Democracy
Thinking Outside the Ballot Box, Brigette DePape
DePape and Barlow
On September 22, 2011, the Council of Canadians launched Brigette DePape’s report ‘
Thinking Outside the Ballot Box: How People Power Can Stop the Harper Agenda and Create Fundamental Change‘. The engaging 24-page report can be read in
English or
French.
In the report, DePape writes, “When a government’s agenda does not reflect the true values of its people – as is the case with the Harper government – it is up to every one of us to act to stop it. As Henry David Thoreau explained in his classic 1849 text titled Civil Disobedience, people have a duty not to permit their governments to overrule their consciences, and to not stand by while government makes them agents of injustice. As citizens of Canada during the Harper majority, we are agents of injustice so long as we are silent.”
Former senate page Brigette DePape held a ‘Stop Harper’ sign during the Governor-General’s reading of the Throne Speech on Friday, June 3. 2011 and lost her job for doing so. The Council of Canadians' chairperson Maude Barlow spoke with her that Saturday, offered her our solidarity, and later that week we agreed to support the writing of this report.
Stephen Harper's Hitlist: Power, process and the assault on democracy
Author and Rabble.ca columnist Murray Dobbin details the harm Prime Minister Stephen Harper is doing to the political and social fabric of Canada in a new, hard-hitting essay commissioned by the Council of Canadians titled Harper’s Hitlist: Power, Process and the Assault on Democracy.
As Dobbin explains in the opening paragraphs of the essay, “This study is intended to examine the most serious violations of democracy committed by the prime minister and his government. Some are clearly more serious than others. But taken as a whole they add up to a dangerous undermining of our democratic traditions, institutions and precedents – and politics. These violations are not accidental, they are not incidental, and they are not oversights or simply the sign of an impatient government or ‘decisive’ leadership. They are a fundamental part of Harper’s iron-fisted determination to remake Canada, whether Canadians like it or not.”
Harper’s Hitlist: Power, Process and the Assault on Democracy
Download report here 1 MB or in sections below:
POLL: Environics, on behalf of the Council of Canadians, polled people about their feelings about proportional representation in February. Here are the results:
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61% of Canadians support moving to a system of proportional representation in Parliament
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36% said they were more supportive of proportional representation as a result of Prime Minister Harper’s recent prorogations
(These results represent the findings of a telephone survey conducted among a
national random sample of 1,001 adults comprising 501 males and 500 females 18
years of age and older, living in Canada. The margin of error for a sample of this size is +/- 3.10%, 19 times out of 20.)
MEDIA: New hard-hitting report details Prime Minister’s ‘assault on Democracy’, April 15, 2010
About the Author
Murray Dobbin has been a freelance journalist, broadcaster and author for thirty-five years. He is also a leading activist and analyst in the movement against corporate globalization. He has written extensively on various trade agreements and their impact on democracy and on neo-liberalism’s attack on social programs. He is a past executive board member of the Council of Canadians and author of Word Warriors, an online activism tool hosted on the Council’s website at www.canadians.org.
