More and more we give less and less thought or attention to the nature and reality of our Canadian democracy. We collectively assume that democracy has been achieved and we can get on with our lives. Canadian citizens and people around the globe, however, are fully justified in feeling disengaged, cynical, disillusioned, apathetic and skeptical about the state of our parliamentary democracy and the talking heads that reassure us that it exists. Parliamentary democracy is a staged form of English democracy that has evolved into capitalist democracy. It is democratic rule by the powerful economic and political elites with a number of innocent participants to complete the charade. This is not real democracy. Citizens everywhere are realizing that democracy is for all intents and purposes a sham. The word democracy is the most exploited word in the English language.  Anything can be justified if it is for democracy.

We live in what might be better termed a “demockracy” that makes a complete mockery of what should be a meaningful, substantive or deliberative democracy, terms that most Canadians are most likely unaware. A demockracy pretends to be a modern democracy by mouthing all the hollow platitudes associated with the ideal but never actually delivers them – public participation, equal rights and treatment, social justice, shared wealth and a prosperous economy. In reality demockracy is propaganda tool employed most recently by the neoconservative right to deliver nothing while claiming to deliver everything, all the while dismantling government. All the major right-wing political parties employ similar variations of this approach whether in power or in opposition. We could consider it ‘dictator lite.’ They govern for their own party once they are elected and use information gathered from their own party when making decisions, no matter how skewed this reality might be. With the extreme populism of Donald Trump these tendencies have become exacerbated. It is a grand performance carried out for the benefit of the public to pretend that we live in a true democracy.

In contrast a substantive democracy is fully and continuously participative, enacts legislation that delivers on social justice and equal rights issues and treats the private sector as a suspect enemy rather than a buddy and friend. Substantive democracies deliver mandatory legislation to govern every aspect of business not voluntary Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards. Business is incapable of taking care of its own business. In a substantive democracy politicians respond to what the majority of all Canadians desire from their government and know to be true, not what the partisan base wants. All three parties have trouble remembering this salient point.

Substantive democracy provides all citizens with the capacity to actively and directly influence their government on an continuous basis in contrast to representative democracy that relies on adversarial and confrontational partisan elected representatives to channel the wishes of the public through government. For example, in a substantive democracy politicians would employ social media to survey and gather direct feedback daily from constituents instead of using it for shallow social texting and self-absorption.

A similar concept called deliberative democracy is understood as a search for the common good governed by the concepts of inclusion, equality, reasonableness, and publicity. In a deliberative democracy, citizens must give one another reasons for their actions that all can accept. A deliberative democratic decision must include all parties as political equals in the decision both theoretically and practically and eliminate any hierarchical differences between the parties, employ an attitude of reasonableness towards the outcome, and the process must be a public one where participants hold each other accountable. A deliberative democracy requires not the first-past-the-post system that wastes votes but a system of proportional representation that values and distributes votes equally. Justin Trudeau rejected a key electoral platform of election reform when he realized it might reduce his chances to form government again.

In contrast, in the modern neoliberal democratic era we are told one thing while knowing full well that the opposite or something else is actually true. Our democracy is an anachronistic vestige of aristocratic privilege held over from medieval England as is our legal system and our courts. It is an imperialist legacy. Our system of representative parliamentary democracy with a first-past-the-post electoral system is unrepresentative except on Election Day and entrenches systemic and historic elite biases and privilege into the democratic structure of the Canadian government. The public’s awareness of the disingenuous nature of modern democracy reflects this in their lack of an inclination to vote in large numbers and their general apathy towards our political system that in reality works against their interests. Approximately half of the eligible voters do not exercise their democratic franchise yet the government and the main political parties express little concern about fixing the system which works in favour of elites. A right as important as voting should not be voluntary but mandatory as in Australia. The answer to this reality is often entrenched status quo resistance to change rather than active restructuring of the democratic process to make it more responsive.

We are living in the neoliberal era of constant attacks on government from the inside and the outside. It is characterized by constantly self-imposed economic austerity due to supposedly flagging economic conditions and the financial meltdown in 2008 that resulted in working people repaying the debts of Wall Street high rollers and Canadian banks who suffered no damage. We are repeatedly told that there is not enough money for social services, infrastructure spending, healthcare, education and debt repayment while corporations enjoy the highest level of profitability in the last century and the lowest taxes in history. Corporations are awash in unspent cash on their balance sheets yet employees are told to hold the line on wages and benefits. CEOs salaries have ballooned while real wages for families and workers have remained static for 40 years when adjusted for inflation. Around the world, the richest 1% possess a growing piece of the financial assets and the majority of the income that the world produces. According to a Credit Suisse 2014 Global Wealth Report the top 1% owned 46% of the world’s assets and the top 10% a full 86% of those same assets leaving the other 90% to share a paltry 14%. Recent reports show that this figure is only increasing. Thomas Piketty has also show that the bottom 50% have virtually nothing. In reality the declining standard of living is a result of the increasing wealth and profitability of the world’s rich corporations and  individuals and their constantly decreasing levels of taxation and well-paying jobs. The bond between employers and workers was to provide good-paying, stable, full-time jobs with healthcare and pensions. This bond has been broken with the advent of globalization. Governments and their citizens are paying the price and suffering the consequences of an rapidly decreasing wealth base from which to organize their societies. They need to demand that corporations rewrite their commitments to society. Taxing them in a progressive manner not only brings massive revenue to the government, but also snuffs our the greed factor in large investments and business. It is like drawing blood from a patient. The more blood that is drawn beyond the capacity of the person to replace the more the patient will deteriorate and finally die. Governments everywhere are on life support due to the increasing lack of support of neoliberal governments. The private sector would have us believe that governments are intrusive, bureaucratic and wasteful. They recommend a de-regulated, low-tax, low social service society in which the private sector has a free hand to provide services and goods as the alternative. They have had this for the last thirty years and it is a dismal failure, another ruse perpetrated by the private sector. Capitalism has been a dismal failure since its inception and must be abandoned.

We should think very carefully about what these developments actually mean. What is happening is that democracy is becoming a demockracy and is being replaced by private sector government that is not accountable nor concerned about the state of the public or the earth and is only driven by a profit motive. We are heading towards a no-pay, no service society were billions will be cut out of the wealth of humanity while bearing the entire social costs of the damage that has been done. If we continue to let industrialization run amok everyone loses. Governments need mandatory cradle-to-grave recycling programs and we need to stop using the world’s waterways as a toilet. We are returning to the era of Marie Antoinette in France where there were 98% peasants and 2% uber rich. There was no middle class. We should all remember that we still pay taxes whether to our government or the private sector – the latter are called profits and we have no control or knowledge of the details or priorities of these taxes due to privacy laws. We need commercial transparency laws instead. In contrast to substantive or deliberative democracy, corporate democracy will be based on the ability to pay with little recourse to those who cannot. It is driven by self-interest rather than the public interest. To change this requires fundamental and sweeping changes to the capitalist economic system starting with wealth distribution and profit. Capitalism is an out of control, authoritarian, unforgiving, predatory economic system that is run by authoritarian, unforgiving and predatory leaders. Capitalism cares for no one. Adam Smith once said that it would take five hundred poor people to make one man rich under his system. That number is now ballooned to a hundred thousand. We need to get rid of capitalism to succeed.

To end the era of demockracy will require massive and deep-structure change in society that reforms our patriarchal, autocratic, overlord system and creates a system for all people. There is already enough food to feed everyone, clothes to clothe everyone and shelter to cover everyone – what we need to do is to structure our society in a way that distributes that equitably while using the earth and its bounty responsibly. We must stop the ‘exploitation’ society and begin the ‘sharing’ society. Then we will finally have a real democracy built on a real economy.