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Democracy
The limits of democracy
By Kevin Potvin
Fate of Grandview Park shows where democracy isn’t so great
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We have coming soon to our neighbourhood a classic high-resolution illustration of the chief danger of democracy as warned about by Alexis de Tocqueville after he toured America in 1831, when it had been only recently christened as the world authority on the subject. Rule by majority vote is all well and good, he said, but though they are in the minority, minorities also have rights to pursue their happiness in whatever form they choose, and majorities tend to serve their own interests at the expense of minorities.
On big either-or issues, majority rule makes sense. We can’t both go to war and not go to war at the same time. But at lower levels, fatal problems with democracy emerge.
For example, Grandview Park on Commercial Drive is up for redesign, the Vancouver Parks Board has announced. This iconic park—during the 1950s, Italian gangs battling for turf made it the most dangerous patch of real estate in the city—currently features largely unused and terribly anachronistic tennis courts, a mostly abandoned concrete stage, a defunct ranger’s house, formerly also the much-fought-over community police office, and a slightly out-of-date but still functional playground shaded by huge beautiful oak trees. In front is a Great War cenotaph and rock and tulip garden, and paved strips criss-cross through the park making for a little bit of greenery in an otherwise green space-bereft neighbourhood.
A few years ago, allegedly to dissuade drug users from discarding used syringes in the playground sand, the Parks Board removed most of the pleasant benches and cut away much of the picturesque shrubbery that provided a bit of shade, windbreak and privacy. Two years ago, and for the umpteenth time, the Board ripped up and replaced the grass, only to find it return once again shortly to plain dirt on account of the fact it is the most highly trafficked park per square meter in the city.
It’s so heavily used because it sits in the middle of the highest proportion of renters of any neighbourhood in the city, and so functions as a basic living space and social gathering place for thousands of people denied the ample floor space and back yards typical home owners take for granted. The redevelopment of the park will become a hot potato issue around the neighbourhood because everything in this street always does. To alley fears, the Parks Board will conduct a thorough public consultation process. All voices who want to be heard on the subject will be invited to make themselves heard. And based on what seems to be the democratically-directed choice of the neighbourhood on how exactly to redesign the park, the Board will proceed with plans. What could be wrong with that?
The problem is, the majority rule on a majority of issues, if not all of them, which leaves no room at all for minority rule anywhere. In every single park in the entire east side, a majority of neighbours living nearby will always vote for park redevelopment ideas that favour improved playgrounds for children and increased family use of the park in general. No majority of neighbours surrounding any park will ever vote in favour of leaving the park alone or designing it to accommodate young, single, poorly-paid people living on top of each other in dark basement apartments and who wish to smoke a little weed in peace because sanding drywall or serving up fried dough for a living is not the most satisfying or engaging way to spend 40 hours a week. This is also the most artistically inclined neighbourhood, and smoking week and collaborating in informal social settings such as in a park like Grandview is essential—has always been essential in every human society in every land—to the production of art.
It is also crucial to a society’s production of art for there to exist a large pool of people thinking themselves to be artists but not, currently, really getting much of anything off the ground while hanging around a park and smoking weed. This is something that looks an awful lot to the outsider as lazy people bumming around. Non-artists, extremely valuable people who keep things working, pay the taxes that support all our shared infrastructure, and who raise and provide for their families, only see the hanging around part and never see the one’s formerly hanging around but now hit with an idea and hunkered down out of sight executing it.
But the non-artists sure enjoy the final results of this intricate informal system, be it a staged play, a painting show, a music concert, a public sculpture or a film, and typically marvel at how, when and where the artists managed to do it all. A big part of the “where” is in places like Grandview Park, a lot of the “when” is at the times it looks like lazy people lying around smoking weed, and much of the “how” happens in the free flow of ideas that take place there. Actually creating the art is only a small and final part of the priocess; getting the ideas is the real game.
A park where poor, lost and alienated misfits (recruits to the art industries), though a minority even in a misfit-friendly neighbourhood like Commercial Drive, will never receive a majority endorsement in any public consultation conducted by Parks Board in any neighbourhood. And yet, such a park, if only one, is required. A democratic process of public consultation over redevelopment of parks will produce in every instance parks designed to welcome children and families, and to push away drug using lay-abouts. The democratic process will never lead to a decision favoring a minority, where a decision has to be made between serving either one or another group only.
And so de Tocqueville’s conundrum: where a minority wish is in the interests of society as a whole, as surely a park where misfits can hang out in peace surely is, how do we secure that minority interest while respecting majority-orientated democracy? No one could suggest with any seriousness that the Parks Board forego public consultation, disregard the plainly known wishes of the majority, and consider Grandview Park from the point of view of the poor, alienated, in-and-out-of-work weed smoking artist wanna-be lay-abouts who don’t after all pay much taxes.
The only solution is for members of the majority to individually choose to give second place to their own interests and give their vote over to the minority in this one case, much like an observant Buddhist will allow his own interest in not being bitten by an insect in favour of letting the annoying mosquito live in service to the bigger project of life.
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