The 2024 Stanfield Conversation brings experts together to discuss the state of democracy

In his opening statements at the 2024 Stanfield Conversation on Wednesday, Nov. 20, journalist Doug Saunders said this year has been the worst in a century for democracy, despite an unprecedented number of elections worldwide. 

“It’s not military coups or takeovers or revolutions that are removing democracy from countries that were previously democratic,” Saunders, an international affairs journalist with the Globe and Mail, told the crowd. Instead, he said, democracies fall when an authoritarian candidate is voted in by democratic means. 

Debra Thompson, a political science professor at McGill and the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies, spoke with Saunders in the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium at Dalhousie University. The conversation was mediated by Piya Chattopadhyay, host of The Sunday Magazine on CBC.

The Stanfield Conversations is an annual event held in honour of Robert L. Stanfield, a former premier of Nova Scotia. The conversations discuss the challenges to democracy and responses to those challenges.

This year’s conversation discussed the circumstances leading to the election of Donald Trump, and the implications his presidency will have on the state of global democracy. 

Thompson said in her opening remarks that institutions protecting democracy in America “have either disintegrated, have been co-opted or are in grave danger.”

“Democratic guardrails” refers to democratic decision-making institutions like the courts, congress, election results and the Department of Justice that keep the president from having unchecked power. 

Democracies fall, the speakers agreed, when these guardrails are shut down, stacked, disenfranchised or disempowered. It is not unusual for democracies to fall because of the results of an election. 

“That’s the most common way,” Saunders said. 

During his campaign, Donald Trump said he would not be a dictator “except for day one” of his presidency. Saunders said he knows of Canadians who are currently working on exit strategies for Trump’s political rivals, military commanders and former members of Trump’s administration because they’ve been “directly threatened with arrest by Trump and his circle.”

According to a 2024 report by the International Institute for Democracy, only 30 per cent of countries today are becoming more democratic, while 47 per cent are becoming less democratic.  

Thompson said even though the global state of democracy is concerning, it’s important to remember the triumphs of freedom over authoritarianism. 

“There was a time when people in the United States and in this country could not imagine a world without slavery,” Thompson said. She went on to explain the same is true of colonialism, apartheid in South Africa and the Cold War. 

“We have done impossible things before in the service of progressive ends and social justice, and we will continue to do that,” she said. 

Despite threats to global democracy, both speakers had faith that Canada’s democracy remains safe; the parliamentary system provides more guardrails than the American republic system.

“As Canadians, we just don’t like it when [one] federal party has control for more than a decade,” Thompson said. “I think that’s a democratic impulse. We don’t even like the semblance of a one-party state.”

Saunders pointed out that while Conservative Leader Pierre Polievre uses similar far-right rhetoric to Trump, he still operates in a very different system. “Somebody who’s very far right … is very different from somebody who’s a threat to the democratic order.”