Review by John Pepall
The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. Andrew Coyne. Sutherland House, 2025.
Originally published in the print edition, Autumn 2025, pp. 3-11.
MANY PEOPLE IN THE United States, and around the world, think that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Andrew Coyne does. (“Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator. Can he be stopped?” Globe & Mail, Aug. 29, 2025.) Coyne also thinks that, unbeknown to most of us, and without a villain like Trump, democracy in Canada is in crisis.
Coyne is perhaps the most prominent political commentator in English Canada. Over thirty years ago he won National Newspaper Awards two years in a row for editorial writing at The Globe and Mail. He joined The National Post at its start up in 1998, decamped to Maclean’s from 2007 to 2011, returned to The Post, and then returned to The Globe in 2019. He has been appearing on “At Issue” on the CBC’s The National since 2007.
I first met Coyne at the Idler Pub in Toronto in 1987. He kindly agreed to interview me at the launch of my book Against Reform in 2010. He came with a well worn copy of the book and sheets of notes on yellow foolscap. While we agreed on some important things, he was unmovable on others.
Though he writes “Until I began research for this book, I don’t think I fully appreciated how badly things had deteriorated,” in May 2015 he and I participated in a Macdonald-Laurier Institute debate on his motion that “Canada’s democracy is in crisis.” He touched then on most of the topics he touches on in The Crisis of Canadian Democracy.
While many commentators have patent political, even partisan, biases, and others strive to be impartial and understanding towards the people whose work they cover, Coyne stands out as a severe moralist, regularly outraged by the manifold sins and wickedness of our politicians. He also has a habit of convicting them of grave crimes without due process.
Though always a staunch and cogent defender of a market economy and consequently supposed by many to be a conservative, Coyne has never been partisan. He endorsed the Liberals in 2011, while at Maclean’s, and in 2015 had to step aside as comment editor at The National Post when he endorsed the NDP while the paper was endorsing the Conservatives.
Coyne writes that most of our Prime Ministers have been scoundrels, including Macdonald, Laurier, and Mackenzie King. By his account, politicians are generally dishonest, corrupt, and craven.
He doesn’t think much of us voters either, as we fall for politicians’ false promises and lies, and are too forgiving of their corruption. And those disenchanted with what our politicians give us, like the Freedom Convoy, he has dismissed as “yobs.”
In his opening chapter Coyne writes of Canada “it is debatable whether it should still be called a democracy.” When it may have ceased to be a democracy he never says.
He proceeds to set out several ways in which in which we imagine our democracy should work, and, fondly, suppose it does, including:
• Elections are contested by candidates selected by their fellow party members in competitive local nomination races;
• The candidates compete for voters’ approval, in part on the basis of their party identification and differing programs of government, in part on their individual qualities;
• Everyone gets a vote and every vote counts equally;
• Voters are free to mark their ballot for the party and candidate of their choice;
• The majority rules;
• Members of Parliament, once elected, propose, debate, scrutinize, and vote on bills, mind the public’s money, and generally hold the government to account;
and then argues that it doesn’t.
Candidates he writes are chosen by “little putsches, stacking meetings with busloads of new recruits whose memberships may well have been purchased for them” or “simply appointed … by the party leader. … all candidates are essentially the leader’s appointees.”
There is a contradiction here. Where there are hotly contested nominations, with busloads of new members or not, the party leader is not appointing the candidate.
Few journalists, or political scientists, have worked in riding level politics, as I have. In many ridings the issue is finding anyone who is prepared to run. The riding executive looks about. Party headquarters may have a suggestion, but the leader is likely not involved. In such ridings the candidate is not expected to win, but sometimes they do.
In promising ridings there may be a contest, or there may be a “star” candidate the riding association is happy to acclaim. Where there is a contest, the “putsches” Coyne describes are rare. And where there is one the winner may well be the best candidate. The theory that a nomination contest is a good test of a candidate’s organizing abilities and appeal is oversold, but there is some truth to it.
Coyne is leery of any party control of the nomination process, preferring to leave it to the little platoons in the ridings. The requirement that party leaders sign off on nominations is an artifact of election finance laws, and the inclusion of party names on the ballot, which only started in 1970. But surely it is only reasonable that parties should be able to say that Jane Snooks is indeed the party’s candidate in Maple River. If everything were left to the riding associations there would be a serious risk of entryism.
COYNE, WHO HAS plainly bulled up on several topics to write his book, would have done well to look into candidate selection in Britain. There, the main parties centrally select candidates who may then seek a constituency whose local members will adopt them. Traditionally a candidate might be taken on in a constituency where they had no hope of winning before finding a more promising seat and going on to a long time in Parliament.
“Political science” has made little contribution to the understanding of how candidates should be chosen and the role of the “grassroots” in politics. The parties have every incentive to get the best candidates in the most orderly fashion. They should be left to do that.
In the end according to Coyne it doesn’t much matter who the candidates are because, if they are elected, they are only there “to do as they are told, speak as they are told, vote as they are told.” Canada’s unusually strict party discipline renders them ciphers.
This is typical of Coyne’s hyperbole running from the title of his book through to the end. Mightn’t MPs actually think their party is best, its policies sound, people worth defending, legislation worth voting for? People don’t go into politics as individual think tanks with policies on every subject that they are keen to promote. They have a general leaning, left, right, or centre, and a sense that their gang are good sorts. They know that they are not so many little dictators who can legislate, tax, and spend as they wish, and have to support what their fellows in their party support.
Coyne seems to think that MPs should be regularly introducing legislation, and breaking with their party on votes, with government MPs asking ministers pointed questions and rebelling and defeating government legislation. Though he professes to champion Westminster parliamentary government, he seems at times to envision MPs acting like US congressmen. Though, as Yuval Levin has pointed out, in the US Congress most are no longer interested in legislating, preferring to appear on TV, and accumulate followers on social media, while with the slimmest of majorities Republicans can be whipped into line to support Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, while Democrats are unanimous in opposing it.
What goes on in party caucuses is rightly confidential, but there is regular reporting that the government is reacting to discontent in its caucus. Canada’s ambiguous position on the war between Israel and Hamas has been explained as an attempt to find a balance between the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian elements in the Liberal caucus. It cannot be supposed that it springs from the mind of Justin Trudeau, or Mark Carney.
Coyne then proceeds to ground where he and I are in agreement, the election of party leaders, and correctly goes back to the Liberal leadership convention of 1919 when Mackenzie King became Leader of the Liberal Party. The circumstances were unusual. The Liberal Party had split between those who had joined Borden’s Union government in 1917 and those who had remained loyal to Laurier. It wasn’t clear who the Liberal MPs were. (See The Dorchester Review Vol. 12, No. 2, Autumn-Winter 2022, p. 59.)
The choice of leaders by party conventions, and then late in the last century by a mass of party members, and finally, with the Liberals, mere “supporters” became the norm. Those whom the party had elected only the party could eject. But the party electorate who chose the leader had vanished.
The principal responsibility of an MP is to support a government, or to oppose it, offering an alternative government. Neither the MPs, nor the public, nor the media, seem capable of understanding this basic fact. MPs have no legal, constitutional, or moral responsibility to support a leader one minute longer than they don’t think there is someone else who could do better, rather the contrary. They may think that there is not enough support for a change of leader and have to bide their time. But they should be thinking about it and pressing their case all the time.
Coyne adverts to the happier examples of Britain and Australia. In Britain MPs in the Conservative Party were able to replace their leader four times in seven years only slightly delayed by foolish provisions for party members’ votes. In Australia Prime Ministers were “spilt” four times this century when the governing party’s MPs voted to replace them.
COYNE IS KEEN on Michael Chong’s Reform Act, which provides, after party adoption at the commencement of a Parliament, for the removal of a party leader by the caucus. It received enthusiastic press when Chong was promoting it. Erin O’Toole was removed as Conservative leader under its provisions. But it provides that “the party” will choose a new leader and effectively compounds the problem of extra-parliamentary leadership selection rather than ending it. O’Toole would have been gone soon enough without it.
Each Liberal MP and NDP MP is personally responsible for our having had to groan through the last years of Justin Trudeau, and the prorogation and the Carney coronation that ended them.
From this one national obtuseness, shared by the media, “political science,” and politicians, stem most of the problems that Coyne sees, “elective dictatorship,” strict party discipline, lack of accountability.
In a chapter entitled “Unelected vs. Elected” Coyne deals with the Senate and the courts.
He indulges his hyperbole by denouncing the old Senate as shamefully corrupt. In fact, as Senators had lifetime tenure, changed to age 75 in 1965, and were usually quite well off, they were less open to corruption than most politicians. What they were was party faithful, with very few cross-bench exceptions. Though with the passage of time, and their tenure, they acquired some independence. Until the Reform Party’s absurd agitation for a Triple E Senate, they were mostly harmless, and occasionally useful. When, as happened several times, there was an opposition majority in the Senate, it was restrained by the party, which did not want to be seen as thwarting the will of the voters who had elected another party majority in the Commons. Only when the opposition party thought they had popular backing did they try to thwart the Commons, the last time in ridiculous opposition to the GST in 1990.
Justin Trudeau’s Senate stupidities have given us a Senate from which the Liberals can disclaim responsibility as there are supposedly no Liberals in the Senate, while it has been packed with progressives empowered by what Coyne sharply calls the “mandate of virtue.” How Poilievre would have dealt with them we sadly shall not see.
From inveighing against the unelected Senate Coyne passes to worshipping the unelected Supreme Court of Canada and The Charter. A complete naïf he writes
The Supreme Court is a specialized, highly trained body whose mandate is limited to comparing one law with another, in accordance with precedent and guided by centuries of rigorous legal thinking.
This is the popular misconception. Judges are really smart people who studied for years and are “learned in the law” and they decide cases as they have to based on “the law,” which they learned in law school. I went to law school. On the finer points of mortgage law judges may be doing what people think they do. But with The Charter they’re doing what they like. The Charter, as “supreme law” flies in the face of a basic rule of statutory interpretation, that the specific overrules the general. With The Charter the vague language, and on the most fashionable jurisprudence, the principles imagined behind the language, rule.
Coyne argues that it’s all democratic because Parliament, and the provincial assemblies, except for Quebec’s, voted for it. But it was actually Parliament at Westminster that passed the Constitution Act, including The Charter, and, ceding all further authority over Canada, left us, at our request, with impractical provisions for amendment. The fundamental principle of parliamentary government is the Supremacy of Parliament. That supremacy was extinguished in 1982 leaving the Supreme Court of Canada the Supremes. To paraphrase Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and supreme power corrupts supremely.”
Some Premiers with a vestigial respect for the Supremacy of Parliament and democracy insisted on the inclusion of the Notwithstanding Clause. If at the time some said it would rarely be used, few outside law schools envisaged how much power the Supreme Court of Canada would arrogate to itself.
COYNE RANTS THAT the Notwithstanding Clause “reveals itself in all its thuggish particulars. … It’s about denying specific rights to specific groups of people, usually unpopular minorities, sexual, religious, or linguistic.” He seems to think we had no rights before 1982. The Charter added nothing to our rights. It only gave power to the courts. And encouraged a “totalitarianism of rights” under which every issue that once was open to public debate and democratic decision has now become a question of “rights” to be settled by the courts, Parliament be damned. Under the Charter regime almost any issue can be taken out of the hands of politicians and out of public debate.
As I write, a judge has held that bike lanes in Toronto are a Charter right. In The Globe, Coyne defends the decision writing
The issue at stake in the bicycle lanes case is disarmingly simple: does the government have the right to kill you? It is not hyperbole but demonstrable, probabilistic fact that banning bike lanes will sentence a certain number of randomly selected Torontonians to death, and cause serious injuries to still more.
This is hyperbole. The implication is that provinces have a constitutional duty to assure there are bike lanes on every city street. The “demonstrable, probabilistic fact” he claims is based on “evidence” from “multiple expert sources.” This is not evidence like the accused’s fingerprints on the gun in a murder trial. It is the opinions of people like the judge’s brother, a transportation consultant who pioneered bike lanes in Toronto over 50 years ago. It is the stuff of democratic political debate. Coyne contends the government has no “basis in evidence or logic” for removing the bike lanes. It has plenty, and popular support. Were there not popular support, the bike lane advocates could have pressed their case with the voters, but the Charter is expressly designed to deny voters what they may want.
COYNE WRITES, “Nothing in the decision obliges the government to build new bicycle lanes. As such it involves no ‘positive rights,’ which conservatives are right to oppose.”
It is true that the courts have resisted finding positive rights, but it is a live issue in law schools, and what is the logic in saying that governments can’t remove bike lanes because people will be killed but can refuse to build more while people are being killed where there are none? The line between positive and negative can be blurred, as when the BC Supreme Court recently barred the city of Prince George from dismantling a homeless encampment until it had provided alternative accommodation.
He sneers at those in Nova Scotia who proposed a Charter challenge of the government’s ban on entering forests. He calls them conservatives and apoplectic, as he does those — like me? — who see the bike lane decision as an extreme example of judicial interference in democratic politics. I myself am uneasy with those like the Canadian Constitution Foundation who invoke The Charter from a conservative perspective. I cringe when people speak of Charter rights. There are common law rights, which served us well until 1982. And there is democratic politics. They are enough.
The “rule of law” is rightly seen as essential to liberal democracy, but in the last 50 years it has increasingly been replaced by the rule of judges. Even without charter-like documents, as in Britain where the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom staged a judicial coup over prorogation in 2019, judges have continually seized more power. Law professors, and many lawyers, assure us that this is as it should be, and that the highly trained specialists will see us right. It’s all a great con, and some day people may see through it. Should that happen the rule of law may collapse, and it will be judges who caused the collapse. We shall be thrown back to the jurisprudence of the Nazi Carl Schmitt. The courts are an increasing threat to democracy, but it has not yet reached a crisis.
In a chapter entitled “Campaigns” Coyne suggests rules he fancies would make politics less rotten.
He is particularly exercised about attack ads: “They pollute debate, and coarsen the culture.” Is it really worse that politicians attack their opponents than that they boast about themselves, about how they care deeply about each of us, hear our concerns, understand our lives with deep sympathy and stand ready to assure us prosperity and happiness? If it’s a question of truth, there is likely more truth to attack ads than to politicians’ boasting.
Falling prey to privacy paranoia, Coyne claims that for purposes of targeting voters through micro-media “information on individual voters is increasingly being compiled into individual psychological profiles.” He has been misinformed.
Fifty or more years ago lists of voters in one’s poll were posted on lamp posts so people could check that they were on the voters list, and perhaps that dead people, or non-citizens were not. Now parties and candidates are provided with voter lists, and updated as people vote in advance polls, or on election day. Surely it is only right that politicians should know who the voters are. They can collate that information with publicly available demographics, and web searches, to assess where best to deploy their campaign resources. Data whizzes may make big claims for how they can work the data, but their claims are no more reliable than politicians’ claims.
IN 2003 COYNE and I were scheduled to debate my proposition that there should be no election finance laws. My argument is that such laws are based on false premises, and have many bad unintended consequences. The most obvious is that they favour incumbents. An MP running for reelection has name recognition, and has had taxpayer funded communications with the voters, and a constituency office to curry favour with the voters, while any challenger has to start from scratch.
The principal premise of election finance laws, which only really started in the 1960s, was that it was unfair that wealthy people might have an advantage in elections if their spending was not limited. History is littered with examples of wealthy people going down to defeat.
Election finance laws vary from country to country, and province to province, and have been changed many times over the decades. When I was a candidate in the 1990 Ontario election, and a riding association president, much of my time was spent in reporting on the few thousand dollars we had.
Coyne is much concerned by what he sees as the unfairness of some people being able to contribute cumulatively thousands of dollars to candidates, parties, leadership candidates, riding associations, and third party intervenors in elections, and suggests a $1,000 total limit on what each of us could give to any such. He thinks this would reduce political contributions and that would be a good thing because too much is spent on campaigns. What does he know?
A fundamental problem with election finance laws is that they attempt to limit specific spending on specific activities, at specific times in our politics. Historically, many newspapers were founded by politicians to promote their party. While media today have obvious leanings, they are not explicitly party organs. But they are arguably a more important influence on voters than politicians struggling to get a sound bite out. Coyne, who regularly reaches hundreds of thousands from The Globe, and on the CBC, has vastly greater sway on our politics than all but a few politicians, and some parties. Should a law be passed to make him shut up, at least during elections?
Coyne would also mandate several leaders debates, organized by “a truly independent debates commission.” What can he mean by that? How should we assure that the commission had “the mandate of virtue?” The debates would become “the core of the modern campaign, the spine along which they are conducted.” More likely more debates would mean smaller audiences, as small as the CBC’s “At Issue.”
Politics is a continual debate. When Mélanie Joly speaks in Montreal on Tuesday and Melissa Lantsman in Toronto on Wednesday they are debating. Politicians are continually debating in Parliament. To have the party leaders debate in whatever format during an election is a gross distortion of our politics. It reinforces the ascendancy of party leaders that both Coyne and I condemn. The endless controversy over who gets to be in the debates results from the distortion. If you are genuinely undecided and think that by watching leaders debates you will have good grounds to make up your mind, you have not been following politics and might better not vote at all.
Coyne is perhaps the most vocal proponent of electoral reform, scil. proportional representation, in Canada. As I demonstrated in my book, which he read fifteen years ago, and again in papers for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Fraser Institute, proportional representation is destructive of democracy and fundamentally misconceived. Coyne’s argument is a perfect petitio principi, pointing out the obvious fact that we do not have proportional representation, as if we thought we did and there is some mistake, and never explaining why we should want it. He concludes that “Our elections, then, routinely and openly violate bedrock principles of democracy…” So we have never been a democracy. And though that is obvious to Coyne, we are all such chumps that we think we are!
Without repeating my demonstration of the fundamental misconceptions of electoral reform, which can easily be found on the web, I ask where Coyne thinks PR is working its wonders? Germany, where the declining old parties fight elections only to enter a coalition? Spain, Israel, Belgium? Coyne dismisses all accounts of the dysfunction caused by PR as “horror stories” that a surprising number of “otherwise well-informed people believe.” I like to think he counts me among the well-informed. But his account of how swimmingly politics goes with PR is a raft of misinformation.
To take just one example, he writes that since 1945 “The citizens of Norway have thrown the bums out nine times.” No they haven’t. Only three times has the government changed as a result of an election. The other six times the government changed because of a realignment of the parties between elections.
As it is fundamentally misconceived, PR comes in many versions. In Italy, after 46 unhappy years under one of the strictest forms of PR, they have gone through, the last time I checked, five different versions, rejigged to advantage one party or another and in the hope of having a government lasting more than a year.
Coyne’s choice is the most complicated: the Single Transferable Vote, where voters in multi-member constituencies rank the candidates. STV is not strictly PR, but tends to produce it. Like all ranked or preferential voting, it breaches monotonicity, the principle that your vote should increase the chances of your choice winning. Under STV your vote, or higher preference, for a candidate may actually decrease their chance of winning. Electoral reform can get highly technical, which helps its proponents to ignore its faults.
An argument for PR specific to Canada is that our elections give a misleading impression of Quebec and Alberta. Because the Conservatives struggle in Quebec, and the Liberals in Alberta, we are supposed to get a false impression of those provinces. Coyne suggests that if under PR in 1980 the Liberals had got seats in Alberta, and had not got 74 of the 75 seats in Quebec, the National Energy Program, and Patriation, would not have passed. I assume he was against the NEP, but in favour of Patriation and its Big Beautiful Charter.
This is nonsense. Quebec nationalism is real, as is Alberta’s alienation. They are not artifacts of the electoral system.
COYNE'S FINAL SUGGESTION is that we should adopt compulsory voting, like they have in Australia. He continually frets about low voter turnout, explaining it in part by our failure to adopt PR, though the evidence of higher turnout under PR is poor. In New Zealand, which sadly adopted PR after its 1993 election, average turnout with PR has been lower than it had been without it.
In 2015, when he was still at the National Post, Coyne wrote a column fretting about the prospect of less than 60% voting in the upcoming election. In the event the turnout was above 68%. He wrote that compulsory voting was“a concept requiring more space to explain than I have.” In fact it’s quite simple. In Australia, there is a small fine for not voting, and you can be excused if you’re sick, or travelling. Our Australian cousins have made important contributions, as pioneers of the secret ballot, and land registration, but compulsory voting is not one of them.
Compulsory voting makes democracy totalitarian, conscripting citizens to the polls. We have a right, not a duty to vote. We should vote according to our thinking and interest. If we are not thinking, or not interested, we should do better not to vote. Australians dragged to the polls, probably sort out roughly as their more interested mates do. Roughly 5% spoil their ballots, a much higher proportion than in countries without compulsory voting.
Coyne addresses dozens of other supposed flaws in our political institutions and practices, including the desks in the House of Commons, which he plausibly argues inhibit the engagement of MPs.
The book is one long attack ad, screaming “A plague on all your houses.” And despite many charts, and 187 endnotes, there is as much misinformation as in the discourse of the average politician. The accounts of the Senator Mike Duffy expenses and the SNC/Lavalin scandals are way off. The account of the role of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Canada’s constitutional law, and the reasons for ending appeals to it are simply wrong. (See The Dorchester Review Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn-Winter 2011, p. 53.)
Most democracies are in a mess. They run from feckless and unpopular governments like those in Britain, France, or Germany, to popular/populist authoritarian governments in Hungary, Turkey, or the US. Any crises in democracies result not from the institutions, but from a politics in which winning elections is more important than governing well, in which the vocation of politics has been taken over by celebrities and political operatives, and in which the noise runs from a woke left to a resentful populist right that has turned on all that was once conservative.
There is no crisis of Canadian democracy. Canada is facing several crises, but it is not its historic institutions, including its sound democracy that have produced these. It is partly trends across the democratic world, and challenges such as the rise of China and the decline of the US, migration, and, yes, climate change. In Canada it is the historically confused and feeble national discourse. With our democracy, as with the best computers, it is “garbage in, garbage out.”
If our leaders of opinion were prepared to accept Justin Trudeau as leader of the historic “natural governing party,” and then Prime Minister for nine years as normal politics, with only a few jibes, ignore Quebec’s nationalism, fall for the mass graves hoax, accept with complacency our self-accusation of genocide, cheer on Carney to Prime Minister without any attempt to tell us who he is, take The Charter as holy writ, and the Supreme Court of Canada as its high priests, look on with bemusement as the hate lobby attacked Macdonald and the rest — then no reform of our political institutions and practices to make them better than best can save us.
Most profoundly we have difficulty answering the questions of who we are, and why Canada should exist. In a recent interview supposed to reflect on the 60th anniversary of the publication of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation Coyne admitted that it was a long time since he had read it and dismissed Grant as wanting to return to a pre-industrial society. He rejected attempts to distinguish us from Americans and professed a “civic nationalism” of which the US was the best example. The obvious question was not asked: Why shouldn’t Canada become the 51st state?
Coyne said that Canada had become more interesting and diverse since the sixties, these interesting and diverse people drawn together by what we believe in. Really? What would that be? The Charter? I don’t believe in The Charter. Should I be deported? What draws people to Canada, apart from money, is obscure. Many who have come have brought with them intense nationalisms, just not Canadian nationalism.
He seems to think that the problem of separatism that emerged in the sixties is behind us. He evidently has not read my essay in these pages arguing that it is worse than ever, approaching a crisis. (“Canada Adrift,” Vol. 13, No. 1 (2023) p. 14.) Coyne, like me, does not believe Quebec has a right to separate. But it is not up to us. As a country we seem to have given them the right to separate.
Early this century Coyne took leave from the Post to write a book about Canada. He found an apartment in Manhattan to concentrate his thoughts. The book never appeared. This is his first book. At heart he is a patriot. He is, in David Goodhart’s words, a Somewhere rather than an Anywhere like Michael Ignatieff and Mark Carney. He knows Canada well, including its history and art. He wants the best for Canada. Even wants Canada to be best. But he cannot conceive it except in terms of economics, on which he is at his best — I used to think of him as “the Economist” — and universal rights, about which he hasn’t a clue, and which are expressly designed to trammel democracy. He has difficulty seeing our life together as anything beyond getting and spending. And universal rights that are not specific to Canada and are imposed on what democracy the courts may allow.
Coyne has an avocation as a fine stand up comic. But he seems to have lost much of his sense of humour. The Crisis of Canadian Democracy is a poor joke.
Originally published in the print edition, Autumn 2025, pp. 3-11.