Canada Parliamentary Democracy Essay

583 Words3 Pages

Canada has always been stylized as one of the many examples of parliamentary democracy, in other words, Westminster democracy. It has been 148 years since Canada first elected our own leader, The Right Honorable Sir John. A. MacDonald. The Canadian democracy smoothly transferred from an oligarchy to a modern, parliamentary and fair government system.

Democracy, the term that originated from the ancient Greece, breaks into two compartments, demo and cracy. A demos is the meeting place of the Athens assembly, and cracy stands form rule. The two terms combined together forms the term "democracy". The Athenian democracy is a "direct-democracy", meaning the people can have a direct voice in the legislative procedure. However, as time passes by, …show more content…

The representative system was working fairly smoothly during the early years of U.S. Nevertheless, as an representative is high-earning and has powerful legislative function, only the affluent could afford running and becoming one. Unfortunately, Canada adopted this "new" democracy option, thus our chambers are filled with self-hypercritical oligarchs who invests a plethora of capitals to serve the sole purpose of getting into the House of Commons.

In reality, these representatives are defender of democratic realms in name only! Many Canadians whom are well-educated of the democracy concepts gives their votes to the MP just because they support the person of the partisan leader to become the head of government, in other words, the prime minister.

Is our society democratic? Unequivocally yes. We use a first-past-the-post voting system(obsolete compared to proportional representation) that breaks our country in to 338 federal single-member constituency districts that elects 338 representatives. Nonetheless, are all representatives created equally? Indisputably, no. Despite de jure, all MPs are created equally. De facto, MPs elected from the governing party has much more power compared to that of opposition parties. Almost all cabinet ministers came from the governing party. Hence, opposition party members hardly has a word if a majority government is