Lisa Van Dusen/For The Hill Times

March 9, 2017 

It says something about the state of democracy that the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2016 Democracy Index, published just over a month ago, is already a dead web page. If you forage for a depressingly long time, you can find a rogue PDF of the report, but the actual magazine’s link to its own data gets you a sad “We’re sorry. We can’t find the page you were looking for.”

As America attempts to swallow on an hourly basis the relentless fire hose of previously unthinkable junk generated by Donald Trump in what appears to be a reality show launched by non-democracies to extinguish democracy, it’s helpful to pause and consider where it leaves Canada.

The major takeaway from the 2016 rankings was that America, for the first time, qualifies as a “flawed democracy” as opposed to a “full democracy.” This slippage in the ranking of the world’s besieged flagship democracy is attributed to a deficit in public trust in democratic institutions.

“This has had a corrosive effect on the quality of democracy in the US, as reflected in the decline in the US score in the Democracy Index,” the report, pithily and ironically subtitled “The Revenge of the Deplorables,” reads. “The US president, Donald Trump, is not to blame for this decline in trust, which predated his election, but he was the beneficiary of it.”

So, America’s degradation as a democracy is blamed not on the actual events that led to the decline in public trust in democratic institutions — the race-based attacks on voting rights at the state level, the 2013 gutting of parts of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, the 2010 Citizens United ruling by the same court that allowed an unbridled influx of special interest money to contaminate the political process, the unprecedented partisan gumming of the gears of Congress, the glut of unmediated and unsourced content that has allowed the beneficiaries of the democratic trust deficit, especially President Trump, to conflate the legitimate media and “fake news”, the exploitation and post-truthification of social media to create false political “winners and losers”  — but on the citizens who’ve processed that degradation and whose predictable mistrust is registered not as disenchantment with the failed and corrupt guardians of democracy but as disenchantment with democracy itself.

American democracy isn’t doomed, it’s just been hijacked… America’s crisis is not existential, it’s circumstantial.

I’m writing this piece because someone suggested I point out the fact that Canada ranked sixth among “full democracies”, tied with Ireland, far ahead of the U.S. down at 21st in the beleaguered “flawed democracy” company of Italy, Cabo Verde and Estonia, behind Mauritius and Uruguay. In our ongoing compulsion to define our national identity relative to every triumph and reversal in the American epic, this was seen as an opportunity for Canada to burnish the brand: “Not only do we have free appendectomies, Timbits and reflexive irony in two languages…we beat America at democracy.”

The news that Canada had not only beaten America at democracy but received its highest ranking ever in the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index was somewhat buried the day it surfaced — January 25 — as it was the same day the new president of the United States signed an executive order proclaiming the construction of a big, beautiful wall along the Mexican border to disincentivize incursions by bad hombres.

American democracy isn’t doomed, it’s just been hijacked. Trump was elected by just over a quarter of eligible voters, he didn’t win the popular vote, the entire process was ridiculous and likely corrupted by foreign interests, and 55 per cent of Americans now disapprove of him. America’s crisis is not existential, it’s circumstantial.

And if American democracy fails, Canadian democracy won’t last a decade. We should keep that in mind when we contemplate Canada’s response to the disaster next door.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.