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Democracy is a simple solution to an age-old problem – how to get rid of people in positions of political power once they’ve outlived their usefulness. Ideally, it allows us to replace them with someone less jaded, less corrupt, and perhaps even with some ideas about how to improve things. The way we accomplish this is by staging a competition for political leadership. The basic rule is simple: if you want to run the show, you have to go out and get the votes. More specifically, you need to get more votes than your opponents.

There has been a great deal of hand-wringing about the state of democracy in Canada. And yet, just as generals are always fighting the last war, democracy-watchers all seem to fear only the last threat to democracy. They imagine that we are in danger of succumbing to some kind of authoritarianism. I too worry about democracy in Canada, but my concern is forward-looking. I worry that it is going the way of football.

The question we need to ask ourselves, as we consider the state of Canadian democracy, is whether our politicians, and our political parties, have also gotten too good at playing the game – whether they have developed strategies that, despite helping them to win, undermine the point of the competition.

We often forget that democracy is a staged competition, designed to achieved a narrow purpose, which is to produce good government. Yet many fail to see it this way. Part of this is due to the close conceptual connection between “democracy” and “freedom,” which leads them to think of democracy as nothing but the expression of individual freedom – as though you could take a bunch of “free” people, put them together in a room, and expect a democracy to emerge spontaneously.