The Friendly Dictatorship

Book excerpt: Is Canada a dictatorship? This question may strike most readers as ridiculous. We have regular free elections, a free press, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, no end of interest groups, and a number of ways to express dissent. But Jeffrey Simpson argues that the presence of partisan parliamentary debate should not obscure one fact: with the Liberal Party's re-election to a third majority government, Canada is in danger of becoming a de facto one-party state. The Friendly Dictatorship tries to make sense of what has been happening in three areas that are vital to Canadian democracy: the parliamentary system, the political parties, and the electorate.