Transcript
Transcript: Democracy in Practice Series: Deliberative Democracy and Global Advocacy
[00:00:00 The video opens with the animated CSPS logo.]
[00:00:07 Ayesha Harij appears full screen.]
Ayesha Harij: Hello, and welcome to this morning's conversation at the event organized by the Canada School of Public Service, Deliberative Democracy and Global Advocacy. My name is Ayesha Harij.
[00:00:29 Text on screen: Ayesha Harij, Director, Democracy Division, Global Affairs.]
Ayesha Harij: I'm the Director of the Strategic Coordination and Cabinet Affairs Division at Global Affairs, and I was previously the Director of the Democracy Division within the department. I'm so pleased to be moderating today's event. Welcome to you all and welcome to our special invitees. We've got a really exciting session for you today.
I'm speaking to you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I want to express my gratitude to generations of Algonquin people, both past and present, who are the original caretakers of this space that I'm occupying now, and I'm very grateful to them and to all of you for participating. I encourage you all to take a moment wherever you are coming to us from to consider what lands you live on and work on and think about your connection to Reconciliation and to Canada's First Peoples.
Today's feature presentations are coming with three experts from democratic theory and practice, and we're going to talk about the global decline in satisfaction with democracies, specifically about how trust can be rebuilt between public and democratic institutions.
Hold on to your seats. We've got some time at the end of the session for some questions from the audience. So, I encourage you to submit your questions for our panelists using the web interface. There's a little chat bubble icon at the top right of your screens, and you can submit questions for consideration in the language of your choice, and we'll get to as many as time permits.
[00:02:00 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: I'm pleased to introduce our excellent group of speakers, starting with Santiago González, who is a senior economist and policy analyst at the OECD in their Public Governance Directorate.
He plays a leadership role there in the Government at a Glance reports. He's an expert at the OECD on public governance indicators and statistics, including the determinants and measurements of public trust, and coordinated the 2023 Government at a Glance report, which looks at the need to build, reinforce, and protect democracy in an era of multiple crises.
We also have Dr. Michael Mackenzie, who is the inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership at Vancouver Island University. He holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia, and before going to VIU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Mackenzie's research interests include democratic theory; Deliberative Democracy; intergenerational relations; Canadian politics; and public engagement. Thanks, Dr. Mackenzie. Welcome.
And finally, rounding out our esteemed panel today, we have Dr. Anna Drake, who is an associate professor in political science at the University of Waterloo. She works in the area of democratic theory with a focus on Deliberative Democracy, intersectionality, and activism. Her current research examines structural injustice and deliberative theory and analyzes ways deliberative systems might better respond to problems such as systemic racism and sexism. Thank you all for joining us. Thanks for your flexibility and rolling with the punches, especially on the technical side. With that, we'll start by turning it over to our first our speaker, the OECD's Santiago Gonzalez, to get us started with our presentation. Santiago, over to you.
[00:03:55 Santiago González appears full screen. Text on screen: Santiago González, Senior Economist & Analyst, Economic Co-operation and Development.]
Santiago González: Thanks a lot, and I am truly honoured to be here with you today, and thanks for having me today at this panel with such distinguished speakers. I work as a senior economist in the OECD Public Governance Directorate. In particular, I lead the Government at a Glance publication.
So, you can put [up] my presentation, so I will be driving you through some of the main results of this report, which is basically a report that brings together all the indicators work of our directorate. And this time we organized the evidence around how to build trust and reinforce democracies in an era of multiple crises.
[00:04:35 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: Okay, so basically the first slide shows the Global Economic Uncertainty Index, which basically is showing us how the number of crises has increased over the past decades. Here we see on the panel on the left, since September 11th, the global financial crisis; then the COVID pandemic; Russia's invasion to Ukraine; and more recently conflict in the Middle East, how we live in an environment where crises are more frequent.
These are the ones that we cannot predict, but there are some that we can predict, as for instance, the crisis associated with climate change. And this is coming hand in hand with increased fiscal pressure. We see that the economic outlook is still fragile. On the left, we see basically that fiscal deficits and debt in most developed economies has actually increased. So, this is a little bit [of] the context in which we are navigating.
Next, please.
[00:05:39 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: However, in this context, we also see that governments have to a large extent managed to be resilient. And on the panel on the right, the pie chart on the right, you have a question that we asked in 2021 in our survey on the drivers of trust in public institutions, where you see that about half of people think that it's extremely likely that governments will be able to manage the next pandemic and will be prepared to handle it.
And the three pie charts on the left basically show that people remain highly satisfied with public services. So, this, to a certain extent, shows that governments have been able to cope with those crises.
Next, please.
[00:06:24 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: But we also know that we hear commonly that we are now in a context where trust in public institutions is declining. This we also see in our survey. We find that on average across OECD countries, the ones that participated to the first wave of the survey, only 40% of people report high trust in their government.
But this varies a lot by population groups. Basically, the less educated, the younger people, those that are financially vulnerable, and more recently, we are also finding that women tend to have lower levels of trust in public institutions. So, it is needed to invest in democratic resilience in this context of multi-crisis and declining trust.
So, what are the three priorities that we have identified to strengthen democratic resilience? Next, please.
[00:07:23 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: First is to build on democratic strengths. So, governments have had for a long time mechanisms to engage people, stakeholder engagement mechanism, formal and informal. We should build on those. We will see some evidence. Then, reinforce the key competencies that are required for governments to support the delivery in the context I have described, and then to protect against the threats to public trust that come from failings in public integrity and from mis- and disinformation.
Next.
[00:07:59 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: So, in terms of building in democratic strengths, this is also from our World Trust survey. This is an indicator of what we call political efficacy, basically the perception of the population that think they have a say in what the government does. And we find that it is only about a third. [In] Canada, it's a little bit better on this, but still below 40% of the population reporting that they could have a say in what the government does.
Next, please.
[00:08:27 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: But our evidence also showed that there has not been a great improvement in formal stakeholder engagement mechanisms. So, the panel on the left shows under our Index on Stakeholder Engagement on Subordinate Regulations, and the increase has been almost negligible between 2018 and 2021.
However, what we do see, and is the panel on the right, is an explosion around very important increase on other types of deliberative processes or processes aimed at giving citizens a greater voice. I think we will be discussing about those later on.
Next, please.
[00:09:14 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: And in order to build this resilience, it's important to find the right levels of representation in government. And we see that this is still happening at a relatively slow pace. We see on the left the share of women and young parliamentarians. And in the case of women, it's a third, and in the case of [the] young, it's 22.8%., which is below the share of the population that they represent, that is 34%.
And, on the right, this is our Gender Budgeting Index. We have seen a massive number increase in the countries that actually implement this practice. However, they have the setup to do it, but there is not [a] measure of the impact that it has been having. So, it's important to advance in making sure that these tools actually achieve what they are aiming to do.
Next, please.
[00:10:09 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: In terms of the competencies to strengthen the competencies that we require for this democratic resilience, there is also room to improve. This is an index that we have on governance of green infrastructure where we see that there is scope to advance in terms of actually ensuring that green is considered throughout this lifecycle of infrastructure projects.
Next.
[00:10:41 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
And also in terms of building the competencies that [are] required to cope with this environment, more could be done to ensure that public servants get the right level of training and the right content in terms of scaling up training opportunities that will allow to manage an agile public workforce that could respond to this multi-crisis environment.
Next, please.
[00:11:15 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: In terms of protecting against threats against democratic resilience. So, here we see our indicators on to what extent OECD countries have actually implemented or have adopted practices on lobbying, political finance, and conflict of interest. So, these are the light-coloured bars. And then the other ones, the greener ones, show the extent to which they have implemented them. So, we see that there are implementation gaps when it comes to these kind of threats that arise from lack of integrity in public administrations.
[00:12:08 Split screen: Santiago González and slide, as described.]
Santiago González: So, to conclude, in order to maintain democratic resilience in a polycrisis environment, it is important to build on democratic strengths, such as citizen and stakeholder participation and representation, reinforce key governance competencies, in terms of employee capacity, bringing public administration that will be key to support this context, and to cope with this context of multiple crises and protect against the active threats coming from misinformation, disinformation, and lack of integrity in the public sector. And for all of this, we need to keep building the evidence base and strengthening the data that we have available for such purpose.
So, this is my presentation. Happy to engage in the conversation later on.
[00:13:07 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thank you so much, Santiago Gonzalez from the OECD. You've laid an excellent context in terms of some of the challenging environments in which we work, and especially for the public service audience, laying out where we have some capacity building and some trust building to do.
With that, I will turn it over to Dr. Michael Mackenzie next, to speak about the current challenges for democracy in Canada, what's driving that, and how public institutions and Deliberative Democracy can help advance those goals. Michael, over to you.
[00:13:39 Dr. Michael Mackenzie appears full screen. Text on screen: Dr. Michael Mackenzie, Professor, Vancouver Island University.]
Dr. Michael Mackenzie: Okay, thank you very much for having me. I'm going to start by saying something about what is going wrong with democracy. Then I'm going to suggest that we have a democratic solution to what the problems democracy is facing. The problem, however, with the solution, Deliberative Democracy, is that we don't know how to employ it on a large enough scale.
So, what's going wrong? And here I'm going to build off some of what Santiago just talked about. When people feel economically or existentially insecure, they tend to become less democratic. There are many sources of economic and existential insecurity, as Santiago was just telling us that the pandemic has caused a high background level of anxiety. Inflation since the pandemic has caused economic uncertainty. It's eroded people's savings and their plans for the future. Income inequality has caused economic insecurity for many as well, and also a sense of unfairness.
Rapid technological change causes disruptions and disorientation. Many experts in artificial intelligence, for example, the experts themselves think that AI is a potential existential threat. At minimum, AI will be a disruptive technology, like the internet and social media. AI will change our politics, our interactions with each other, and our careers, but we don't know how it's going to do that yet. And this causes uncertainty and anxiety.
And there's been many extreme weather events, for example, which have caused damage and disruption, and also mass migrations. And wars are causing humanitarian disasters. Some of the countries in these wars have nuclear weapons. I just read this morning that soldiers from North Korea have joined Russia in the war. The culture wars and online interactions more generally have taught people that it's okay to hate and abuse people who disagree with you because they disagree with you.
There are a lot of bad— and when I say bad, I mean unethical— leaders who stoke fear and anxiety for their own benefit in this context. But those leaders are not just a cause of these problems. Unethical and undemocratic leaders are simultaneously both a cause and a consequence of those problems.
I said a moment ago that when people feel economically or existentially insecure, they become less democratic. Well, why? That's the obvious question. I think it's because democracy requires a high level of tolerance for uncertainty and complexity. But we have a limited capacity for these things. When we're uncertain and anxious, we don't want to tolerate more of that in our political systems. In response to insecurity and anxiety, many people very reasonably crave simplicity, certainty, and security. They therefore gravitate toward leaders who promise these things; simple solutions to complex problems and some sense of certainty in a stew of uncertainty.
So, why don't democratic leaders offer simplicity and certainty? Well, they can't. At least they can't do so while being democratic leaders. Simplifying complexity may be helpful to some extent, as when we use schematic models to better understand complex realities. But saying things are simple when they're complex is deception and using deception as a political tool is always undemocratic.
But certainty is also mutually exclusive with democracy. If we're certain about who would be in power in 5 or 10 years, for example, we would not by definition be living in a democracy. In Canada, we don't know who's going to be Prime Minister next November. In China and Russia, we can be pretty sure who's going to be in power next year. So, any leader who promises certainty in the future is, by definition, undemocratic. And this means that when people feel economically or existentially insecure and anxious about the future, they cannot look to democratic leaders to provide the comforts of simplicity and certainty. They can look to democratic leaders for other things, but not that.
By contrast, undemocratic leaders can, in my view, falsely promise those things. So, this raises the question, how can we maintain robust and healthy democracies in times of uncertainty, change, and anxiety like those that we're living through now? What can we do about this? There is, I assure you, no simple solution. That's the point. But we can look to Deliberative Democracy for some answers and possibilities.
Deliberative processes can help people grapple with complexities and uncertainties, the complexities and uncertainties that democracy entails, and also that our political realities entail. In deliberative processes, people listen to the concerns and arguments of others. They justify their own positions and critically assess them, try to persuade others. In deliberations, people engage with each other to try and figure out what they're going to do together to solve complex problems. They confront complexity and learn to navigate it.
Now, I'm not being naive here. I know that there will be disagreements that can't be resolved through deliberation and reason giving. That's to be expected. But when people have opportunities to speak and listen to others, they can often navigate complexities and uncertainties in productive ways.
There are, however, many, many challenges. Deliberation is difficult to do well. It can be resource intensive. It's hard to get people to deliberate. It's hard to get them to spend the energy needed to do it well. And also deliberations can be exclusive. Those who aren't used to discussing difficult issues with others may feel uncomfortable or ineffective in deliberative settings. Also, the more people included in a deliberative event, the more difficult it is to engage in substantive deliberations.
Nevertheless, we have robust and credible deliberative methodologies to draw upon. I've done a lot of work with randomly selected deliberative forums, which are sometimes called Citizens' Assemblies. In these processes, individuals are randomly invited and then randomly selected to form diverse and representative deliberative assemblies. These assemblies learn about and deliberate complex public issues. They're often required to issue collectively forged recommendations.
There's a citizens' assembly going on right now, which is deliberating a possible merger between the cities of Victoria and Saanich here on Vancouver Island, where I am. Citizens' Assemblies are a means of helping people navigate and understand and grow more comfortable with complexity. I know that Citizens' Assemblies can do this. I've worked with many of them.
So, we know that Citizens' Assemblies can do this. What we don't know is how to scale up those processes so that we can have genuine public deliberations, i.e., deliberations that include the public, as a whole, in discussions and deliberations about complex political issues. The concern is that those who are not involved in these Citizens' Assemblies will not understand the rationales underlying the recommendations that they make, and that undermines their legitimacy.
Nevertheless, Citizens' Assemblies can sometimes increase output legitimacy. If policy recommendations forged in Citizens' Assemblies really do reflect and integrate the concerns, needs, and interests of diverse groups within society, those policies may be more likely to be seen as legitimate when they are implemented. Thus, the successful implementation of deliberatively forged policy recommendations can help provide a legitimate foundation for public trust, even in circumstances characterized by uncertainty and anxiety.
Thank you very much.
[00:23:16 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thank you so much, Dr. Mackenzie. You've laid out both a great reason for why we need Deliberative Democracy and effective ways of engaging with our citizens, and also some of the real challenges we face in trying to do that effectively.
I'll turn it over next to Dr. Anna Drake, who's going to speak to us some more about some of the challenges of Deliberative Democracy, the role of activists in particular in our democracies, and how we can better make sure to capture marginalized voices. Dr. Drake, over to you.
[00:23:49 Dr. Anna Drake appears full screen. Text on screen: Anna Drake, Professor, University of Waterloo.]
Dr. Anna Drake: Thank you very much and thank you again for having me here. It's great to be part of this conversation.
So, first of all, I'm going to start out by talking about some of the challenges for Deliberative Democracy, or with Deliberative Democracy. First of all, I think it's really important to be really clear about what it is that Deliberative Democracy is supposed to do.
Why are we using this? What do we want to get out of the process? And I think remembering, too, that it is a process, it's something that's ongoing. There's no fixed template that will apply in every scenario. So, it's really important to ground Deliberative Democracy in the particular context that we're using it and in the community or communities that we are hoping to involve. So, some big picture questions related to that.
It's, again, also really important to think about how Deliberative Democracy and the actual dialogues that we're having, whether they're Citizen Assemblies, whatever iteration of Deliberative Democracy we're doing, how does this fit into the broader understandings both across the community and how does it influence public policy? Because it can be easy to get lost in the actual room or rooms where Deliberative Democracy is taking place.
But in order for it to do all the things that I think we're hoping for it to do, to actually make change, what comes after deliberation? Is it actually going to have a chance to impact policy? Because we don't want to waste people's time. We don't want to waste resources. We want this to be as useful as possible.
And so, having those expectations be really clear and having a way to follow up, to recognize that people have invested a lot of time and energy and care into this, they don't want to see it just be dropped. So, I think making sure that it's not seen as a "once-and-done" event, but rather as part of something that is ongoing is really key to look at.
So, a couple quick examples of this. One of the Citizen Assemblies in Canada was in BC on electoral reform, and a lot of the work that went into studying what came out of that praised the Citizens' Assembly very much in terms of how successful it was, the great justifications and judgment that people in the assembly used, and the substantive recommendations that came out of it.
Now, what happened after that was there was a very, very poor uptake in the broader community. Messaging around what happened and why; why this is important; why people should care didn't really come through.
So, looking at media, looking at good news media, at community engagement, and making sure the broader public understands what's going on, why it's important, is really key because there was a province-wide referendum in which people were asked, "What do you think about these recommendations?" And the results for that were very poor. It didn't pass. So, the big picture context is always key.
In, I think, 2021, there was a Global Climate Change Assembly, again, that had very positive feedback from the people who were involved. The recommendations that came out that went on to the climate conference in Glasgow. But we all know that while people like to have lots of meetings about climate change and say it's really important, we need to do something, we never ever do anything of substance, and we really ought to. So, again, we need to make sure that we are actually changing our policies and taking the messaging seriously.
In terms of another challenge of Deliberative Democracy is trying to ensure meaningful inclusion. And this is something that I do a fair bit of work upon. So, not only in terms of the selection, there are different ways to pick deliberative groups, whether it's random selection, whether it's more focused to make sure that we don't exclude people who are affected particularly by a particular issue. So, if we're looking at deliberation on subjects that particularly impact Indigenous peoples, for example, we can't just have Indigenous peoples there in proportion to the population, and we want to make sure that voices are actually heard in meaningful ways.
We also want to make sure that the way in which issues are framed really takes seriously the input of everybody who's involved and affected. We don't want to be limited by predetermined framings and agendas and then have that force a particular way that we ought to approach deliberation onto everybody who's there, because that will limit the conversation, it will limit how it unfolds. It will make people feel as though they aren't able to or aren't supposed to bring up particular views on the topic.
So, I think communicating that we need to be actually listening to the people who are there. That they, as individuals, and representative of communities, are there to bring their own voice and that their voices are valuable and need to have the opportunity to truly be heard.
But taking that input seriously is a big challenge because we have massive structural and systemic issues: racism; sexism; anti-trans hatred. We have ableism. All of these things, because they exist in society, are brought into deliberations whether or not we want them to be there. And so being really clear that that's the case and owning up to it and trying to figure out a way to deal with it is really key.
Some of the things we could do is to have facilitators, moderators who will do things like call people out when they are being racist, when they're being sexist, because there's a huge hesitancy to do that because we don't want to hurt people's feelings. But that particular approach obviously excludes the meaningful, the more pressing problem that we're actively hurting people when we are being racist and sexist or when we are allowing racism and sexism to go unchallenged. So, deliberation can be messy. It can hurt people's feelings, but I think that's something that we have to get used to if we want to have genuine engagement.
I'm going to move on now to talking about the role of activists in our democracies, because I'm a bit conscious of the time. The activism that I focus on is social justice activism. So, looking at activism as a way of keeping our attention on core principles of justice. And when we're talking about Deliberative Democracy and why it's important, the idea of democratic engagement, and having it be meaningful is really key.
So, activists there pick up on one of the fundamental principles of Deliberative Democracy, a foundational principle of democracy, which is the need to treat all people as moral and political equals. And so, sometimes that gets lost, oftentimes unfortunately that gets lost in public policy, in government. It gets lost in deliberative groups. And so, activists have had a significant impact on a number of different deliberative forums and trying to get people included into deliberations because they've identified players, people who are affected who have been excluded oftentimes when it comes to environmental issues.
And also people who are protesting deliberative groups themselves from outside of the actual group who don't necessarily want to be included in the group, but who might be opposed to the premise of what it is people are deliberating about. So, part of that, again, is stepping back and looking at the broader context in which we want to have Deliberative Democracy and recognizing that it is one part of a broader system of democratic engagement.
So, activists are important when it comes to accountability, when it comes to drawing awareness about the kinds of things that we might want to deliberate about, the way we might want to approach deliberations. They're important for looking at principles of solidarity. How can we support people? We want to make sure that we're not falling into a trap of a zero-sum game where some people are winners and some people are losers. Deliberative Democracy was explicitly designed to counter that zero-sum approach and to make sure that this process of mutual respect and justification was what carried the day, rather than trying to get the most votes or convince the most people using sheer force.
So, having solidarity and that concept of why solidarity is important built into Deliberative Democracy, recognizing that this is something that activism brings into play is really key. And I think perhaps on a bit more of an uplifting note, something that people often think when they're trying to conceptualize activism is that it's something that they can't necessarily do, that it involves a whole lot of work and energy. And that is absolutely true. There's lots of stories of activists getting burnt out, but I think that activism is more accessible than a lot of people often think.
Black feminist theorist, Audre Lorde, is famous for a lot of things, but one of the quotations that's relevant here is when she's talking about revolution, which we think is something that is kind of beyond the scope. We don't really expect that to happen, but her take on it is that revolution is not a one-time event. She says, "It's becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make genuine change".
And, if we look at it that way, I think it's something that everybody can do. Everybody could be [an] activist in that respect. And I think that, when we're talking about democratic engagement, reminding people of the things they can actually do in their daily lives, and that this is something we ought to be doing consistently, is important.
So, quickly to wrap up, how can our democracies better work with marginalized voices? First of all, just to really underscore, I think what we need to remember is that we need systemic change, that if we want to take marginalized voices seriously, we don't want to look for an "add and stir" approach. We need to go beyond just extending the invitation for people to come in and talk about things. We need to really draw attention to who is organizing particular events; who's leading this. We want to make sure that there's a genuine drive to ask people who are most affected by things what the problem is and to seriously try to have that bottom up approach in terms of how we might want to remedy injustices.
We want to make sure that, again, that moderators call out things like racism and sexism as events are unfolding, and to recognize that that will happen consistently and to be trained for that. Not to think that Deliberative Democracy is warm and fuzzy and people are here to do their best, but to recognize that contention happens. And sometimes that creativity is a positive force for change, that sometimes it's only through having conversations that are uncomfortable that call people out. We have to sometimes go through that in order to be able to fix things, and that's what's most important.
And then on a more practical standpoint, the space that we have deliberation in is really key, not only in terms of can people get there, where do we have these things, making sure that we're not just limiting deliberative groups to major urban centres, making sure that we don't exclude people because they live in rural areas, making sure that it's possible for people to attend.
So, is there childcare? What times of day do deliberations happen? Can people get there? Is there reliable transportation? Looking at are there interpreters for people who might need sign language, who don't speak English as a first language or French as a first language. Practically, how is that going to happen?
And finally, to make sure that we are aware of the rampant ableism that exists in society. We are about to enter year 6 of the pandemic. The massive sentiment is that the pandemic is over, which is a failure of multiple institutions. It's not over. So, thinking about who we are excluding with that basic assumption and looking at how that very specifically excludes people who are most marginalized in society, how they're seen as expendable, how they're not even on people's minds when we have Citizen Assemblies where there's no masking, where there's no air filtration, where there's no thought given to, "Can the most vulnerable people in our community even attend these events?"
And then, when we combine that with the data that we have on people who are most impacted by COVID, we see the way in which Indigenous peoples are hardest hit, in which racialized people are hardest hit, the most elderly and the younger people in our community bracket the hospitalizations and deaths when it comes to COVID-19. And women are also caregivers. And, in the 40 to 60 age, are most likely to suffer from long COVID and chronic illness.
And so, if we take anti-racist and anti-sexist organizing seriously, then we need to recognize something like that that is still so prevalent. So, I will wrap up on that note. Thank you.
[00:38:27 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thank you so much for that, Dr. Drake. My key takeaway from what you said just now is that deliberation can be so messy, but the way in which we do it, how we think about accessibility, is the linchpin for building trust and for success in those processes, and ultimately in yielding the best kind of possible outputs that we can use to inform policy change. So, thanks so much for that.
I'll thank all three of our panelists for their opening remarks. We're now coming to the question and answer period of our event today. I'll invite attendees to get into that chat and ask their questions. And so, I will kick us off with a couple. And, of course, [we] really want to hear from those who are participating in this session today.
So, first, a question to all of our panelists. You've all presented some of the overwhelming evidence about the global decline of the public satisfaction in democracies. But I'm so curious to hear what it is about the Deliberative Democracy approach that gives you hope; that it is the vehicle through which we can rebuild trust in democratic institutions.
Some of you have already spoken to some examples. Dr. Mackenzie, you spoke to the Saanich-Victoria merger example, and Dr. Drake, you spoke to some as well. But are there some positive stories or even negative stories that you can share from your own experience that would highlight some of the value that you've seen from your experience in the Deliberative Democracy process? I'll start, Dr. Drake, perhaps with you.
[00:40:20 Dr. Anna Drake appears full screen.]
Dr. Anna Drake: Thank you. So, two prongs to that answer would be, one – I'll start with the cheery side first – I do think that the amount of care that goes into deliberative forums does let us have a significant potential for looking at trust building. There's a lot of active listening. There's a lot of time and energy spent to making sure that everybody who's in the room is able to speak and people are encouraged.
And, because they're talking face to face, it builds relationships. To different levels, of course, but when you are in that situation, when you're part of a process and especially when deliberative forums go on for more time, it is being able to see how people might shift their views or ask questions that show genuine concern for what is your perspective on this? Why is it important? What might we do together? And because it's a collective project, the group is trying to come up with something that's presented as this will help people, communities, et cetera.
Being tasked with that and having that be a priority is, I think, the kind of work that people need to be doing. So, that mindset itself is what I find most promising in terms of building trust because you're also building relationships. And if you want to have trust, you need to see that connection, see that process, and to know that your collective contribution is going to be valued in some way. So, I do think there is some hope there for trust.
The negative side, which I don't want to leave out, is that, again, we need to really think about who knows that deliberative forums are happening. How connected are these forums to the broader community? Because if they're isolated, everything else is happening outside of it, it's harder for people in the group to feel that their contributions matter if nobody else other than people they talk to has any idea of what's happening.
And when you're living in a world that is full of systemic injustice and we see with policy after policy after policy ways in which this isn't getting fixed, then I think it's a lot harder to have trust in systems of government, too. You might be coming up in this small group with like, these are some great recommendations and have a certain amount of inspiration from that. But if you see law after law being passed that's neglecting the most vulnerable people in society, then that's going to also impact whether or not you trust the government to actually care for all of its citizens equally. So, pros and cons.
[00:43:12 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Yes, that's absolutely fair. Dr. Mackenzie, I saw you nodding during that, so I'll turn to you next for some of your positive and negative examples and things that have worked well.
[00:43:25 Dr. Michael Mackenzie appears full screen.]
Dr. Michael Mackenzie: Sure. On some level, we don't really have a choice whether we deliberate or not. If we want to do things together as a society, if we want to make collective decisions that are intentional, we need to talk to each other about what we're doing and why. And so, really, the idea of working together collectively to live well together, which is the foundational premise of democracy, requires us to deliberate at least on some level.
And there are some positives. I worked, as I mentioned, with the Ontario Citizens' Assembly some years ago. We worked for a whole year. We met with our group every second weekend and met for a whole year. And people really worked well together with people they would never otherwise have talked to in their lives. It was a very diverse group. One guy, I tell people, delayed heart surgery because he didn't want to miss a session – this is not something I recommend – but they were very committed, and it was a positive experience. They learned a huge amount about electoral systems. They were really experts at the end of it.
But as Anna pointed out, the problem is that in that group, there's a whole bunch of experts who have navigated through disagreement and who've figured out some possible options that work for a diverse group of people. And then the public has no idea what happened in the deliberations.
So, we really have to figure out how to scale up deliberations like this. And frankly, we don't have good ideas about that yet. We've done various experiments to try and do deliberations at a larger level, but we're not good at having public deliberations in any of our democracies. But if we really want to do things together, we have to figure that out.
[00:45:27 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much for that. That's a perfect segue to turn to Santiago, both on the question of the positives and negatives that you've seen, but also, are there, from your vantage point, countries that stand out as leaders in those practices that we should be taking some cues from? Are there approaches or best practices that we could be taking inspiration from, from the countries that you deal with across the board?
[00:45:56 Santiago González appears full screen.]
Santiago González: Yes, thanks a lot. So, very interesting. A couple of points on this. So, in terms of what we are seeing in our research on the drivers of trust is that this lack of sense of political agency is definitely having a huge impact. And this lack of what we call political efficacy is definitely impacting levels of trust. And deliberative processes are a way of building this sense of agency. Not the only one, but definitely one. So, on that vein, I think they are definitely powerful.
In terms of examples, maybe one of the countries that have pushed this further, and it's an example of a small community, but this is the German-speaking community of Belgium. And maybe it's a surprise for you that Belgium has also a German-speaking community in addition to the French and Flemish. But what they have done is basically they have established a permanent citizen council. So, this is embedded into the policymaking cycle that has 24 citizens, that a third of them rotate every 6 months and they have the possibility to initiate 3 ad hoc citizen panels.
But not only this, they also have the oversight responsibility. So, they make sure that this is reported to Parliament and that they get an answer both from parliamentary committees and ministers. And they also have a permanent secretariat with a staff that actually take care of these processes.
So, in a way, there is a sense of permanency that these are not things just popping up, but that this is something that is happening recurrently. It is embedded in the policymaking cycle. It is well designed in terms of random design, random selection with rotation, and it also has a little bit of resources to accompany the whole process. This is just one example, but I think it's really relevant on some of the things that could help to scale these processes.
In terms of things we don't see working that well is, for instance, in the country where I live, there was the French Convention on Climate, which was a presidential initiative to have these types of procedures to give recommendations on climate. And the Convention did its work, gave its recommendations, but there was a little bit of disenchantment when these were transformed into policy because people felt that the way in which it was actually— some of them were not even taken, and those that were, they felt that they were transformed to lose a little bit the original intention which they were designed.
So, I think there is definitely a problem of scale. These things seem to work somehow better at the local level, and I think we haven't found the answer on how to scale up to national topics. And it also seems to work better with certain types of topics than others.
So, just some elements and some examples. We have a database on these deliberative processes at the OECD, and there is also some literature showing cases, just as the one from Belgium that I described, that could be of interest. But how to embed them into the political cycle, how to better provide resources so that they could happen, I think are definitely things to be considered.
[00:49:47 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much for that. I'm starting to get in some of the questions from the chat, and there is a really important one about the insertion points in the Deliberative Democracy process and where that best fits in, in the policy cycle.
[00:49:55 Overlaid text on screen: Democracy in Practice Series: Deliberative Democracy and Global Advocacy.]
Ayesha Harij: And so, I think that that speaks to the point that you've just made about trying to find the best entry points. So, I would happily hear your views on that.
But I'll turn to my next question, which is for Dr. Mackenzie. We have seen democratic rights and systems suspended or removed entirely often acting in the service of efficiency or in the context of emergencies as well. We can think of a couple recently in the context of the global polycrisis with climate change and pandemics and lots of sort of easy way outs of those important processes that we've got.
Do you think – really, this is an interesting one – do you think that democracy is up for the challenge? How would you be reassuring the public that we can, in democracies, be nimble and still continue to address the challenges that lay ahead in the ways that align with our core values around democracy?
[00:51:05 Dr. Michael Mackenzie appears full screen. Text on screen: Dr. Michael Mackenzie, Professor, Vancouver Island University.]
Dr. Michael Mackenzie: Yes, this is a difficult issue. There are a lot of people who think that when we need to deal with crises, we need to abandon democracy. One problem with that is it's very hard to get it back. And so, the proposal is often, "Well, we need to suspend it", but there's no real plan to make sure it comes back.
But more importantly, it is possible for strong governments to act decisively, but it also means that we are then disempowered, and they might decide to do things decisively and they might do a very good job of it. But they might not. And if they don't, we don't have any recourse here. So, the idea that democracy needs to be abandoned when we're dealing with crises is a dangerous and probably misplaced idea.
The other thing is that democracy, inclusive processes are actually more likely to be innovative and creative. And so, when we're dealing with problems in society and crises, we need some creative thinking about possible solutions. And we're more likely to get that when large numbers of people have some influence, or have some possibility to present options, as opposed to relying on a very small number of experts.
So, for example, in the pandemic, we very rightly looked to epidemiologists for advice. That was a good idea. But we needed to be talking to a whole bunch of other people, too. People who were experts in mental health and childhood education. Our decisions about the pandemic were affecting all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, and particular specific expertise is always relevant, but it's not sufficient when you're making these decisions that affect society in complex ways. So, the idea that we don't need democracy in crisis situations is misplaced.
[00:53:21 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: That's an excellent point. Those are the moments in which we need to protect it the most, frankly. That's when it's at greatest risk.
Dr. Drake, I'll turn to you next. You've written about a lot of the challenges of Deliberative Democracy and the standard inclusion frameworks. What do you think needs to be done to ensure the right people are being included in the deliberation that informs democratic decision-making? And I'll add just a question from the chat. What role does social media play in helping to move that forward around inclusion as well?
[00:53:56 Dr. Anna Drake appears full screen. Text on screen: Anna Drake, Professor, University of Waterloo.]
Dr. Anna Drake: Yes, thank you. Those are great questions. And I want to bring in another thread from the chat into my response too, because a couple of them pick up on this question of how do we get people who are disillusioned involved? And that also relates into like these insertion points, too. How do we start this in a way that is meaningful?
So, I think that first of all, we need to recognize that not only do we want to talk about how important democracy is, by trying to actively include people, but, in terms of our infrastructure, we also need to have a commitment to what that means. If we care about democracy, when we dig deeper, the reason for that is because we think that democratic engagement is the best way to listen to, and to respect all the people who are in our society who are engaging in democratic processes.
So, it's about not only asking people what they want, and hearing what they think, which is obviously hugely important, but figuring out what it is that people actually need to be safe, to be valued, to warrant the trust that we want people to place in our democratic institutions.
And so, for people who are living below the poverty line, for people who are having to take the bus for over an hour just to get to work, who are rushing around to affordable childcare on the other side of town and spending their day dealing with all these logistics, and trying to take care of sick kids and elderly parents. All of these things are part of the makeup of people's lives.
And, if we have a democratic society that isn't making dealing with that a priority, then we're not going to have that buy-in. We're going to have disillusionment because we're going to have that question of, "Why does it matter whether or not I'm at this deliberative forum? Why does it matter what I say if nothing is going to change and my life is going to be just as difficult tomorrow as it is today?"
And so, I think if we factor that into our approach to Deliberative Democracy; looking at difficult problems such as, let's say negative medical outcomes for people who are racialized, like the racism and sexism in healthcare, which is especially pronounced in the States, but it's still very much at issue in Canada. How might we support people? Like looking at gaps; looking at negative health outcomes; trying to figure out what it is that people need to be healthy. We might start with some really difficult questions and try to figure out where the different barriers to access and service provision are. And to figure out how we can try to deliver services to the community but ask people what it is that they need.
I think approaches like that will be really helpful. Looking at a lot of the really successful deliberative forums have happened at the community level when there's community input on how to design or redesign public spaces. What is it that people need from their community? Do they need more libraries? Do they need to have accessible, clean public bathrooms and water fountains? Things that make a real difference to people's quality of life.
And again, that's going to require a lot of money. It's going to require a lot of spending because a lot of the things that are problems are really big structural problems. And I think we need to know that it's going to be difficult if we want to make an actual genuine change and to take that on. We can't just say, "Okay, we'd rather pick this method of voting and that's going to improve democracy", because sure, that might be true, but is that going to make a difference in people's lives? Probably not.
[00:57:59 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much. I'm going to turn to questions now from the chat. Thank you to all of those of you who have submitted. We've got a lot of folks raising a couple of really important threads.
[00:58:16 Ayesha Harij appears full screen. Text on screen: Ayesha Harij, Director, Democracy Division, Global Affairs Canada.]
Ayesha Harij: Some around what we use as metrics for success and for prosperity in the country and whether those are the right ones. A lot about the digital side, about AI and social media as well, and then some deep questions about trust.
So, let's start first off with these questions around what we are aiming for and the questions around economic prosperity. So, this one is particularly directed at Dr. Mackenzie.
[00:58:46 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Would you say that a key goal of increasing democracy is to increase the economic and physical security of the population? And are those models of economic prosperity in need of a serious rethink? I'll turn that one over to you.
[00:59:04 Dr. Michael Mackenzie appears full screen.]
Dr. Michael Mackenzie: Sure. So, I think the answer is yes. A democratic process shouldn't have any substantive goals. Democracy is about figuring out what we're going to do. We need to be free to figure out what we're going to do together. And so, we shouldn't have A priori economic models or commitments in view.
But we do have to recognize that democracies function when people have, broadly speaking, not perfect but reasonable equality. And economic insecurity, as I mentioned in my short talk, is a problem because people who are insecure find it more difficult to tolerate other insecurity in the democratic system.
But we also know that economic resources can always be turned into political influence. So, if we want good functioning democratic systems, we have to pay attention to economic inequality. It's not good enough to just have greater levels of political equality, political rights, or equal votes. So, do we need different models of economic prosperity? Do we need to rethink this? On some level, I think, absolutely. This is a condition. Economic inequality is a condition that's undermining our democracies.
What can we do about it? Again, very complex, difficult questions that involve of power and redistribution of power, and that's going to be very difficult and frankly is not likely to happen. But I'm interested in democratic workplaces. Democratic workplaces are more likely to be equal. If you can imagine an economy— it's hard to imagine these things— an economy of democratic workplaces, we would have a very different kind of democracy. Not just in our workplaces, but in our society more generally.
There are a whole bunch of challenges there I'd be happy to talk about. I don't think it's very likely, but is that a way to buttress our democracies? Yes, it would be.
[01:01:16 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much. I'm going to go from that vantage point and re-examine the models that underpin our collective efforts and turn maybe next to Santiago on the questions of the some of the threats that we see, the vectors from the social media perspective and the artificial intelligence perspective, and how to best navigate those, both in terms of how we use them in Deliberative Democracy, but what impacts they have in terms of trust. And from your vantage point, you're doing the Government at a Glance reports, how that's figuring into perhaps the findings or the inputs that you're working on.
[01:02:00 Santiago González appears full screen.]
Santiago González: There are different and several topics there, so it's a very challenging question. In terms of social media, mis- and disinformation, polarization, there is definitely a need there to rethink a certain number of things.
There is a need to work on media literacy and to better strengthen people to disentangle what is true from false and have the tools to do it. Fact-checking, having a publicly funded, independent, strong public media could definitely help.
Also, there is a lot that could be done in the realm of public communication to make public communication more appealing, to have trusted but also appealing outlets, trusted outlets coming from the administration could certainly help to cope with all these threats.
These are very complex, but these are real. And these are having massive effects also in electoral and political outcomes. So, in a way, it's a very difficult threat, and I don't think we yet have the full answer on how to address it. But there are some elements there that could be important that I mentioned.
And in terms of AI, this is probably the biggest challenge that we are just starting to understand.
In a way, this could bring a certain number of opportunities. We have always said that this could certainly be used as a tool that could leverage work of public administrations, but it could also be very much misused. And there is a lot of scope to further regulate this, but it's an area that is very complex and I don't think we are yet there.
So, that's indeed a very challenging question for which I don't have the full answer.
[01:04:17 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much for that. I'll turn to other speakers in case they want to weigh in on that.
[01:04:31 Dr. Michael Mackenzie appears full screen.]
Dr. Michael Mackenzie: I'm actually doing some work on AI and democracy right now.
So, one of the positive possibilities is using AI systems to very quickly integrate and aggregate deliberative discussions and outcomes. And so, you could imagine having small deliberations that work well in lots of different places, getting information about the themes and aggregated outcomes from other deliberations to scale up in the way that I was talking about before, which we haven't been very good at doing yet in the past.
There's also some really interesting work on using AI to help moderate these larger deliberations and sometimes online deliberations. I'm skeptical, but I think these things could potentially— I think the aggregate of capacity, very quick aggregate of capacity of AI, might help scale up public deliberations. It's possible. I'm skeptical in part because, as Anna pointed out, trust building really happens when we engage with people, so you might get some trust building in the smaller group, but it would deteriorate when the aggregations happen.
So, that's an interesting possibility. But there are so many other threats to democracy in the AI space and also on social media that I'm sure most of you are well aware of. And to be frank, there was a question earlier. I'm just trying to find it. I don't think we're doing anything to address this kind of misinformation and disinformation. We're not doing enough and partly it's because we don't quite know what to do about it. It's a very difficult problem. The social media spaces are run by private corporations. It's very difficult and undemocratic to censor. But it's just a very difficult situation, and I don't think we're addressing it, and I don't have any ideas about how to do it, to be frank.
[01:06:58 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: I think that's a challenge that we're grappling with in every corner of the planet. So, at least we're in good company as we try, as a collective, to find some solutions to that really, really challenging element of democracy in the current day. I think, Dr. Drake, you were mentioning earlier that we've got these moments in our spectrum of democratic engagement, and we've moved beyond that. And so, we have tons of work to do in the other points along that scale.
I'm sort of hopping all over the place in the questions, but there is one, Dr. Drake, I want to turn to you for in particular, and it's question 6 about, "How do we stop from being driven away from those spaces?" We've got a lot of polarization and sometimes Deliberative Democracy, if I'm reading that question, can generate some groupthink. So, how do we make them more accessible and open to new ideas instead of just reinforcing existing ones?
[01:08:04 Dr. Anna Drake appears full screen.]
Dr. Anna Drake: Yes, thank you. That's a really important question. And it's a problem that political theorists have been struggling with for a while. There are people like Nancy Fraser who writes some positive things about what she calls "enclave deliberation". Which, as she writes about it, can be particularly useful for groups who are marginalized to have a safe space to talk about what's wrong; to give voice to identify systemic patterns and problems; and to recognize that it's not something that's just a problem for them, but it is a collective structural problem that people are experiencing on the basis of group identity.
So, much like the consciousness-raising groups of second-wave feminist movement. There's a lot of good that can come out of having that really focused enclave deliberation. Now, of course, there is the negative aspect of echo chambers where one view is amplified to the exclusion of all other views. And it's especially, I think, a problem when it comes to right-wing hateful speech. But both enclave deliberation in a positive sense, and echo chambers, especially when they're harmful, neither of those in and of themselves are enough to sort through what we need to do in terms of democratic responses, truly democratic responses. Because what we want is engagement, first of all, meaningful engagement.
And also if we recognize that we need to actually have systemic change, if we have an enclave group identifying something that is a systemic injustice, then it's not enough just to recognize this is a problem, you want something done about it. So, how do you convince people that's an issue? How do you have the right kind of dialogue where people understand that something is a problem and, two, that something needs to be done about that problem collectively?
So, I think that's a place where moderators and facilitators come in, in deliberative groups, to make sure that there are safe spaces for people to identify problems and patterns. And that might happen literally behind closed doors for people. And then have a second version of that dialogue come back into a bigger group context when people actually feel confident about what it is they're saying, and then you can move on to try to deal with the problem.
So, yes, fact-checking is important, having data. So, a lot of people who organize deliberative forums are tasked with bringing research packages, information packages to deliberative groups so that people actually have facts in front of them, and they can see what's happening where, and then engage with people to see how that impacts them; how they respond to that.
And so, it's a lot of moving parts, and so the willingness to do that work and to make sure that we are trying to keep our focus on what's harmful, what could we do collectively about a certain issue to make sure that we're not artificially having this kind of both-sides-ism to conversations. We don't need to hear the other side when it comes to, is racism good, is racism bad? That's just useless. It's fundamentally antithetical to basic principles of democratic equality.
So, we need to be aware of what the issues are, where they're coming from. Are the points that people are making actually treating other people as if they deserve to be in the room? So you can't have, for example, a bunch of white supremacists saying, "Oh, we don't care what you have to say because you're less than." There's a lot of hard work that we need to do.
[01:12:05 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Yes, thanks for that. Santiago, perhaps I'll turn to you next. We've heard about some of these very longstanding issues as well as some of the influx of new age or newer challenges. But I'm so curious to hear, do the low rates of confidence in democracy, how does that compare against historical data? Is this a new phenomenon? Have we had periods of higher confidence in living memory, or is this an ongoing perennial issue that we've been facing on the planet?
[01:12:40 Santiago González appears full screen.]
Santiago González: I know very well the data on trust in public administrations. I will use proxy to satisfaction with democracy. The country that has the longest series is the United States that have 60, 70 years of measurement of leadership approval trust from the Pew Research Centre. And it's a very volatile indicator, but what you see there is that definitely there has been a decline. So, it goes from something like 60% in the 1950s, to 30% in the 2010, '16, '18, the latest I see. The precise figures are out there.
But I can also tell you what has happened over the past 15 years in the whole OECD. So, we had a low point in trust that came right after the global financial crisis. It took almost a decade to recover to pre-crisis level, and then we were hit by the COVID pandemic. And what happened during the pandemic is that trust actually increased.
So, we saw a spike in trust. That is what we know. We call it the "rallying around the flag effect" on the trust literature. But we are starting to see that this is actually fading away. This has faded away, and we are already seeing that trust is again in an average downward trend. So, we are starting to perceive again a decline in trust levels.
What I also think is important to acknowledge is that in this kind of trust concept, there is a family of things that are usually mixed together. There is what we call mistrust, that is healthy scrutiny that every democracy should have. You probably know this literature by Pippa Norris that says, "Trust, but verify". That is very, very popular now. But there is also distrust, which is these exit behaviours, people that are out of the system that are completely disconnected from democratic ways. And what we are seeing is that this is actually growing.
So, even if we have the average of trust levels that do not seem to decline as much, we do see much more of this distrust and kind of unhealthy behaviours associated with polarization, exit type of behaviours. So, even within that data, we have to scrape a little bit and dig deeper into what it is telling us.
But what I can tell you is that for countries for which we have data, yes, there is a decline. This is very volatile, but we see very worrisome signs.
[01:15:27 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much. I'm keeping a close eye on the time and so I'm going to ask, in closing, one question to the three of you, and I would welcome your answers in turn.
You're speaking to a group of public servants here from across the country, and so I would love to hear what is it that you want to share with us, as we work to help support various ministries and departments, what is it that you want us to know? Where do you see we can be changing the ways we do things to best address some of the challenges you've raised, as well as some of the opportunities you flagged?
Perhaps, Michael Mackenzie, I'll start with you on that one.
[01:16:16 Dr. Michael Mackenzie appears full screen.] Text on screen: Dr. Michael Mackenzie, Professor, Vancouver Island University.]
Dr. Michael Mackenzie: Sure, thank you. I think that's a great question.
So, following on some of what Anna's been saying, I really think when public servants work with government bureaucracies to do public engagement, the options and the decisions that people in the engagement processes are considering and the outcomes, the decisions that they make really have to be meaningful. Which means that you have to go into those processes upstream before decisions are made. And that, I think, is really where you build trust.
But I want to say something as well very quickly about the kind of trust that we want in a democratic system. We've been talking this session about declining levels of trust and we want more of it. And I agree. I think we do need more of it because when we're doing things together, we have to trust people to do things for us. And that's how we engage in collective action. So, we need more trust in democracies.
But we also don't want too much trust, or the wrong kind of trust. Democracies are predicated on a balance between warranted trust, that is trust when we have good reasons to trust, and warranted skepticism, where we're skeptical and critical when we have reasons to be skeptical or critical or distrusting.
And so, what we want people to do in a democratic system is occupy a space in between that – I call it trust agnosticism – where we're trusting when we have good reasons to trust, and we're distrusting when we have good reasons to distrust. So, if people are not trusting, we have to take that seriously. They may have very good reasons to not be trusting, and we have to address those reasons.
[01:18:13 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much. Dr. Drake, over to you next on same question to this room full of public servants. What is it that you want us to know and think about as we continue to work on behalf of Canadians?
[01:18:26 Dr. Anna Drake appears full screen. Text on screen: Dr. Anna Drake, Professor, University of Waterloo.]
Dr. Anna Drake: Thank you. I think that it's hard to build democratic infrastructure, but that would be useful moving forward with that particular mindset. Not only that we need to be pursuing the money necessary to support the projects that people are proposing, but also looking at ways to get started. Tangible ways to get started, I think we could look to kids in high school.
And a lot of the time, youth are just really neglected. Teenage girls are written off horrifically and pandered to. And this is the time when kids are learning about how the world works, about civics. There are civics classes. I teach a Democratic Theory and Practice fourth-year seminar at UW, and I ask them about their experience with civics that's changed since I was in high school in the '90s.
And the one thing that hasn't changed is that people say that it feels a bit like a joke. They don't respect what they're being taught. They don't feel as though they're being respected. And I think that we really need to be aware of that. And education – I realize that's a provincial responsibility – needs a redesign. But the way that we approach the potential, the democratic potential and the human potential of kids in high school, and making real lasting connections, and responding to the very legitimate concerns that they have and figuring out ways we might be able to have meaningful outreach.
And following through. If we're going to have community-based deliberation and engagement, do people know who they can talk to? Is there somebody or an office that they can go to where they will be heard, where they can follow through? Because if you give recommendations but then you never hear anything coming from it, then that's a way to kill trust, potential trust, right there. So, looking at it in terms of an ongoing process and relationship that needs work and effort, I think would be something that we can at least start to do. Thank you.
[01:20:35 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: Thanks so much. And the final word goes to our colleague from the OECD, Santiago, over to you. Same question to this group of public servants.
[01:20:44 Santiago González appears full screen.] Text on screen: Santiago González, Senior Economist & Analyst, Economic Co-operation and Development.]
Santiago González: Thanks a lot. Government at a Glance is written for public servants, so I will end where I started. I think the message is the following: build on the democratic strengths. Democracies are under threat but have proven to be resilient. They are surviving and they are the best system that we have.
So, build on these strengths, reinforce the key competencies that you need to address these democratic challenges, and protect against these threats that we see towards democracies. So, build, reinforce, protect.
[01:21:19 Ayesha Harij, Santiago González, Dr. Michael Mackenzie, and Dr. Anna Drake appear in video chat panels.]
Ayesha Harij: A perfect way for us to end. Thank you. On behalf of myself, and of the organizing team at the Canada School for Public Service, I'd like to thank all three of our speakers for adding such value to this conversation. We really welcomed all the points that you've made.
[01:21:47 Ayesha Harij appears full screen. Text on screen: Ayesha Harij, Director, Democracy Division, Global Affairs Canada.]
Ayesha Harij: A second thank you to all of the participants across the country who are listening in. If you are keen to learn more, and I saw that there was tons of questions, and if you're hoping to understand the challenges of democracy better as you face them at home or abroad, keep an eye on the school's website for future events in this series. This is one of an ongoing series of discussions. Please note that the speakers' presentations will be available in Brightspace under the resources section. But thank you again to everyone for participating. We hope you found this valuable. Thanks for joining and have a great day.
[01:22:16 CSPS animated logo appears.]
[01:22:21 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]
