General statement one: a good leader sometimes needs to make unpopular decisions.
General statement two: a good democracy is a reflection of the will of the people.
Now these two very general statements would seem to me to possibly come into conflict even though I think most of us would more agree than disagree with them.
So where is the line drawn on when an elected government can make a decision that is unpopular, presumably for the greater good of a country?
This is why Canada is a political mess, for all our international reputation of being a country of polite people. When it comes to politics, we're not very nice to each other, a significant portion of the time.
If you substitute "province" for "country" you get the worse mess that is my province of Alberta. The UCP won the most seats (I still don't consider the premier to be legitimate since he did not win his party leadership honestly), they have made many unpopular decisions that they claim is for the good of the province.
Cow pies, most of them.
The line, in my view, is how much corruption are people willing to tolerate for the so-called "good of the country/province". If we weren't having a pandemic, there would be protests going on, the likes of which haven't been done here in decades.
Not that it takes a lot of people to make an effective protest. Sometimes all it takes is one mentally ill veteran who got nowhere with trying to get help for his mental and other medical issues, considered his situation hopeless, and took his own life on the steps of the provincial legislature... at the time when the debate going on was whether or not to "reaffirm" the right of doctors and pharmacists to deny MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) for reasons of religious belief.
The debate was cut short when the MLAs were informed that someone had just committed suicide out on the front steps, but did that make an impression on the government? Of course not. What an inconvenience (and what an unnecessary debate in the first place, since the medical professionals and pharmacists already had the right to refuse services on grounds of conscience; the debate was actually over whether or not they should be required to refer the patient to another doctor/pharmacist who would provide the service the patient was seeking).
With Internet and mass access to communication technology, perhaps the government should make a live poll for everything that they wanted to decide, so the literal democracy can be apply. So it's always an objective collective, popular, decision
I really wonder how would a nation behave when it's totally controlled by the will of the people.
You'd get chaos. And if the government words the question in a sneaky or ambiguous way, they can easily manipulate the result to be what they wanted.
That's how my province's government operates. They claim they "consult" the public by posting surveys, but the survey questions are so obviously biased that it's just insulting to anyone who isn't one of their kool-aid-drinking sycophants.
Wanna get the result you want on whether to change to permanent Daylight Saving Time or keep changing twice a year? Just don't include an option for permanent Standard Time on the survey and don't allow anywhere for write-in comments. And then claim that "the people have spoken."
The situation is the same for questions of much greater importance. Everything is slanted, and the premier keeps blathering on about referenda, and mocks the Opposition Leader for calling this undemocratic. It's not the idea of a referendum that's the problem. The problem is that the referendum question(s) will be heavily slanted in favor of the result the government wants, so they can claim that "we're doing what the people voted for us to do."
(It's like a bunch of states working together under one flag) Russia is too a Federation , but Russia ... "is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
