For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

I vividly remember my first snow fall. We had just arrived in Canada, fresh off the plane in 1987. It was the first time I saw downtown Montreal. We were standing on Sherbrooke, padded with synthetic warmth in our puffed out jackets. The snow fell slowly. Little flakes of culture shock.

A couple years later, I was immersed in a new language, speaking a mixture of British English (from my schooling in Dubai) and French (with a battered Quebecois accent), maintaining Arabic at home. It was the early-’90s. The “Mother of All Battles” waged in Iraq, and I lived in a neighbourhood that wasn’t the brownest in town. I don’t know what changed me more: experiencing war through the xenophobia that comes with the conquest of a nation, or watching it on a television.

School bullying taught me I could be stronger than my physical presence. The constant pulling of my roots and my ethnicity, the jokes, the graffiti, the TV, the kids pushed me to be funny. It made me want to laugh at people, not with them, about how they feel about Iraqis, Arabs, Muslims, The Other.

By 2000, while studying Political Science and Communication Studies at Concordia, I started to dabble in song, using the university facilities to record at night. Then, a year into expanding my darkest and deepest thoughts into music, came another media war. September 11, 2001 was a tipping point for many in North America, and doubly so for those of us who are Iraqi Muslim boys and girls.

Fast-forward to today, and the events of the last two months have shaken my faith in humanity—and yet also affirmed the importance of placing hope in my children’s future paths. It is extremely difficult to watch the hijacking of our religion. It is more painful to scroll through social media feeds on my iPhone and see children weeping over their parents, and parents weeping over their dead children. I don’t know where to place all the injustice we experience third-hand. The news cycle is so quick. Two-hundred-and-fifty-eight dead in Baghdad. A police officer’s bullet deletes a young Black man from this Earth, streamed on Facebook Live. We are living in the most visible and blind times ever. Our choices will resonate even faster and longer into the future. The healing of our combined history is up to us—just having the conversation isn’t enough.

Canada, I bid you the best of peace, the hardest of self-reflection, and the sincerest of honesty on our history. I would like (and unlike) to believe that we are at a tipping point, yet again. The mistakes of our previous leaders must be accounted for, to help us understand the by-products of violence that today plague us. Our appointed leaders should be held accountable in a court of law, just like any citizen who wants a true and free democracy. As we move forward into the future, we must decide whether we want to pave the way to violence or build the world in peace.

A World War Free is possible—if we want it.

Illustration by Matt Daley

If students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to a Canadian classroom to continue their lessons with new teachers and a new curriculum, would they be able to tell the difference? I do not ask this question facetiously. It seems plausible that a good lesson in multiplication, chemistry, or a foreign language might seem equally at home in many parts of the world. The children in your local school probably learn how to read and write, just like students do in, say, North Korea or China. Students in your local school might learn to add numbers, do fractions, and solve algebraic equations. But that’s what students in Uzbekistan learn too. Maybe students in your local school learn not to hit one another, to follow the rules, and not to break any laws. They might sing the national anthem and learn about asteroids and the life cycle of the glowworm. I know of schools in Eritrea and Belarus that do those things too. So what would be different about teaching and learning in a Canadian school than in the schools of a country governed by a one-ruling-party dictatorship?

Do students in democratic countries like Canada learn how to participate in public decision making? Are they taught to see themselves as individual actors who work in concert with others to create a better society? Are they taught the skills they need to think for themselves and to govern collectively? Most of us would like to believe that they do. We expect that schools in Canada teach students the skills and dispositions needed to evaluate for themselves the benefits and drawbacks of particular policies and government practices. Democratic citizens should be committed to the people, principles, and values that underlie democracy—such as political participation, free speech, civil liberties, and social equality.

Yet, teaching and learning do not always conform to democratic goals and ideals. Research colleagues and I have conducted over the past decade reveals a clear and troubling trend: much of current education reform is limiting the ways teachers can develop the kinds of attitudes, skills, knowledge, and habits necessary for a democratic society to flourish. In fact, the goals of K-12 education have been shifting steadily away from preparing active and engaged public citizens and towards more narrow goals of career preparation and individual economic gain. Pressures from parents, school boards, and a broad cultural shift in educational priorities have resulted in schools across North America being seen primarily as conduits for individual success, and, increasingly, lessons aimed at exploring democratic responsibilities have been crowded out.

In many boards and provinces, ever more narrow curriculum frameworks emphasize preparing students for standardized assessments in math and literacy at the same time that they shortchange the social studies, history, and citizenship education. Moreover, there is a “democratic divide” in which higher achieving students, generally from wealthier neighborhoods, are receiving a disproportionate share of the kinds of citizenship education that sharpen students’ thinking about issues of public debate and concern. Curricular approaches that spoon-feed students to succeed on narrow academic tests teach students that broader critical thinking is optional. The last decade of school reform has seen education policy makers engaged in a myopic drive to make students better test-takers, rather than better citizens. A large number of public school teachers are reporting that disciplines such as science, social studies, and art are crowded out of the school day as a direct result of state testing policies.

As bad as that sounds, omitting lessons that might develop critical thinking skills is still different from forbidding them. Yet a number of examples of misguided education policy seek to do exactly that. Almost a decade ago, Florida passed a stunning piece of legislation that served as a clarion warning call to educators. The 2006 Florida Education Omnibus Bill included language specifying that “the history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history … American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable.” For example, the bill requires that only facts be taught when it comes to discussing the “period of discovery” and the early colonies. Florida thus became the first state or province I know of to ban historical interpretation in public schools, thereby effectively outlawing critical thinking.

More recently, in fall 2014, more than a 1,000 Jefferson County, Colorado, high school students and hundreds of teachers walked out of classes to protest the school board’s efforts to promote “positive” American history and downplay the legacy of civil disobedience and protest. The protests came in the wake of a proposal by the school board to make changes to the Advanced Placement (AP) history curriculum. AP history, the board suggested “should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard for the law.” One Jefferson County teacher characterized the board’s proposal as “an attack on teachers and public education” while a high school senior vowed: “If they don’t teach us civil disobedience, we will teach ourselves.”

In Canada, too many schools have become oriented toward pedagogical models of efficiency that discourage deeper consideration of important ideas. The relentless focus on testing and “achievement” means that time for in-depth critical analysis of ideas is diminished. Current school reform policies and many classroom practices too often reduce teaching and learning to exactly the kind of mindless rule-following that makes students unable to take principled stands that have long been associated with democracies. Students are learning more about how to please authority and pass the tests than how to develop convictions and stand up for them.

Even when educators are explicitly committed to teaching “good citizenship”, there is cause for caution. My colleague Joe Kahne and I spent the better part of a decade studying programs that aimed to develop good citizenship skills among youth and young adults. In study after study, we come to similar conclusions: the kinds of goals and practices commonly represented in school programs that hope to foster democratic citizenship usually have more to do with voluntarism, charity, and obedience than with democracy. In other words, “good citizenship” often means listening to authority figures, dressing neatly, being nice to neighbors, and helping out at a soup kitchen—not grappling with the kinds of social policy decisions that every citizen in a democratic society needs to understand.

Commonly called character education, these programs emphasize honesty, integrity, self-discipline, and hard work. Or they hope to nurture compassion by engaging students in volunteer community service. What they don’t do is ask students to understand social, political, and economic structures or explore strategies for change that address root causes of problems. Voluntarism and kindness can be used to avoid much thinking about politics and policy altogether. Character traits such as honesty, integrity, and responsibility for one’s actions are certainly valuable for becoming good neighbors and citizens. But, on their own, they are not about democracy.

Former U.S. President George Bush Sr. famously promoted community service activities for youth by imagining a “thousand points of light” representing charitable efforts to respond to those in need. But if young people understand these actions as a kind of noblesse oblige—a private act of kindness performed by the privileged—and fail to examine the deeper structural causes of social ills, then the thousand points of light risk becoming a thousand points of the status quo. Citizenship in a democratic community requires more than kindness and decency.

Recall my opening question: If students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to a Canadian classroom, would they be able to tell the difference? Both classes might engage students in volunteer activities. Government leaders in a totalitarian regime would be as delighted as leaders in a democracy if their young citizens learned the lessons put forward by many of the proponents of character education: don’t do drugs; show up to work on time; give blood; help others during a flood; recycle; etc. These are desirable traits for people living in any community. But they are not about democratic citizenship. In fact certain ideas promoted by these kinds of programs—obedience and loyalty, for example—may work against the kind of independent thinking that democratic citizenship requires.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. Students don’t need to learn passivity, but rather that they have important contributions to make. There are many varied and powerful ways to teach children and young adults to engage critically—to think about social policy issues, participate in authentic debate over matters of importance, and understand that intelligent adults can have different opinions. Indeed democratic progress depends on these differences. If education policy makers, teachers, and administrators in Canada and elsewhere in the world hope to contribute to students’ democratic potential, they must resist the narrowing of the curriculum. And many do. In every province there are examples of individual teachers, schools, and sometimes boards that work creatively and diligently to keep their students thinking.

Approaches that aim to promote a “thinking curriculum” for both teachers and students share several characteristics. First, teachers encourage students to ask questions rather than absorb pat answers—to think about their attachments and commitments to their local, national, and global communities. Second, teachers provide students with the information (including competing perspectives) they need to think about subject matter in substantive ways. Third, they root instruction in local contexts, working within their own specific surroundings and circumstances because it is not possible to teach democratic forms of thinking without providing an environment to think about. This last point makes provincially standardized tests (especially in large provinces with both rural and urban settings) difficult to reconcile with in-depth critical thinking about issues that matter.

The exit of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, dedicated to a critical history of war, bears the following inscription:

“History is yours to make. It is not owned or written by someone else for you to learn … History is not just the story you read. It is the one you write. It is the one you remember or denounce or relate to others. It is not predetermined. Every action, every decision, however small, is relevant to its course. History is filled with horror and replete with hope. You shape the balance.”

I suspect many This Magazine readers could imagine a lesson in democracy that begins with just such a quotation.

Alison Loat. Photo courtesy Samara Canada.

Canadians are giving up on their political system. Voting participation is at historic lows; the number of people who vote for the winning party is now routinely outpaced by the number who don’t vote at all. Most young people don’t vote—63 percent of people under age 24 didn’t cast a ballot in 2008—and that bodes ill for the future of Canadian democracy.

Alison Loat, director and co-founder of Samara Canada, is determined to get to the bottom of this increasing political disengagement.

Samara, based in Toronto, was founded in 2008 and has since been dedicated to the study of how Canadian citizens engage, or don’t, with their democracy. Their most attention-grabbing project so far was a series of “exit interviews” with former members of parliament, which uncovered a wide variation in what, exactly, MPs think their jobs are. The foundation has also hosted a series of talks on the future of journalism, and the role it plays in shaping civic life.

“The hope is to create a bit of a community,” Loat says, to “tell the stories of Canada in a compelling way so that citizens will engage with them.”

Loat is currently developing Samara’s next project, the Democracy Index, a report card on the health of Canadian politics and civil society. Expect a few “Needs Improvement” marks—dismal youth voter turnout, for instance—but Loat says the purpose of the index is also to highlight the things that are working well. The point, in the end, is to get citizens talking about the democratic system of which they are a part. “Any way that I can creatively influence and help the development of this country,” Loat says she’ll do it. “Because I think it’s a great place to live.”

— Victoria Salvas

February 4 anti-Mubarak protest in Alexandria, Egypt. Creative Commons photo by Al Jazeera English

In Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, even Italy, citizens are rising up, risking their lives to protest their corrupt governments. Egyptians, in a historical event, have proven they can be successful in overthrowing years of dictatorial leadership. Canadians were mostly cheering along (though our government wasn’t), but’s hard to put ourselves in their place—Canada, flawed though it is, is simply not Egypt. Corruption here is less pervasive; the military less present in our everyday lives; we have a functional political opposition. But since freedom, democracy, and human rights are on everyone’s mind right now, perhaps it’s time for a little self-evaluation session.

The uprisings in the Middle East should prompt Canadians to take a closer look at the state of our own politics. For just one recent example, see the recent KAIROS “not” scandal and assess how democratic our government’s behaviour truly is. Murray Dobbin on Rabble stopped just short of comparing Steven Harper to ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and called Harper’s Conservative cabinet a squad of “hit men.”

But would Canadians ever reach the point where we just couldn’t take it anymore? Could we rebel in  Egypt-like protests? Would our rants to friends or angry blog comments ever manifest as rebellion in the street?

Stereotypically, Canadians are polite and retiring; unconfrontational if you’re being nice about it, apathetic if you’re not. But there’s data to prove that we really don’t like things to get politically messy. Besides our dismal-and-getting-worse voter turnout rate, A 2000 General Social Survey by Statistics Canada found that only 9 percent of Canadians (age 15 and up) had participated in a public debate that year (things like calling radio talkback shows or writing letters to the editor). Half of those individuals researched information on political issues, and 10 percent volunteered for a political party. We also seem naturally more inclined to express our opinions with a group that we know will share or agree with our own opinions.

Historically, if Canadians take the time to understand a politcal issue, then get mad about it, we will find a way to express it. Like the time time the Conservative government decided prorogue parliament; a 63 day break while 36 government bills lay untouched. While plenty of us apparently didn’t know what the heck that meant, 200,000 Canadians got angry, logged onto Facebook and joined a group called Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament. Many attended actual rallies across the country.

If you were in Toronto in the summer of 2010, you witnessed Canadians in a more traditional form of protest during the G20 conference. Over 300 people were arrested and the images of Toronto streets seemed almost unrecognizable, as if it were a different country altogether.

The erosion of Western democracy seems to be everywhere you turn lately. Paul Krugman identified the union-busting tactics of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker as just the latest example of a hemisphere-wide push by anti-democratic forces: “What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” Krugman wrote.

Dobbin’s Rabble column sounds the same alarm for Canada: He calls Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda’s corrections of the CIDA report “political thuggery worthy of a dictatorship.”  This seems to be just one example of our democracy moving backwards while citizens of Italy, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are actively involved in taking back control of their respective countries.

Illustration by Matt Daley.

When Google, citing concerns over security and censorship, pulled their operations out of China in March this year, they were widely praised for taking a stand for democracy. But Google’s move wasn’t the first time a Western entity had taken the moral high road in regard to China.

In fact, almost 200 years ago, the British government also stood up for its beliefs. After they had expended countless resources developing an opium industry, China shut down its borders to the drug, claiming that addiction was taking its toll on Chinese society. The Raj, seeing not only its business threatened, but also its ideals of free trade and capitalism, twice sent its navy to war to force China to open its borders. Britain won, and China had to relent.

Of course, comparing an enforced opium trade with online free speech may slip into exaggeration. But when Google indignantly left China, an important point was lost in the sanctimonious chatter: to many in China, the difference between the Google of today and the Empire of yesterday isn’t as clear as we might like to think. And as the web increasingly becomes a battleground for cultural and political exchange, it’s worth remembering that history is never as far in the past as we might hope.

In the aftermath of Google’s departure, the chorus of satisfied approval was overwhelming. Though Google itself treaded with the kind of care any profit-minded company might, the press was less tactful. When Google launched a chart that tracked which services China had blocked, prominent tech journalist Steven Levy called it an “Evil Meter.” Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff suggested that China was simply a bully, and that Google had “beat an honourable retreat.” Meanwhile, the National Post and the Globe and Mail did their best to cast the decision in moral rather than economic terms. The complexities of geopolitics and culture were reduced to a tired old approach: “Western values good; China bad.”

One might say “fair enough”: we are talking about a totalitarian regime here. But a few hundred years of Western global domination means there’s just no way to get around the optics of a massive American multinational saying its moral views are the right ones. In light of history, that kind of ideological dogmatism comes off as more than a little paternalistic.

But Google is not a parent and places like China, with their own histories, cultures and practices, are not children. To make matters worse, Google’s business model is essentially a paragon of Western democratic capitalism: disseminate information without restriction and then find a way to make money off the ways people access it. This may seem neutral, but it isn’t. It relies on the idea that spreading knowledge and information is an inherent good because an effective social system empowers individuals to find out things for themselves, and change their lives accordingly. For us, the sovereign individual is everything.

By contrast, even in contemporary Chinese thought, what still reigns is the idea that the community gives people their place in life, and the structures of ritual and authority give life order. The individualism that underpins Google’s business model is frequently seen as both arrogance and selfishness because it seems to prioritize the individual over the knowledge of the state and its rulers. The questions Google raised in China weren’t simply a matter of “repression,” but of how people locate themselves in reality. This fact seemed to be lost on most Western journalists. (About the only dissent in the technology press came from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, himself the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, who wrote a piece titled “Google Would Remind My Grandpa of the Arrogant White Invaders.”)

Is it a noble goal to try to spread values and ideals that seem to have benefited the societies that have adopted them? Sure. But principles like democracy and freedom of speech don’t simply float down from the sky into open arms below. They are borne out of centuries-long processes rooted in social, material, and intellectual change. To assume their universal good—as Google and the Western press seemed to—is to deny their historical and cultural specificity. And at a certain point, it ceases to matter what is “objectively” right when such presumptuousness and arrogance only serve to galvanize people against you.

For all that, it’s worth noting that when Google did leave China, many there weren’t too affected. They had Baidu—a Chinese search engine, albeit heavily censored, that is the sixth most-visited website in the world and is still growing. And this is the thing, really: a Western navy can no longer force “our” way of thinking on the world, because power is no longer centralized in the West.

But history rattles noisily still, and the values of an open, democratic web aren’t universal or even necessarily right. And some, presented with the image of Google getting up on its moral high horse, find it hard to forget an armada of ships, their holds stocked with opium, barging their way into the Canton harbour.

So this past June, Finkel teamed up with some change-hungry Albertans and created the Democratic Renewal Project. Its goal is “to provide Albertans with a united progressive alternative government to the Conservative dynasty.” Here’s its plan:

1. Form a united alternative: Says Finkel, “We need to create the sense that there is a real contest in Alberta, and that can only happen if the centre-left parties, whose current policies are virtually indistinguishable even if their political cultures are different, form a united alternative.” But this doesn’t mean a new party. Instead, the DRP wants the existing Alberta Liberal Party and NDP to cooperate to get fed-up Albertans to the polls by promoting such common topics as greater social justice, diversifying the economy, and environmental sustainability, under a “United Alternative” banner.

2. Get proportional representation: The DRP believes that ditching the province’s current past-the-post electoral system is vital to ditching the Tories. But, says Finkel, since the Conservatives would never agree to a referendum on the topic, the switch would have to be pushed through the Legislature by the United Alternative, once it had enough seats.

3. Adopt a non-compete policy: To get those seats, the DRP is calling for the Liberals and the NDP to run only one centre-left candidate per riding. Had this been done in 2008, at least an additional 12 left-centre candidates would have been elected, more than doubling the progressive presence.

4. Get the Liberals & NDP on board: Of course, for any of this to happen, the provincial Liberals and NDP need to agree to it. Finkel says Liberal leader David Swann already supports the DRP and that “there are many individuals in both parties that recognize that we cannot go on like this, with two centre-left parties battling each other and allowing the Tories an automatic victory.”

Sure, the web is rife with nonsense. But real political dialogue thrives too

In my more idealistic moments, I always imagine I’ll stumble upon raging intellectual debate on the subway. But based on the conversations I’ve overheard lately, here’s what I can tell you about the public mood in Canada: saving GM is both the best and worst thing we’ve ever done; Lady Gaga “sucks”; and, at least according to that one guy, “this sandwich is delicious!”

Gauging the opinions and temper of a society has always been a rough enterprise at best: part statistics, part science — and part overhearing things on the train. But when we start to record our reactions in a public space that makes overhearing things easer — like the web — discovering what people are thinking becomes far easier. And with the rise of what you might call the “real-time web,” capturing and then becoming part of “the public conversation” is no longer metaphor so much as it is reality.

And yet, the real-time web has got itself a bad rap. You’ll hear it when people grumble about sites like Twitter and Facebook, which revolve around a constantly-updating stream of short-form musings from peers and complete strangers. The standard complaint about these new sites is that they’re full of details along the lines of “Going out to the store now!” The truth, however, is that people tend to post what they’re thinking as much as what they’re doing. Sure, taken individually, it’s just some person recording their thoughts. But when you put all of them together, instead of only inane chatter, you also have a living record of people’s ideas and conversations.

In fact, the real-time web is opening up possibilities for both documenting and understanding the public mind. With realtime search engines, such as the one now built into Twitter, one can also instantly wade through the torrents of chatter to find up-tothe minute takes on a specific topic. Some searches, like typing in the name of a nearby restaurant to see what people think of it, can be straightforward. Search by locale, and you might get a sense of what locals think of the weather, their latte or local politics — an experience web thinker Leisa Reichelt charmingly labelled “ambient intimacy”: a vague sense of others that hovers quietly in the background.

While these chirpings can at times be pleasantly mundane, at others they can be more serious thoughts on politics and ideas. And if one of the ideals of democracy is healthy public debate, the real-time web expands the reach of this conversation while it focuses it, providing quick feedback and a variety of perspectives you may not have gotten before. Technology can often be isolating and alienating, but this, it seems, is not one of those times. Sites like these do a great deal to connect, rather than separate us, from the ebb and flow of social conversation.

Yet, just like overhearing chatter on the subway, sometimes we hear things we’d rather not. The recent protests by Tamil-Canadians in Toronto produced a storm of opinion on Twitter, some of it ugly and xenophobic. The effect of reading so much collected, subtly racist bile was disturbing and unsettling. Ambient intimacy can quickly turn into a threatening sense of alienation when voices you wish you never heard sit side-by-side with your friends’ in the public register. For all the times sites like Twitter make us feel part of something, moments such as the Tamil protests highlight the limits of this new, immediate web.

The problem is, there is only so much depth one can fit into a couple of sentences. In order for a conversation to happen in realtime, it has to be composed of short, pithy statements that lend themselves to being read quickly. We might dream of a world in which lengthy, measured response is the norm, but it’s undeniably easier for someone to say “immigrants go home!” than “hey guys, we really need to think about whether we should reformulate our concept of national identity to deal with the reality of our shrunken, globalized world.” The downside to all this immediacy is that polemics frequently trump profundity.

But all media have their constraints: you wouldn’t read a novel in a newspaper just as you wouldn’t go to the cinema to watch a sitcom; the point is to have each form of communication do what it does best. Though the real-time web certainly encourages a sort of flippancy, it also gets people talking in a way they might not have before, making public conversation broader, more immediate, and ultimately more rewarding than merely nodding after reading a newspaper column or fuming after watching a spot on the news. And if an ideal democracy involves an engaged, excited populace, spouting opinions while they argue and debate, then maybe, for the sake of the living out our democratic ideals, we can occasionally put up with what that guy down the street thinks of his sandwich.

What to choose? Proportional representation

Canada, in deciding to adopt the British system of responsible parliamentary government, instead imported SMP elections. The supposed strength of SMP was that it encouraged two-party contests, which would lead to clear mandates for the elected MP and strong majorities in the parliament so these MPs could enact legislation with the broadest appeal. PR, on the other hand, inevitably leads to multiple parties being elected to a legislature, which in a parliamentary system means a divided legislature and coalition governments.

If we had adopted PR in 1867 when it was the dominant democratic idea, many of Canada’s current political problems would have been eliminated. At the very least, Canadians would see that parliamentary government and coalition governments are actually synonymous — they are predicated on identical democratic principles.

Furthermore, Canada has been — and continues to be — the exception to the SMP rule. Open any textbook on electoral systems and there will likely be a footnote next to Canada explaining how our large land mass and ethno-linguistically diverse population resulted in “third parties” (and, eventually, four-, five- and six-party contests).

The reason for this is that SMP rewards regional parties. Canadian political parties need only focus their policies and resources on local interests and, as is often the case in Canada, can pit one region against another for electoral gain. This is the reason the Bloc Québécois won 49 seats in the current Parliament, running candidates in only one province. The Bloc Québécois received 12 more seats in the Commons than the NDP, which won eight percent more of the popular vote across Canada.

The skewed electoral system is also the reason most people believe that all Albertans oppose the Liberals and why in the last federal election, 27 of Alberta’s 28 seats went to the Conservatives, even though more than a third of the province voted against them (with 11 percent of Albertans actually voting Liberal).

The exaggerated success of regional parties under SMP in Canada fuels regional discontent. PR would alleviate this because it would ensure that those 11 percent of Albertans who voted Liberal, and the 12 percent of Quebecers who voted NDP, received representation in the House. Regional parties would still have some advantages under PR due to the geographic and demographic quirks unique to Canada, but PR would rebalance the electoral system so it did not disenfranchise pan-Canadian political parties.

Yes, PR ensures more ideological and divergent parties get elected, but SMP is already doing that in Canada. However, since it is rare for any party to hold a majority in a PR system, it forces political parties to form coalition governments. These governments are, based on the mounting evidence from other countries, centrist and not ideological in their policies. The same cannot be said for recent Canadian governments.

Canada’s minority governments for the past five years have increasingly used the threat of confi dence votes and early election calls to ram through ideological legislation in the pursuit of a public policy agenda that was not supported by the public or the majority of elected MPs. Proportional representation would change Canada’s electoral dynamics. Parties would be forced to leave the door open to the possibility of coalitions, and the electorate could consider these possibilities when casting their ballots. It would also force politicians to work together once elected, since the illusion of a majority just being around the corner would disappear.

If PR had been in place, Stephen Harper would not have triggered an early election in 2008. Jack Layton and the NDP would not have wasted the last two years, and the last two election campaigns, running against the Liberals instead of focusing on keeping an ideological right-wing Conservative party out of government. And Michael Ignatieff would not have had an excuse to seize the leadership of the Liberal party without a leadership convention and then spend a month considering whether his own electoral future was most advantaged by keeping the Conservative government in power, forcing a new election, trying to form a Liberal government, or forming a coalition with the NDP.

PR would have ensured that following the last election, all political parties worked together to decide how to form a stable government whose policies were supported by the majority of the Commons and thus the Canadian people. This is how responsible parliamentary government is supposed to work — and that, not the wonky electoral system, is what Canadians thought they had imported from Britain in 1867.

How big is the internet in Iran?

There are more than three million internet users out of a population of 70 million, which is not bad. They’re mainly students and middle- and upper-class. The access is now much easier than it was six, seven years ago. For the past five years, there are different ISPs, private ISPs, and they have calling cards that they sell. Ten hours of internet access is 10 bucks. It provides people with anonymity, because that’s a big thing for internet users in Iran. And it gives them an option not to stick with one ISP; if the service goes down and anything happens, they can change to another ISP. But recently there have been regulations passed, both in government and the judiciary, that want to limit this anonymous access through these cards. This is a very important development, and it could harm the increasing number of internet users in Iran.

Is it fair to say that the government sees the internet as a threat?

The government is good toward the internet. It’s not controlling it. It’s helped to develop the infrastructure and they’ve allowed private ISPs to operate. But there is another part of the regime, which is more powerful than the government. The leader himself and security organizations have been trying to shut down the internet or, as much as they can, prevent people from accessing the political opposition websites or anti-religious websites.

How bad is web censorship?

Since [May], it’s stepped up very, very heavily. You can say that almost every popular website, whether it’s political or entertainment, has been filtered and has lost almost half of its users. Several years ago, on July 9, there was a student protest. Every year, on the anniversary of that day, [the regime] gets paranoid. They always think that the CIA or [Israel’s intelligence service] Mossad is conspiring against them. On the eve of this day, or one month before that, they start to shut down everything, to effectively disconnect Iranians inside from the outside world.

Does the Iranian regime consider you a public enemy?

Unfortunately, yes. That’s why I can’t go back. I mean, I can go back, but it’s risky. One of my friends was arrested—he was a blogger and journalist—and now he’s in Holland, because he escaped after he was held for 20 days. We have had phone conversations, and he said they were interested to know about his relationship with me, and the part that I’ve been playing in promoting these weblogs, who’s supporting me, what kind of family I come from. It wasn’t good news for [the regime] when they heard that my family was very religious. For example, my uncle was among the top officials. In the beginning of the revolution, he was killed in a bombing. He was very close to the party of the current leader, the hardliners. When they heard that I came from that kind of family, they were disappointed, but still very suspicious. They can’t believe that one person with his laptop can still start this whole thing.