years. Every big businessman in Malaysia needed to be quite intimate with that ruling party in order for his prosperity, his business, to thrive. You've had an alternation in power there, and that has trickled down into the private sector and into the economy.
I will close with one thought. The populist wave in the west right now may fail, because populists arguably cannot deliver on their promises. They are too expensive. I would include populism of the left and of the right in this. There are lots of promises being thrown around in America now, as we look towards our 2020 presidential election, about new benefits for people. I'm not sure how we're going to pay for those. I would say the same things about the populism on the right that you see in places like Italy. At the end of the day, it's budget busting, and it's not sustainable.