Crackpot or Genius? Canada Steps onto the World Stage as a Democratic Innovator

Concluding remarks by J.H. Snider, a Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government and President of iSolon.org, delivered to Harvard University Canada Program’s Conference on Comparing the Democratic Deficit in Canada and the United States: Defining, Measuring, and Fixing, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 10, 2008. The remarks divide the substance of the conference into three categories: Democratic Deficits, Reforms to Fix the Democratic Deficits, and Reforms to Reform the Process of Fixing the Democratic Deficits. Canada's great democratic innovation, the creation of citizens assemblies on electoral reform, fits in this third category, Reforms to Reform the Process of Fixing the Democratic Deficits.