Dragging the people along
As I pointed out in my recent post , democracy is not so easy to measure. The sine qua non of democracy is generally felt to be "free and fair elections". But that begs quite a few questions: Can you have "free and fair" elections without freedom of the press? How was the list of candidates assembled? Is wealth a precondition for running? Have there been any implicit or explicit threats conditional on the outcome? But there's a lot more to democracy that elections ("free and fair" or otherwise). Elected representatives should be responsive to their constituents' concerns. When those concerns are consistently ignored, there is clearly a problem. This has been just the case with Canadian public opinion on the war in Afghanistan. According to public opinion polling conducted by The Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV News, since the summer of 2006, a majority of Canadians have opposed sending troops to Afghanistan. In the poll of Janu...