Elizabeth May doesn’t have a seat in Parliament, so she writes about it

Elizabeth May risks being dismissed as a shrill liberal loser. She began writing Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy, immediately after the October 2008 federal election campaign. The Green Party of Canada, of which she has been the leader since 2006, has never won a parliamentary seat — ever. Perhaps May wrote this book because she is bitter, not because she's worried about democracy. But whether or not she is a sore political loser is irrelevant. Anyone who reads Losing Confidence closely can see the message is important, regardless of the author's political failures.

The book is slim but not sparse. May manages to cover lobbyists, the electoral system, voter apathy, coalition governments and the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office. In a recent interview, she admits too many topics could confuse her theme: that Canada's increasingly confrontational politics is destroying our democracy.

Within the multitude of issues, May tries to explain how the Canadian government evolved to discourage real debate and public participation, mirroring the policies of the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

The book describes a smorgasbord of government abuses, but she says its treatment of the Accountability Act is so far the greatest breech of ethics. “They removed from the code of conduct for members of Parliament and senior civil servants the duty to act honestly,” she says with breathless frustration, “No elected official should engage in a tactic to their own benefit that has the result of damaging democracy.”

The behaviour of Harper and his Conservatives are especially important for Albertans, because the party is descended from the Reform movement of the 1990s, which began in this performance. The principles of the movement were based on prairie populism. May explains that the premise of populism “is that you don't want this elite hierarchy telling you what you're going to do.” It is a point of pride for conservative voters that they brought a party to office that subscribes to those principles.

“I think a lot of Conservatives are aware, from a number of things, that Stephen Harper is betraying some of the things that they thought was fundamental to their party,” says May.

The greatest flaws in Losing Confidence are May's personal anecdotes. They're good stories, especially after witnessing what Harper did under the table during the ’08 debate, but May should have been more careful to keep herself out of the book. She is in a sensitive position — having never won a seat for her party — and is derided in some reviews as a tree-hugging wash-out. She does make a good case as to how Canada's first-past-the-post voting system cheated the Green party out of as many as 23 seats in the last election, despite receiving one million votes.

May is not the first to raise a red flag over the steady decomposition of Canadian and western democracy, but her contribution is worthwhile. True, Canada is not comparable to many of the crippled democracies around the world, but remember there is no such thing as a good dictatorship. For anyone who doesn't want to commit to reading a major manifesto, May has provided an easy primer to prepare for the day the debate actually begins.