You know that you just raised all these very heavy terms: democracy, accountability, deference. Where to begin?
I don't share the same view of what democracy is. Democracy isn't something you define in terms of elections or not. It's something you experience, you feel, you sense when something's democratic or not. I'm hesitant about electing the Governor General. The position ought not to be politicized in that kind of way. In fact, I'm very concerned about the debate we're having right now in the country about who should be the next Governor General.
We've had a shift in the political and popular culture, as you point out, from deference to a sense of greater participation. You had Christopher White here. What I found most interesting about all of his comments is that there were 200,000 people on his Facebook, but now there are only a few dozen activists. If I'm not mistaken, I think there were probably five times as many people on Facebook suggesting that Stockwell Day should have his name changed to Doris Day. That isn't sufficient to run public policy. I don't think public policy should be run on public opinion, although you have to be sensitive to it in terms of getting elected.
On accountability and the appointment of the Governor General, one way you can construct it from a democratic principle point of view is that the Prime Minister does have the confidence of the House and he makes these appointments. The Governor General is one of them. He makes other appointments. If people are so outraged about all the appointments the Prime Minister makes, they have a nuclear bomb, as he does. He can dissolve the House and you can vote non-confidence. That's the kind of system we're trapped in.
I'm hoping—and I think this is what most Canadians want—that we'll move to maybe a more consensual type of arrangement. And we've had this. We've had this in Canada. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Canadians said they were happy with minority governments both federally and in the province of Ontario. MLAs in that province, based on a survey done by Vaughan Lyon and published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, found that experience was positive.
In recent years, we're finding minority governments are more dysfunctional, and they're reminding me of what occurred in the early sixties—1962, 1963, 1965—when the main issue in the elections wasn't policy; it was majority government, the Liberals arguing it has to be a Liberal majority and the Conservatives arguing it has to be a Conservative majority. From the NDP, incidentally, Tommy Douglas said, “What do you want stable majority government for? You know what stables smell like.” That was the only position he could argue.
I don't have an answer. I just have some—