Today Ontarians vote to elect their next government. It’s been a difficult, exhausting and by all appearances futile campaign. Polls indicate that voters are deadlocked and unhappy with their choices. The one televised debate was so anodyne and lifeless that even political veterans despaired. If you weren’t being paid to watch it, chances are you changed the channel.

Still, tonight a victor will be declared. She or he will form a government but one without the support of anything close to a majority of eligible voters. If there is a contradiction at the heart of our system of popular government, it’s that our governments are usually anything but popular.

This dissatisfaction, not only in Ontario but throughout much of the democratic world, has brought me to Copenhagen, and later today to the island of Bornholm, where Denmark’s eight major parties will meet for Folkemodet, a four-day political festival that attracts as many as 60,000 Danes. Imagine 180,000 Ontarians travelling each summer to Manitoulin Island to talk politics and you get a sense of how incredible this is.

Denmark’s political tradition is admirable. Voter turnout is high. The political parties work more or less comfortably in coalition with one another. Large, well-funded and arm’s-length political foundations work in tireless and ingenious ways to engage citizens in the space between elections.

But many of the concerns expressed at home are echoed throughout Scandinavia. A generational shift is underway and there’s real anxiety that government — and more specifically, the old-line parties — just can’t keep up. Much like in Ontario, voters here have tried every option, rewarding parties on both the left and the right, but with little satisfaction.

Enter Danish maverick Uffe Elbaek, a former social liberal minister of culture, who last year resigned from cabinet and his party to sit as an independent. Now Elbaek is in the midst of launching a new political party that deserves close study. Fittingly, it’s called Alternativet: the Alternative.

Elbaek will launch his party’s platform Friday. For six months Elbaek and his supporters have been hosting “political laboratories” across the country, engaging thousands of Danes in a conversation about Denmark’s future. The result is a political program that borrows freely from across the spectrum fusing green economics with a steadfast commitment to promoting entrepreneurship and personal freedom. It also seeks to lay the groundwork for a more creative and responsive state. The party is governed by six principles, which include humility, empathy and humour — three qualities that have been in short supply at Queen’s Park.

In a country where promoting social welfare remains a sacred trust and not a maligned and disfigured concept, this style of political innovation may come more easily. But it’s here as well that you can see new energies being marshalled for the next great push in the rights revolution.

If the 19th and 20th centuries were largely defined by struggles to lock in popular control of formal political power, then in the second decade of the 21st we can see the first signs of credible efforts to extend democracy’s promise to other spheres of human life as well. The environment, workplace and family are each leading candidates for new forms of democratic expression.

But before this next adventure can get started, the political party must reinvent itself from within.

First, parties must widen their field of vision. Rather than basing their social use on their ability to advance interests, parties should be prized for the skill with which they address and resolve conflict — both within formal political arenas and beyond.

Second, parties should be platforms for learning. For as long as leaders hold tight to their scripts rather than being guided by curiosity — another Alternative value — then the certainty and confidence they’re trained to project will always ring hollow.

This is the transition that’s stirring in Denmark where an attempt at a kind of post-tribalism may yet succeed in redefining what political parties are and how they are expected to operate.

None of this is borne by any particular virtue. Rather it’s an attempt to deal squarely with the same frustration and contempt that we know sours Ontario’s political system. If parties survived on their memberships and votes, rather than their seats and their donor drives, they would have had to rethink and retool long ago.

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So vote today. But with your vote cast a promise. It’s time for Ontario’s political parties to reinvent themselves: how they speak, act, include us and define their purpose. And to do that, they’ll need all of us.