Mere moments after taking the American oath of office, President Joe Biden stepped up to the podium and delivered his inaugural address to a bitterly divided nation. 

He didn’t start by mentioning his campaign donors, advisors, or peers in the Democratic Party. Nor did he begin with the COVID-19 pandemic, a calamity that has claimed over 400,000 American lives so far. Instead, he acknowledged what for over 150 years had been a given in American politics: the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another. “We’ve learned again that democracy is precious,” Biden said. “Democracy is fragile. At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.” 

Two weeks earlier, thousands of Trump supporters tried to change that. On Jan. 6, shocking images of an enraged mob storming the U.S. Capitol building filled TV screens around the world. Shocking, but unsurprising to many experts. Former president Donald Trump and sympathetic media supporters had been riling up the Republican party base for years with unsubstantiated rumours that the election was rigged. 

Many Americans are deeply distrustful of their political system. All sides of the political spectrum paint the U.S. government as unsympathetic to the concerns of everyday Americans or corrupted by untrustworthy elites. Canadians seem to place more faith in Parliament than Americans do in the U.S. government, according to studies conducted in both countries, but Trump’s election in 2016 gave liberal democracies around the world pause. Four years of rampant racism, white nationalism, and populist vitriol south of the border have not left Canada unscathed. 

Biden is promising to renew American democracy. What will his plans mean for Canada’s own populist movements? How can social impact organizations north of the border help rebuild trust in democratic institutions? And how much do Canadians really trust their governments? 

How much do Americans trust their democracy? 

Not much at all. Last September, the Pew Research Center found just 20 percent of U.S. adults trusted their government to “do the right thing” most of the time. Only a third said they trusted the U.S. government’s handling of the immigration system and poverty alleviation strategies, while only 42 percent believed Washington was good at handling public health threats. Trump isn’t entirely to blame. According to the Center, the share of Americans who trust the federal government “always” or “most of the time” has hovered around 20 percent since the Great Recession of 2007. 

Trust in the federal government also varies by political allegiance depending on who is in power. Just 12 percent of Democrats trusted the federal government to do the right thing in the Pew Research Center’s poll from September. But Trump’s insistence that the election was rigged and several coup attempts by the president himself — including ordering Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes for him — have taken Republican distrust in the federal government to new levels. 

In a YouPoll survey released just days after a white insurrectionist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol earlier this month, 73 percent of Republicans believed the election had been stolen from them. Nearly half approved of the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol itself. A plethora of lawsuits filed by Trump supporters in recent weeks have attempted to simply overturn November’s election results as though it never happened. 

Political scientists, historians, journalists, and civil society leaders have been sounding the alarm on American democracy for years, well before the November election. Despite everything on Biden’s plate, Kevin Deveaux — president of Deveaux International Governance Consultants, a firm that assists political parties around the world — says the newly-minted president needs to follow through on his promises to repair American democracy.  “I think the Americans, for the first time in at least 150 years, are realizing the threat to their democracy is real,” he says. “So I hope he does go ahead with it. I think that it needs to be part of a bigger package.”

How is Biden planning to restore faith in democracy? 

Within his first year in the Oval Office, Biden is promising to hold a global ‘Summit for Democracy’ to bring together world leaders concerned about the state of democracy within the United States and around the globe. “It will bring together the world’s democracies to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda,” Biden wrote in an essay for Foreign Affairs last year. 

Biden is promising to hold a global ‘Summit for Democracy’ to bring together world leaders concerned about the state of democracy within the United States and around the globe.

The president is modelling this summit off of the Nuclear Security Summit, a series of meetings in 2010 with dozens of world leaders to reduce the threat of nuclear smuggling and prevent nuclear terrorism. Biden wants attendees at the Summit for Democracy to focus on fighting corruption and authoritarianism within their own countries, as well as advancing human rights. “The Summit for Democracy will also include civil society organizations from around the world that stand on the frontlines in defence of democracy,” Biden wrote. 

Members of this summit would also call for the private sector to preserve the rights of residents within democratic societies, according to Biden’s essay. Biden focuses on social media companies specifically, saying they must “act to ensure that their tools and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state, gutting privacy, facilitating repression in China and elsewhere, spreading hate and misinformation, spurring people to violence, or remaining susceptible to other misuse.”

At home, Biden is promising to tackle the U.S.’s longstanding history of voter suppression of Black people. He plans on restoring the Voting Rights Act, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation, reforming the criminal justice system, and revitalizing America’s educational system as a way of ensuring that as many people in the U.S. are capable of voting as possible. “First and foremost, we must repair and reinvigorate our own democracy, even as we strengthen the coalition of democracies that stand with us around the world,” Biden writes. 

Why does strengthening democracy matter to Canada?

Political attitudes in the United States inevitably drift northward. During the Trump administration, the Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigration became increasingly common in Canada. As mentioned in Future of Good’s previous report on immigration, reported hate crimes against Black people, Muslims, and other oppressed groups rose dramatically in 2017. “The thing that we need to guard against in Canada is [the narrative that] what happened in the U.S. on January 6th is a specific U.S. issue,” says Leslie Woo, CEO of CivicAction. 

Canadians put more trust in their democracy than their U.S. counterparts. In a poll commissioned last spring, the Samara Centre for Democracy found that trust in the federal government rose from 38 percent in 2019 to 59 percent in 2020. Followers of every political party from the Bloc Quebecois to the Conservatives said their trust in Canadian democracy also improved during that period. 

The Centre doesn’t believe U.S. style right wing populism is popular in Canada, but says some elements are lingering here.  “While we have seen some movement in attitudes that are associated with populism — like polarization on issues like immigration — actual populist attitudes have not been on the rise,” the Centre says in a recent report on the state of democracy during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

However, there have been flare-ups of Canadian right-wing populism. In February 2019, hundreds of truckers and oil workers drove to Ottawa from Western Canada as part of the ‘United We Roll’ convoy. Yellow vest protesters have picketed outside government buildings in Canada for years, calling for Trudeau to be deposed or even hanged for ‘treason’. Just last year, a man was charged for allegedly driving into Rideau Hall with four loaded weapons while threatening to harm the Prime Minister. He claimed in a letter found after his arrest that Canada was devolving into a communist dictatorship. 

Even if these incidents are far more common in the U.S., their increasing frequency suggests the deep divides and political violence seen south of the border are not impossible here. Many of the contributing factors — racism, xenophobia, the loss of male-dominated blue collar jobs, a false sense of disenfranchisement among white men — are similar. An end to democratic distrust and far-right violence in the U.S. under Biden could also mean a reduction in Canada’s hate crime rates. 

An end to democratic distrust and far-right violence in the U.S. under Biden could also mean a reduction in Canada’s hate crime rates. 

As is the case with climate action and immigration policy, a resolution to Canada’s own democratic challenges might be found south of the border in whatever Biden, along with U.S. civil society, does to correct its course. 

Where can Canadian social impact organizations play a role? 

In Canada itself, Woo believes there must be an effort to understand how exactly the U.S. reached a point where thousands of its own citizens would be willing to storm the seat of its government, change an election’s results, and execute politicians. She says racism was a huge part of what led to the events of Jan. 6th, and says a collaboration between non-profits, the private sector, and government is needed to guard against it in Canada, as well as build a more inclusive country. “We need to take a really comprehensive approach to it and deepen our commitment to the idea of the Canadian mosaic,” Woo says. 

That mosaic has fractured before. The 60s and 70s saw Quebec separatism briefly expand into full-blown terrorism under the FLQ. Barely 20 years later, separatists on the other side of the country, sick of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s National Energy Program, urged Alberta to follow suit. “We’ve had moments in which our system has been stretched very severely,” Deveaux says. “These things have a tendency to ebb and flow.” The difference, of course, is that social media didn’t exist at the time. 

Civil society organizations and governments could do their part by putting out data to journalists, Deveaux says, to counteract the flow of misinformation on social media. These stories could be as simple as explaining why one community is getting a sewer line while another one is not. “That’s the nuts and bolts of democracy on a daily basis,” Deveaux. Another is for non-profit organizations to start functioning as newsrooms — supported by civil society, but free to pursue stories in the public interest. (A couple of Canadian news and research outlets, such as Press Progress and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, already take this approach). 

Ultimately, Woo believes Canadian civil society will need to take a comprehensive approach to the health of our country’s democracy. This will mean a collaborative approach she doesn’t believe existed before the Trump administration. “The problems we face — there’s no silver bullet,” Woo says. “We’re going to have to work together more.” CivicAction is in discussions with the private sector and government to ask what it can do to help out. 

They are not working on democratic renewal projects per se, but its interests in leadership and inclusivity are critical to understanding how to rebuild democratic trust in both the U.S. and Canada. Biden’s administration is in its first week, but Woo already expects they will be a better example for collaboration with civil society than their predecessors despite the challenges it faces. “Because I’m an eternal optimist, I see great opportunity in recasting so many of our practices, our systems, our policies,” Woo says. “I really hope that we use this window of opportunity to do that.” 

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