Madam Chair, I rise with some appreciation for the process that we are using but I want to say to my colleague from the Bloc that I share a great deal of his concern over the historical role that the present Prime Minister has played and the previous prime minister and the one before that in concentrating so much power in the Prime Minister's Office, oftentimes to the exclusion of the departments, the ministers, this House and the electorate generally in Canada.
In preparation for this evening I spent some time reviewing material of other authors and researchers who have done work on the whole issue of the term that is becoming popular, which is civic literacy. In the course of doing that, I have to acknowledge the work of our colleague from Ottawa Centre who provided me with a good deal of this background and pointed me in a certain direction.
One of the authors he pointed me to was Henry Milner who has done a great deal of analysis on civic literacy and how it is achieved. A good deal of his work was done in countries in the northern part of Europe and then some comparison work with other democracies in the world. He came up with a list of ways of achieving a greater civic participation by all citizenry. One of the points that we should make is that he spent a good deal of time looking at Denmark specifically, as well a number of the other northern European countries.
While in Denmark he did quite extensive research in terms of trying to ascertain why the rate of participation in Denmark was substantially higher than it was in Canada, oftentimes exceeding 80% or 85% of eligible voters. One of the conclusions he came to was that voter participation was higher in countries where people read newspapers. In Denmark the average citizen reads three to five newspapers a day from a broad spectrum of newspapers across the ideological parameters and they do that on a regular basis. There was an exact correspondence to the people who read multiple newspapers to the percentage of the population that voted. It was almost an exact number.
He said that there were five things a government really had to do to make sure civic literacy was achieved to its epitome. The first one on his list was encouraging newspaper reading. He pointed out that a number of northern European countries provide public subsidies to newspapers to ensure they are widely available. It is an interesting concept given the way our newspapers function in this country.
The next one was to make sure that there was not an overreliance on commercial TV and that public broadcasting was readily available, well funded and, in effect, useful in developing that civic literacy. He talked a great deal about the need for society to ensure that the maximum amount of intellectual awareness is guaranteed and provided for by that particular society, and public television was one of the ways of doing that.
The next one is interesting given the current experience we are undergoing, at least at the federal level. He says that we should limit the authority and power of money in politics. Of course the last election in this country was run under legislation that substantially reduced the ability of large monied interests to have influence in politics.
Looking again at the experiences in both the province of Quebec and the province of Manitoba, which have been ahead of us in working on that, it has changed the way politics function in those provinces. More important, from the analysis that I have made of those provinces, it has engaged the average citizen more extensively than I see in other provinces where money is still a major factor in elections.
The next point he made was that society and governments had to enact transparent laws and regulations. Coming out of a legal background myself, I can identify with the difficulty that the average citizen has in understanding our laws, being able to read them and understand them, even with post-secondary university degrees. If one does not have a law degree, a good deal of our legislation is quite frankly not very comprehensible. That is something I would suggest that we need to work on, and it was the same findings he made.
The final point he made is what I think we will deal with to a more extensive degree in one of the subsequent take note debates on trying to expand democracy in the country. That is the issue of governance and the use of a consensual model, that the first past the post, which is the present system we have, does not lead to this and that we go to a consensual model of proportional representation where both during and after the election and during the whole period of governance after an election the interests and policies of a wide range of parties and interests are reflected in the House, first is the natural representation. However, in terms of the nature of not having majority governments. where one party dominates the House exclusively, we always will have a Parliament, the law-making body, forced to deal with the interests of other parties and other sectors of society. Therefore, we never have a very narrow scope. It always will be a broad one. We have seen some really good examples of how that does not work well at the provincial level in particular, but also at the federal level.
He comes back to the importance of this repeatedly in his analysis by arguing that if we do not have that model just about anything else we do to try to develop civic literacy is doomed to fail. If the average citizen does not feel Parliament, the House or houses if it is bicameral, are making decisions on a consensus basis, by building consensus in the country, they are going to be much less interested in participating on an ongoing basis in their governance.
I was interested to listen to the comments by the minister. We heard about a number of things we could do. I agree with him on the point he made about the need for most of us to have greater resources as members of Parliament. For instance, I have tried to hold public debates and forums in my riding and I have felt inadequate in my ability to do them as often as I like. If I had the resources, I could conduct public debates in my riding, and perhaps the city as a whole, where people from different perspectives could come to and take part in, or run seminars and forums that would encourage that kind of debate.
I just spent the weekend in Windsor speaking to one of our city councillors. She said that she needed to do more of that but she did not have the resources.
The minister spoke about the need to try to democratize our committees in the House. I agree that we should be doing that. We could look at the English experience and how they do much more work in advance before the laws are put to the House. Committees and representatives deal with them at that level.
I would like to conclude by saying we will be unable to do that unless we have a government forum that builds this consensus. If it does not come with that attitude, with that as an essential theme, we will not get any of those other democratic reforms in place.