Here’s some thinly veiled self-promotion for the Manning Centre, which happens to make some good points:
Americans invest more time, energy and money than Canadians do in preparing the politicians and supporting casts for their roles and responsibilities on the political stage.
In the United States, there are scores of think tanks, covering the entire political spectrum, that constantly generate compelling ideas, policies and communications pieces for their politicians in a timely and effective manner…
There are at least nine U.S. graduate schools in “political management”…
American organizations, such as the Leadership Institute near Washington, have trained tens of thousands of grassroots political activists in everything from policy analysis to fundraising to getting out the vote…
Whereas in Canada, we have very little of that kind of – I don’t know what to call it, someone help me out – stuff to feed fresh substance and variety into the system, ensuring it doesn’t move towards entropy.
It made me think of an editorial post from Jonathan Kay yesterday, about the past ”really, really, really good week for the Canadian blogosphere“:
Whatever happens on October 14, the 2008 election will be remembered as — among other things — the collective coming out party for Canada’s blogosphere. Amateur Web scribblers have been making their mark on Canadian politics for years, but never on the scale we’ve witnessed this month.
American bloggers have already had their “coming out party” back in 2004, with the Dan Rather thing and all of the factchecking and mudslinging about Swift Boat Veterans and all of Bush and Kerry’s biographical details (or alleged biographical details).
We seem to be a few years behind. I’d love to add more Canadian content to my feedreader and blogroll, but I haven’t found much that’s really valuable, yet (any recommendations?).
Also related, a local web designer John Leschinski posted a scathing critique of the NDP website, complaining that they “stole” the design from Barack Obama. The site’s design is pretty corny, and like the weak efforts by other Canadian parties (compared to their American counterparts) social features seem be added as afterthoughts and almost don’t seem to be intended for actual use.
So building on the question in my title, the more specific questions we should ask are, What could we gain by becoming more politically sophisticated? What might we lose? How much will it cost? How might it affect our society in general? What kind of society do we want anyways? And what kind of politics will help us create it?
Before we get too deep into institutional and technological adaptations, we first need to address the underlying, intellectual questions, to make sure there’s a conversation to help us understand about what we can lose or gain.
