Real democracy achieved

Page 4

Preston Manning talked the talk and then walked the walk in Calgary in late June and it cost him. Believe it or not - we commend him for taking a rare risk.

To prove he sincerely believes government in this country should be (to borrow an American axiom) of the people, for the people and by the people, Manning introduced direct democracy - a very unusual concept in Canadian politics - to the Canadian Alliance Party leadership process by allowing grassroots participation. By surrendering his control, by not ensuring that the hands on the levers of power belonged only to a few select insiders, he risked losing his power and position as leader of the Official Opposition.

Of course, that's what happened. The people have spoken and, for better or for worse, Stockwell Day will lead Manning's party for the foreseeable future. But if Manning had continued the colonial-style, indirect application of democracy that has long been practiced by the Canadian establishment, he would never have considered taking the chance in the first place.

The two Indigenous peoples, the ancient Greeks and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), that get the credit for creating the concept we now call democracy, dealt with small, manageable populations and could easily employ direct participatory democracy.

In the more recent past, vast distances and large population numbers have taken direct democracy away from grassroots people. A pure form of democracy - where all the members of the community gather to debate and decide all the issues of the day - is hard to work in a large community. But today's technology makes it workable. Despite the glitches, the Alliance proved that with their call-in vote, people from the far reaches of Canada could contribute.

Elders and traditional people tell us that the band council system parallels the Canadian system where patronage and secret back room deals grease the machinery of government. They say elected chiefs act just like their non-Native counterparts and that's the root cause of a lot of the unrest in First Nations. Fully accountable governments will stem a lot of that unrest and it seems to us that complete accountability can best be accomplished by complete participation.

That means - if they want to live up to the spirit of their words regarding accountability - the chiefs can no longer keep the national chief selection process as their personal plaything.

We say there's definitely no excuse for excluding the grassroots people at the band level. Most First Nations are small enough to include all the people all the time. And now that the Alliance has proven it can work at the national level, there's no excuse for the AFN to continue to exclude the grassroots. This should be the last election where only chiefs select the national chief.