It comes as no surprise that information and the reaction to information weaves itself into a number of May's arguments, as her book focuses on democracy in Canada. It is impossible to have a democratic society without well-informed citizens. How could we choose who best to represent us if we knew nothing about them? What I'd like to look at first is one of the sources of information in a democratic society: experts. An expert is, for the purposes of this post, someone who knows a great deal more about a specific area than the general population. These people are highly valuable in the operation of a good government, as they are in a role to make better-informed decisions than your average person. This is not to say that they are always right, just to say that their opinions should be considered (always keep in mind Bertrand Russel's essay "On the Value of Skepticism.").
Curiously enough, experts are not often given the deference they are due. We can see this both on the part of the population in general and on the part of the government. The recent H1N1 Flu panic is an example of the population not heeding the advice of experts: the World Health Organisation has published a good deal of helpful and insightful information, none of which includes the advice "panic and act irrationally." Even governments are susceptible to panic, as we can see in the case of Egypt, who is slaughtering all of its pigs, despite the fact that pigs are not the most likely cause of the disease in humans, and despite the fact that such slaughter will ruin thousands of lives and livelihoods. The example of the Egyptian government shows us the grave damage that can be caused by a government that willfully ignores the advice of experts.
We can see instances of damaging ignorance in our current government and the recent government of the US. Think of Bill C-61, the Conservatives' now-dead attempt to reform the Copyright Act, that completely ran against the advice of copyright experts like Michael Geist. Or look to the Bush government, who invited novelist Michael Crichton to serve as an expert witness on climate change. While I do not wish to undermine the great amount of effort that a novelist might put into his work, I doubt very much whether Crichton was the right choice for this particular job.
May reminds us that this willful ignorance does not have to be so. When talking about her term as senior policy advisor to federal minister of environment Tom McMillan (under Mulroney's Conservative government), May tells us that she "was frequently directed to keep the opposition critics up to speed on key files" (45). The constant collaboration of experts would benefit the country greatly. Indeed, if we return to the issue of H1N1, we can see a glimmer of promise with Canada's most recent minister of health, Leona Aglukkaq:
If there were fears she might be ill-prepared for such stuff, they’ve initially been calmed. If only, it seems, because she would seem for now to understand how poorly prepared to manage a worldwide health crisis she—or anyone—may be. In public, she has deferred to the experts around her. In private, she has gathered opposition MPs for consultation. In Question Period, she has provided straightforward answers. Asked after one session this week to clarify a previous statement, she stood, admitted her mistake and thanked the opposition critic for the opportunity to correct the record. (via Maclean's)
We can only hope that such behaviour will become the new baseline, rather than a noteworthy oddity.
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