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Tom Monto

Ernest Brown called for democratic Proportional Representation

Updated: Jun 16, 2023

Ernest Brown, better known for his massive collection of photographs of early Edmonton, was a political reformer of the leftist tendency. He supported work for the jobless, public control of money and democracy through proportional representation. His views survive in many surviving manuscripts he composed but never published. The following are some excerpts. (I apologize for the choppiness of the prose.)


In one of his papers at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, he outlined the trials and tribulations of the unemployed in Edmonton in the 1920s and 1930s.


He then launched into a discussion on democracy by asking rhetorically:

What does the economic hardship of unemployed in Edmonton got to do with democracy?


You may well ask the question but have patience. It took a long time for you to be born, and it has taken you a lifetime to get into the mess you are now in.


You may not be surprised when I tell you that in 1923, when I appeared before the 'City fathers,' more than half of them denied there was any hardship or suffering among the people of the city or the country. As a result of this acknowledgement of ignorance I had to distribute many pages of a report I was presenting and then setting out specific cases the number of foreclosures, the number of business failures, bailiffs sales, court judgements and such like evidence of trade depression.


Yet these were the men who were ruling us. To them we had delegated this power over our happiness, as we had in a larger measure given to members in the Dominion House for the development of the West the power over our wealth and resources, even to our life. This is the democratic method.


It may be well for a brief space here to enquire "What is democracy?"


The word "democracy" comes from two Greek words which means "people" "to rule" or government by the people. A system of government to which the sovereign power is vested in the people as a whole and is exercised directly by them or by representatives chosen by them.


Put differently "A democratic government bears the same relation to its people as the committee of a club bears to its members - the State exists for the benefit of the People. A totalitarian government bears the same relation to its people as an Army Command bears to its human and material resources - the People exist for the benefit of the State." (A.A. Milne)


Perhaps the Standard Dictionary definition is as simple and explicit as any:

'Political and legal equality; a state of society without class distinction made or favoured by law or custom'


Most of the republic of Greece, notably Athens, were at their best periods democracies, if by the word 'People' in the definition is meant "citizens."


If this ruling is accepted, what must we think of the city of Winnipeg where only property owners are allowed to vote for members to the city council.


This was Aristotle's method. He said, if all citizens were allowed to vote they would have mob government. A more modern author, Professor Burgess of Columbia University, defined democracy as applied to the State as the rule of the majority.


John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, made the rule of all, not of a majority and certainly not of a class, the essence of democracy.


He said 'The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people equally represented."


Democracy, as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced, is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people as exclusively represented.


The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter is a government of privilege in favour of the numerical majority who alone possess practically any voice in the state.' 'This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disenfranchisement of minorities.'


Mills then made a strong plea for proportional representation as a solution for this inequality and said: 'Nothing is more certain that this virtual blotting out of the minority is no necessary or natural consequence of freedom, that far from having any connection with democracy, it is diametrically opposed to the first principle of democracy - representation in proportion to numbers. It is an essential part of democracy that minorities should be adequately represented. No Real democracy, Nothing but a false Show of Democracy, is Possible without it."


Dorothy Thompson wrote 'If any party becomes so powerful that the minority is unable to find a hearing at all, or if any group of interests becomes so powerful that they can flout the popular will, democracy cannot survive.'


Long before the Christian era in 1050 BC to be exact, democracy of a form flourished in Athens. The Nobles ruled with a council but all citizens could meet and express assent or dissent. At first thse nobles were elected for life but later a term of ten years was fixed.


In Sparta the constitution of Lycurges 850 BC though maintaining the ancient double monarchy introduced institutions largely democratic. The King's became little more than presidents of a senate elected by the general assembly of citizens. Please note however that citizens had to be over the age of 60 before they could vote (while we have cut the age to 19). This assembly could accept or reject all laws and decide on war or peace, etc.



BC 594 legislation of Solon created constitutional government admitting all citizens to share in power but giving the higher orders a preponderating influence. This gave way to a dictatorship till the constitution of Clisthenes (509 BC) introduced a complete democracy so far as free citizens went. All such could vote. Ten officers were elected annually. By a law of 478 BC the last property qualification for office was swept away. The continued re-election of capable statesmen gave continuity for brilliant leadership like that of Aristides Limon and Pericles. The real democracy of the Middle Ages is to be found in the rise of the free cities and centres of Art, trade and Commerce. like Florence, pisa, Venice and Genoa. in the south and Hamburg, Nuremburg and Frankfurt in the north.


Modern democracy begins with the idea of the brotherhood of man and is developed in theory of the social compact by Locke, Rousseau and the various French writers of the 18th Century.


But all history enters into modern democracy, says Tocqueville, in the introduction to his "Democracy in America" "We shall scarcely meet with a single great event in the lapse of 700 years that has not turned to the advantage of equality...The gradual development of the equality of condition is therefore a providential fact and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree; it is universal, it is durable, it constantly illudes all human interference and all events as well as all men, contribute to it."


The need of civil laws gave the legal functionary a place by the mailed baron. The nobility being exhausted with wars and the lower classes enriched by commerce, the man of money gained position beside the man of birth, education, science and literature, opened any one of ability avanues to power.


"In the 11th Century nobility was beyond all price; in the 13th Century it might be purchased; it was confered for the first time in 1270.


"But modern democracy descended from our English ancestry. The English parliament was in a sense the continuation or revival of the ancient Witenagemote, or meeting of the wise men (earls) of all England. If it did not rule England in form, it did rule through the purse. The connection between taxation and representation - the idea that no man could be taxed save by his consent - that and the kindred ideas embodied in the Great Charter won from King John in 1215 that no man could be condemned without a trial by his peers - "by the country" like at the basis of English ideas of freedom. The overthrowing of feudalism, the struggle with Charles, the revolution of 1688 against James II, the development of constitutional government had made England to an extent democratic by confining its government to a parliament elected by a limited suffrage to represent the people.


Thus the beginning of democratic government and its development through the ages, which prompted us to write at the beginning of this Chapter, "If you want to see monumental failure of democracy under the capitalist system, I would say 'look around you.'"


An increasing number of prominent personages are doubting the advisability of continuation of the so-called democratic system.


(Lecky (Locke?) in his "Democracy and Liberty" says,

It must, i think, be added that modern democracy is not favourable to the higher forms of intellectual life. Democracy levels down quite as mush as it levels up. The belief in the equality of man, the total abstinence of the spirit of reverence, the haste are little favourable to the production of great works of beauty or thought of long meditation, sober taste, interrupted study. Such works have been produced but in small numbers and under adverse condition.

We could quote many more adverse opinions on the democratic form of government but my own contention is that democracy, like Christianity, has not been tried.


Going back to our first definition of democracy "People" "to rule" or government by the people. We say that we have not yet achieved such a desirable condition in Canada. Majority rule. sometimes but not a government of the people.


Often we fail to get even majority rule, as for instance when three candidates contest one seat and the one with the highest number of votes is elected notwithstanding the fact that the two unsuccessful candidates together polled a larger number of votes than the successful candidate. It is occasionally the result of a Dominion as it is of a provincial election that the winning party has less than half the total votes cast, yet such a party becomes the governing party for the next four or five years as the case may be. (see Chapter 8 on party government in the West and see how 1654 UFA votes elected a MLA while it took 9,900 votes to elect a Conservative. How 3862 votes in Macleod elected a "representative"while the same was done in Clearwater with only 40 votes and in Edmonton it took 13,616 to do the trick.)


John Stuart Mill in his 'Representative government" says: "It is a great discouragement to an individual, and is still a greater one to a class, to be left out of the constitution, to be reduced to plead from outside the door to the arbiters of their destiny not taken into consultation within."


De Tocqueville, who studied U.S. democracy, has this to say about majorities:


"He fears the power of majorities and says that the main evil of democratic institutions in the U.S. arises not from their weakness but from their overpowering strength. He is not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty that reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities that exist against tyranny...


if ever free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to unlimited authority for the majority that may at some future time urge the minority to desperation and oblige them to have recourse to physical force."


[Brown here quotes from an article in the Dec. 1927 issue of the The North American Review by C.H. Bretherton, which pointed out that national poverty and Democracy cannot live together. Government that imposes high taxes are accused of being dictators and democracy swells when times are good.


Brown continues: "But what is democracy? asks the reader determined that before he permits himself to be seduced into fundamental controversy we shall know what the other is talking about. I reply that "as the farmer said when he saw the hippopotamus "there ain't no such an animal."


"Democracy is a relative term like whisky. You remember that the Scotsman said that some whisky was better than others, but there was no bad whisky. Some forms of government are more democratic than others. An oligarchy is more democratic than an autocracy. A constitutional system involving adult suffrage is more democratic ceteris paribus than one with a property qualification and one that includes the Referendum and initiative is more democratic than one that has neither."


"There is not and never has been a pure democracy and there never will be. Even if it were possible to devise a workable system under which all the people made al lthe laws all the time, it would still be necessary to entrust the functions of the executive to individuals who however hedged about by laws and restrictions would still have to do a lot of things that a great many people objected to."


"So when we use 'Democracy' as in the title of this article, we simply mean a constitutional system in which a relatively large number of people have a finger in the governmental pie. how difficult it is to carry the matter further is seen when we consider the definitions of democracy that have been propounded by men who should have known better. Lincoln called it "government of the people, by the people, for the people." All governments are of the people and profess to be for the people. The earmark of Democracy is government (theoretically) by the people."


It is not by considering what Democracy means but what government means and what "the people" means that we shall well and truly lay the foundation of our argument. Government is easily defined. It is the direction, by law or by executive action, of the actions of the individual for the benefit of the community To the extent that the citizen is so directed, his liberty is curtailed. To the extent that he is left to do as he pleases, he enjoys the priceless boon of liberty."Democracy is least harmful when the democrats are most ignorant. It only become really impossible when the people are reasonably sophisticated, politically alert and sufficiently educated to have opinions on everything but not enough to have sound opinions on very much.When the general standard of intelligence is high, Democracy becomes impossible. Let us rather put it in another way and say that between a community having a comparatively low order of intelligence no education and political sophistication - which has never existed but if it did could accommodate itself to any form of government or none at all - there lies a point at which Democracy is impossible because the people are too enterprising and active-minded to let others do their political thinking for them, and still too ignorant and narrow to do their own political thinking with success.of all the democratic peoples, the U.S. alone has reached this point and it is the U.S. that alone presents the spectacle of Democracy as a gigantic failure. A crisis in national affairs generally stimulates a flight from Democracy. We have seen it in Italy, in Turkey, in Spain, in Poland and elsewhere. [written in 1927]


It is in the U.S. that we shall see if anywhere, the flight from Democracy deliberately undertaken by a nation seeking in a moment of vision that not of emergency, to replace an unworkable and unworthy system of government by a better one.


There is much to think about in this very interesting article published in an American magazine of high standing. While we have not referred to it in our quotation the burden of his argument is "there is no country in the world where the 51 percent interferes with the liberty of the 49 percent so often or so fundamentally as in the U.S., It is this majority rule, dishonestly obtained that makes it imperative that Canada must depart from the Party System....(p. 15-16)


An editorial in the American Guardian of August 11, 1939 reads in part:


Democracy is liberty plus economic security. What is liberty when you don't eat? What liberty do the 12M unemployed have except to stare? What freedom do the 23M dependent on relief have except to accept charity? ...


Another U.S. writer, Harry Emerson Fosdick, wrote " Democracy in this country is insecure not only because of external danger but because of internal failure. In particular, political democracy can never be safe without economic democracy."


R.T. Elliot, K.C., writing in 1937 in the Edmonton Bulletin, on "The Dawn of Democracy" gives us a very prophetic article which I would like quote.


"...There is not yet in the world a really democratic form of government. in Canada there is no political leadership in any political party giving a public lead into a restoring democracy, and the nation has every factor to make restoring democracy safe, honest and successful...


It is absolutely true that Canada is only approaching the dawn of democracy. It is also true that Canadians' experiences have proved that a money autocracy can never build up a great democratic nation because the interest-collecting factor is the mainspring of a financial autocracy, and the necessity of putting money into circulation as a public utility is poison to a financial autocracy. This does not make interesting reading, but it contains truths a proper understanding whereof is vital to Canadian restoration."


At a debate on Democracy at one of our universities in 1940, one of the debaters pointed out that the "politics of the people are 50 years behind the times... elected representative do not either represent the people or their opinions. Democracy is doomed unless this evil is removed."


Others were more supportive of Democracy. One said People do not realize the full value of democracy until they lose it."


On another occasion (Nov. 29, 1940) Premier Aberhart said "Democracy will exist so long as there is a Britisher." We are approaching the most important crisis in the history of mankind. Democracy is on the move, but what direction it will take after the war is over is a matter of extreme importance to everyone who is seeking democratic freedom with economic security.


There can be no democratic freedom without economic security.


Prof. Ottewell of the UofA is quoted in the Farm and Ranch Review of May 1931 "democracy apparently has proven incompetent to cope satisfactorily with the present social unrest and inequalities."


The Review's editor echoed Ottewell's remarks - "it is self-evident the professor is right in his remarks. Grain elevators are at present bursting with unsaleable human food, and and men and women are starving on our streets. We have one-seventh of all the coal in the world all around us, but decent families sit at home freezing. A more complete failure of our social and economic system could hardly be imagined.


A large majority of voters have little or no stake in the community and are smarting under a sense of social injustice... The people all have votes and the vote of the freezing and starving citizen counts for as much as that of the warm and well-fed millionaire. if we look to democracy to zealously safeguard property rights, which is one of the fundamentals of the system, we are evidently expecting far too much from human nature."


"Periods of depression are the testing times of democracy. Governments can seldom take the bold course in emergencies, aside from spectacular historical conflagrations such as a great war when we frankly and unanimously consent to autocratic government as a matter of sheer self-preservation. That proves conclusively the absolute inefficiency of democracy in an emergency..."


Francis Bacon wrote "Read not to contradict and refute nor to believe and take for granted,but to weigh and consider."


In a broadcast over the Canadian radio network, the well-known author William Van Loon said

"We have to train our younger generations the way we train our physicians and engineers - train them to judge every case on its own merits, train them never to take anything for granted.


Believing without a moment of doubt in the ultimate victory of the cause of human freedom - in the cause that will once more give the average man his chance to live his own life and that will make him, and not the State, the beginning and end of a desirable form of life, I would like to make a suggestion...


Let us train every one of our citizens to keep his mind open - train them in that knowledge of the past that alone can prevent them from repeating all the mistakes of the past."


Thanks for reading.

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