There are ways to make decisions and there are the actual decisions one makes. The former is about procedures, the ‘how’ questions. The latter is about substantive calls, the ‘what’ questions. Now it only takes a moment’s thought to realise that no method or procedure for making decisions will be perfect. We are fallible, biological creatures. We humans are in the ‘least-bad’ business. And for me, it has long seemed that the least-bad way to make political decisions was to let the numbers count. Majoritarianism. Democracy in other words, at least in its old-fashioned sense of counting everyone equally and voting. (Human rights lawyer types and top judges have these past couple of decades tried to redefine democracy so that it includes a hefty substantive component, namely that these elites also approve of the decisions made – and of course the judges don’t put it that way; they talk in terms of a decision having to be in keeping with ‘the rule of law’ or ‘sufficiently rights-respecting’ or some such.) But the point is any procedure will sometimes misfire. Majoritarianism misfires, hence Winston Churchill’s famous quip that democracy is the worst form of government… except for everything else. But then, too, letting a bunch of unelected judges have a veto over majoritarianism misfires too. No option is – make that can be – perfect. You pick your poison.
All that means that sometimes you will find yourself in a position where the procedure you think has the best hit-rate for making decisions has, in your view, thrown up a bad decision. Obversely, sometimes a procedure you think suboptimal might throw up a good substantive outcome. So here’s a big question. In those sort of situations do you stand by what you think is the best way to make calls overall or go with the substantive outcome you happen to like in this instance? If you opt for the latter, of course, you can’t blame others whose substantive preferences differ from yours for doing the same. No one’s attachment to majoritarian democracy would then be anything other than skin deep. “I’m for it only as long as it delivers outcomes I like.” And that is plainly not sustainable. Or put differently, with democracy (or any decision-making procedure) you’re going to win some and lose some. The benefit of democracy is that when you don’t like outcomes you can spend a few Saturdays campaigning for the team you like. No substantive call is locked-in beyond the next election. By contrast, if you don’t like what some judges have decided, often under the guise of proclaiming what our supposedly timeless, fundamental rights are, well, all you can do is hope to replace such judges with more congenial ones some time far in the future. (And for conservatives, with a legal caste whose median member is far to the Left of the median voter, this is a mighty big ask.)
That’s some background to what is happening in Canada. Justin Trudeau just resigned after driving his party’s popularity down to 16% in the polls. Parliament is in recess for the Christmas break, due back at the end of January. And the further-Left-than-Trudeau party, the NDP, has promised to no longer prop up Justin’s minority coalition Government. (For cynics, Pierre Poilievre, the Tory leader, has been claiming for months that the NDP would continue to prop up Trudeau until the NDP leader’s gold-plated Parliamentary pension vested – which will happen just before the looming no-confidence vote – and right on cue, as it vests, this party’s leader announced he would bring down Trudeau. This blatant self-serving has tanked the NDP support too. As has the revelation that this socialist party’s leader drives a Maserati – though I’m betting he has fewer houses than Albo.)
So an election is coming. It’s just a matter of when. The current polls indicate this would be near-annihilation for Trudeau’s Liberal party, possibly seeing it fall to fewer than 10 seats – the benefits of a First Past the Post voting system is that it doesn’t work as a protection racket for the two main parties as Australia’s woeful one does. Here’s the problem for the Liberal party. Parliament is due to resume at the end of January and that will mean an immediate no-confidence motion (which will succeed) and an election. The Canadian Libs won’t have time to pick a new leader. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. That is why Trudeau went to the Governor General and asked her to prorogue Parliament. That’s when the Government has the Head of State put Parliament into a sort of suspended animation. You can’t do that beyond the deadline for the next election but historically around the Anglosphere the democratically elected Government can do it. And it’s happened a lot as you go back in time. In fact, back in 2008 then Canadian PM, Conservative Stephen Harper, asked the Governor-General to do so and she did. It’s a prerogative power. It’s a bog-standard part of our system.
Or it was until British PM Boris Johnson tried to prorogue the British Parliament to get Brexit through in the face of a Tory party with many Remainer MPs who wanted Parliament to block it. Boris wanted to prorogue for a few weeks till it went through. The activist lawyerly caste, to a man Remainers, kicked in and went to court. They got the case expedited to the U.K. Supreme Court in the second Miller case (the first one was about the prerogative power and equally egregious). All 11 judges, to the best of the available evidence, were Remainers. And they overturned 300 years of precedent and inserted themselves – the unelected judges – into the process and quashed Boris’s attempted prorogation. In effect, they gave themselves a veto over its use, wholly disinterestedly you understand.
In that case I liked the would-be substantive outcome, Boris getting Brexit through. With Trudeau’s requested prorogation I would much prefer an immediate election. But you know what? I hate the idea of unelected judges inserting themselves into the process of what’s ‘reasonable’ and ‘appropriate’, as though these nearly wall-to-wall ‘Yes to the Voice’ Australian judicial types are representative of anyone. If Trudeau tries to avoid an election for an extra month or two the voters can deliver a remedy, a harsh one. Of course the activist lawyer types love judicial involvement as regards what’s reasonable. (It’s becoming an epidemic in Australia.) So expect them to bring a case (here’s one already) to block Trudeau. For all the reasons above I hope they lose. (And unlike the Brexit case, Trudeau has appointed just about every top judge in Canada – wall-to-wall politically sympathetic Lib judges – so cynics can draw their own conclusions about outcomes.)
But remember. Best procedure should trump the odd substantive win under a bad procedure.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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A very helpful example of pseudo science.
It’s the kind of garbage collectivists lap up while searching for policies to solve social problems. We’re all, not just the homeless, like little lab rats on which they can act upon to “make the world a better place”.
This is similar to the Universal Basic Income which is another fraud. Hand every person £1K per month on top of the welfare system which sets a minimum level of income. Ridiculous. If you are homeless you cannot be handed cash. You need to repair many other issues first. The Welfare state is broke and broken. Enough already.
UBI would actually be better than the current welfare system. No means test, no discrimination, no perverse incentives.
There are big differences in why people might be homeless (or appear to be). Complex mental or physical health issues make some people unsuitable to ‘normal living’. Given social housing or sheltered accommodation and these people will still find their way back on the streets. Similarly there are the drug addicts and alcoholics that exhibit severe anti-social behavioral traits that money alone wont fix. Then there are the ‘professional’ beggars, there are also those exploited by criminal gangs in what is known as modern slavery.
Only anecdotally, but in a country like the UK with it’s generous welfare system and councils having a statuary responsibility to house anyone – I cant think of any reason why a person could be on the streets for lack of money. The first time in my life I saw real, genuine hardship was on a stag-do in Eastern Europe and ironically also in the supposedly wealthy USA.
FYI, you can watch Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s new (35min) documentary about the sorts of people living on the streets across Germany here. You will not be in a rush to visit after watching this. She speaks German too, clever lass. I can’t see how major cities in the UK would differ much from this tbh. Worth watching.
https://twitter.com/EvaVlaar/status/1703157698219458989
The study may not have been perfect, but Occam’s Razor would say that giving them unconditional cash DOES make them better off on balance, at least at the margin. I know conservatives don’t like the idea of “something for nothing” (unless they themselves benefit directly from it, and not “those people”) and think that everything must have more strings attached than a spider’s web (often conflating the normative with the descriptive), but come on now. Behind such opposition, I detect “the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism” that is causing such cognitive dissonance.
Well this conservative doesn’t like the idea of giving his money away. Occam’s razor would suggest to me that in the long run, giving people money without giving them other help does more harm than good.
1) No one in favor of it, including the authors, is saying they should be denied other help. That is a straw man, as we can walk and chew gum at the same time. 2) The money can simply be created, like all money is when you really look at it, so you don’t have to “give away” your own money if that bothers you. 3) And finally, as the late, great John Maynard Keynes famously said long ago, “in the long run, we are all dead”.
(Mic drop)
“2) The money can simply be created, like all money is when you really look at it, so you don’t have to “give away” your own money if that bothers you”
I don’t have the ability to create money, so giving mine away does bother me. Money can be created with a printing press, value can only be created through work.
This study has already been savaged in the Canadian and other media.
One was the pre-screening – everyone with addiction or mental issues were excluded. Only shorter-term homeless were excluded.
“age 19 to 65, homeless for less than 2 y (homelessness defined as the lack of stable housing), Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and nonsevere levels of substance use (DAST-10) (21), alcohol use (AUDIT) (22), and mental health symptoms Colorado Symptom Index (CSI) (23) based on predefined thresholds”.
There were many dropouts from the study etc.
“Of the 732 participants, 229 passed all criteria (31%). Due to loss of contact with 114 participants despite our repeated attempts to reach them, we successfully enrolled 115 participants in the study as the final sample (50 cash, 65 noncash0”
There were many problems with this study.