Activists with Just Stop Oil during a November 2022 protest near Trafalgar Square. Photo by Alisdare Hickson/Flickr.

In his inauguration speech, Donald Trump proclaimed, “I was saved by God to make America great again”—leaving no doubt that we can expect scant regard for the democratic rights of those who oppose his Divine Mission. Indeed, writing in The Conversation, French scholar Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy describes Trump’s rhetoric as marked by “triumphalism and overt authoritarianism.”

Pierre Poilievre, who may well be the next Canadian prime minister, personifies the same impatience with opposition, as he advances his radical right-wing agenda. As I noted in my last column for Canadian Dimension, he regards his opponents as a sinister force, as he lashes out at “authoritarian socialism” and characterizes challenges to the inequities in society as intolerable expressions of “wokeism.” Clearly, the need to defend democratic rights is pressing on both sides of the border.

If we are to defend democratic rights, we must distinguish between the rights that were won in struggle and the flawed systems of political representation that exist in liberal democracies like Canada. As the historical record shows, these systems were developed to provide representation only to men of property.

Elections Canada acknowledges that the electoral system at the time of Canadian Confederation in 1867 granted the right to vote to property-owning males exclusively. It wasn’t until 1918 that voting rights were extended to women; and racially-based restrictions persisted for decades after this. Shockingly, the removal of all voting restrictions on Indigenous people was delayed until 1960.

The extension of the franchise was postponed as long as possible, but the system now in place is still a severely limited form of democracy. In a thousand ways, the power and influence of wealth controls the electoral process and the workings of government. We may vote for the candidate of our choice but the economic decisions that shape our lives are mainly decided around corporate boardroom tables. The so-called democracy that we are taught to revere is a weak and sickly creature but the democratic rights that we must defend are a very different matter.

If the right to vote was not intended for the “lower orders,” the power structure also didn’t grant the right to assemble or to express dissenting views without a fight. The 1819 Peterloo Massacre........

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