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The Current Transcript for June 29, 2016

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Multiple sirens blaring]

MIKE FINNERTY: Europe's third busiest airport attacked. Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul, dozens killed, hundreds injured, including at least one Canadian. Turks, travellers, and foreigners targeted just as the country's busy summer tourist season gets underway. Turkey's prime minister says ISIS is to blame. Other attacks have been the work of separatist Kurds. In just a moment - why has Turkey gone from being one of the safest countries in the region to this? Also today:

SOUNDCLIP

I voted for Boaty McBoatface myself. It isn’t a sort of substantive topic of public engagement. You’ll get different types of public response from the more serious, more substantive questions.

MF: Public consultations don't always go as planned. You'll remember the British people chose Boaty McBoatface when asked to vote on the name of a new polar research vessel. So, why did the British government put a cornerstone of its economic and foreign policy future into the same mischievous people's hands? Coming up, a discussion on whether referendums are a clumsy dangerous tool for deciding complex issues or the most fundamentally respectful of the people's will. I’m Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

ISIS to blame for Istanbul airport bombing, says Turkish prime minister

Guests: Borzou Daragahi, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE OF TRANSLATOR: I was getting my three suitcases wrapped when I heard the blast. The police told us to lie down. The wrapping machine steel case protected us from getting caught in the crossfire. They were shooting at the police and the police were shooting at them. Someone next to us got shot. Then we saw the bomb in the x-ray explode. Everybody around it died in that blast. I got up and looked through the window to see the shooting.

MIKE FINNERTY: Chaos at Ataturk International Airport. The number of dead has been going up this morning, currently over 40, with hundreds wounded. At least 13 of those killed were of foreign nationality. CBC News has learned at least one Canadian has been injured in the Istanbul airport bombings. Istanbul’s main airport has become, not just a regional, but an international hub. Several flights from Canadian airports travel there every day. And even for a country that has become, sadly, used to attacks on civilians, this is one of the worst. This is an airport where extra security is already built in. Unlike in Canada, you can't get into the main terminals themselves without first putting your bags through a scanner. But that still leaves passengers vulnerable, exposed, and it was those people who were in the line of fire when three attackers arrived in a taxi at 10:00 PM local time last night and began firing with automatic weapons. Footage on social media shows one of the attackers moving through the building as people around him flee. He’s shot by police, remains on the ground for about 20 seconds before blowing himself up. All three known attackers were suicide bombers. No one has yet claimed responsibility. The Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım has blamed ISIS militants for the attack. When he toured in Istanbul hospital to visit the wounded, one patient cried out, you have turned us into Syria. In a moment, why Turkey has seen 17 attacks on civilians in a year, but first, for more details of what happened we're joined by Borzou Daragahi, the Middle East correspondent for BuzzFeed International and he is in Istanbul. Borzou, hello.

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Hello.

MF: What's the latest information you have?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Well, I mean, those details are pretty good. We have 41, at least, killed, 239 injured. About half of those still in the hospital, the other half have left the hospital, so they were not such serious injuries. So, the death toll could go up. At least 13 foreign nationals killed in the attack, among them, Saudis, Jordanians, Ukrainians, an Iranian. Most of the people arriving here at the end of the Ramadan season for what is traditionally a time of holiday making in Turkey, taking a break taking their summer vacation. You know ,reports of people-- Pandemonium, really, at the airport, panic, people running, being hauled from this part of the airport to that part of the airport by equally confused and panicked security officials, people being trampled upon, children crying, screaming as they were trying to seek shelter in this airport, accounts of people stuck on airplanes not knowing what was going on, not able to get into the terminal. You know, a really horrific scene at the airport, one of the most secure, as you noted, in the world.

MF: Can you give us, Borzou, a clearer or as clear as you can, an idea of how the attack played out. The attackers arrived in a taxi?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: There several different kinds of scenarios. According to Turkish security officials, they're still piecing together the exact sequence of events. Three attackers arrived. Each may have been armed with firearms. All three had suicide bombs. At least one had firearms. And they seemed to have tried to enter the airport at different points. There's conflicting accounts as to whether one of the suicide bombers tried to enter at the arrival section. We know that at least two of them were-- I'm sorry at the departure section. We know that at least two of them, confirmed, they were in the arrivals hall, tried to enter into the arrivals hall as the passengers are coming out. And from what I understand, from multiple sources, everyone agrees on this, the first suicide bombing was outside of the terminal in the street where there are taxis are waiting and the passengers are waiting. And, in fact, this injured a lot of people because there was a lot of people out there. A bunch of people who were airport employees, tour guides, tour leaders, and so on who were in the arrivals hall rushed to help those people, bring them inside to the terminal. And this was sort of a fateful decision because the next bomb, it appears, hit either inside the terminal or at the x-ray machine just inside the terminal, not exactly in the terminal. And this created even more havoc and destruction. And then there was the third one that was captured on closed captioned tape. This is the extraordinary footage some people might have seen on social media with the guy being shot, the brave Turkish security official shooting at him and then running away. This guy obviously trying to create a lot of injuries but not able to create as much damage as he would have liked, ultimately, forced to blow himself up with not many people around. This brave security official is alive and well, apparently, and Turkish authorities say they're going to try to make him available for interviews and so on. So, we're still trying to piece together exactly what happened, how the exact sequence of events and so on.

MF: The prime minister thinks ISIS was behind this and not the Kurds. Why does he think that?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Yeah. I mean, this attack bore all of the hallmarks of al Qaeda ISIS jihadi type of terrorist attacks - the suicide bomb aspect of it, the extremely horrific, high profile aspect of it, the sort of targeting of innocent civilians and foreigners. The PKK, the Kurdish separatists, they’re not really into hitting-- Sometimes they've occasionally hit civilians. They always apologize for that; they say that wasn't the original target. Their main target is Turkish security officials and they don't really like to go after foreigners too much. So, in that sense, they don't want to alienate, especially, the Europeans who are somewhat sympathetic to their cause. It wouldn’t make sense for them to be behind this.

MF: This is a huge airport and has become a major international and European hub. Can you talk to us a little bit about the significance of this target?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: You know, Atatürk has grown so much and has so much traffic that they're actually opening up a third airport in Istanbul. There's also another airport on the Asian of Istanbul called Sabiha Gökçen, which is a pretty significant airport itself. But Istanbul is an extremely important hub. It is a gateway to Central Asia. It is a gateway to North Africa. You know, Turkish Airlines has become extremely ambitious, in terms of its destinations, including North America and Latin America. There are several Turkish discount airlines, Pegasus, Atlas, Onur, that operate out Ataturk and the other airport. And it's extremely busy and they have way more requests from international airlines to operate out of Ataturk than they have berths and space to give those airlines, because it's become such a crucial transfer and transit point in the Middle East and for other parts of the world.

MF: What political reaction has there been from President Erdoğan?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Well, one of the things that he's been saying is that this proves that we are fighting this big war against terror, and other countries should step up and so on. It wasn’t an exactly a message of healing and conciliatory towards the world. It was more, sort of-- I mean, he has a sort of attitude about this, which is interesting. He's an interesting guy. And his argument was that this shows that the rest of the world needs to join us in our fight against terror. Some would say that he was trying to use this attack to try to rally support for what the Turkish authorities see as an equally greater threat of the PKK, the Kurdish separatists. They often accuse European countries of being too lenient towards the PKK, even though it's listed as a terror group. It's tolerated in places like Germany and Belgium and so on and that really riles the Turks.

MF: Borzou, just a last question. I said, I think, 17 attacks in the last year. What do everyday Turks—

BORZOU DARAGAHI: It’s way more than that. It’s way more than that. There's been hundreds of terrorist attacks since June 28th, 2015. The exact numbers is if you count - according to Verisk Maplecroft, which is a very trusting risk management firm - in Turkey over the last year there have been 434 terrorist attacks by Kurdish and separatist groups. 670 people have been killed in those attacks and 1,719 people have been wounded. So, Turkey has gone from, as you said, sort of a staid country known more for its growing economy into a logistics hub and battlefield for all of the Middle East sectarian, ethnic, and political wars. And the reason for that is, as the patient was saying in the hospital, reason for that is just one reason for all of this is Syria and the implosion of Syria and the spreading of Syria's wars into Turkey.

MF: Borzou Daragahi, Middle East correspondent for BuzzFeed International in Istanbul. Thank you very much.

BORZOU DARAGAHI: It’s been a pleasure.

MF: Well, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş was on a plane heading to Istanbul when the attacks happened. She is also a Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. She specialises in Turkey, and a journalist who is based in Istanbul. This morning, we’re reaching her in the Turkish capital Ankara. Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, hello.

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Hello and good morning.

MF: When did you learn about the attacks yourself?

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Well, they made an announcement. We were to land right after the attack. They made an announcement that the plane was diverted to Ankara for security reasons. There was a security situation in Istanbul airport, but we didn't learn until we landed in Ankara and turned on our phones. We didn't know what had happened.

MF: And what was your reaction when you learned what did happen?

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Obviously, it's a horrifying situation and an attack of this scale on an airport is truly shocking. But, on the other hand, in some strange and rather twisted way we have come to expect attacks and bombings and suicide bombings in Turkey. As you've pointed out, there’s been 17 bombing incidents in western Turkey - civilian targets or non-civilian targets. At the heart of Ankara, twice, I guess, an aid group, a group of activists in Suruç last July, et cetera. So, it's been one tragedy after another. And, I hate saying this, but one does get used to it. There was an attack on the subway that was not ISIS, that was the PKK, The Kurdish separatist group, last month in Istanbul. And while it didn’t make it to international news because there were no foreign nationals involved and the Kurdish, Turkish thing is something that people have come to accept. On the other hand, in terms of our lives and the way we conduct ourselves, terrorism has become, within one year, in such a quick turnaround of events, within a year it's become a daily reality.

MF: So, how safe do people feel?

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Well, it’s the summer and Istanbul is a buzzing town and I am noticing that people are not out, partly also because it's Ramadan that the restaurants are empty. When you go out on a subway you think twice. Most demonstrations-- This is a country with a very polarized political debate and a huge opposition. Political demonstrations are banned for security reasons and also because it's somewhat convenient for the government to have an excuse to ban these events. But there is always, in the background, the threat. When you sit with a friend and have a drink or have some lunch, there's always: Did we pick the right place? Could this be a target for ISIS? Last week, I met up with a few friends who are visiting town and former correspondents who used to live in Istanbul and we met for dinner and then another friend said, you know, I won't come there because that might be a target for ISIS. Why don’t we meet in this place instead? And so that's the kind of factoring in that people do now in a daily basis.

MF: Turkey used to take a lot of heat from the United States because of the way it was handling ISIS. It was thought the border was left far too porous. It did have a common enemy with ISIS in the Syrian regime in President Assad. What's changed that ISIS is now, to this extent, targeting Turkey and Turkish civilians?

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Well, both ISIS and the Kurdish groups are transnational problems, not just security issues. They're transnational problems that involve multiple countries and they're intertwined, the two issues. Yes, Turkey’s policy, to be very frank and blunt about it, was live and let live. We're not going to mess with ISIS and that way ISIS isn’t going to mess with us. But did creates enormous amount of problems with United States and it's also forced Washington to sort of pick another ally in Syria, which is a Kurdish group in Southeast and they've been seen rolling through northern part of Syria with the help of US air power, gaining more and more territory. And at some point, Turkey started panicking, particularly-- The government here was like, wait a minute. Maybe the only way we can prevent this is if we roll up our sleeves and get on board in the fight against ISIS. So, that way the Kurds will not be the only allies of the United States. We’ll have more of a bargaining position. And that took place gradually over the past year. So, Turkey's now in the fight against ISIS. There is a very, very critical hundred-kilometre stretch of ISIS territory on Turkish border. This sort of hundred-kilometre by 50-kilometre, this is a major hub for ISIS. It's also the only gateway that the group has into the rest of the world. This is where the jihadists come in and out. This is where their people come. This is where the goods come, et cetera. And over the past months, Turkey has been backing opposition forces, in fact, sometimes bussing in opposition groups to fight ISIS and seal off the border. It is clearly an existential threat for ISIS. Mind you, in that pocket are very important towns, like Manbij, like Dabiq, where Brussels and Paris attack-- where the external relations department of ISIS is based and where Paris and Brussels attacks had been planned. So, ISIS is putting up a very fierce resistance on the ground against Turkey-backed opposition forces trying to seal off the border. And I think this is their way of sending a message to Turkey, that they will continue fighting these efforts.

MF: There are those who think that possibly there's a connection in this week's reconciliation between Israel and Turkey. What's your view on that?

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Well, I'm sure they're not happy about this and this has been in the works for a while, so they may know about it. But it's not possible that it would be a direct reaction to the announcement, because this kind of an attack, the planning must go back at least a couple of months. It's not the type of attack that you could be like, wait a minute. They're signing a deal with Israel and so tomorrow, you guys go and take on the airport. I think ISIS has a number of, quite a few sleeper cells in Turkey. It had to, up until this point, up until last year, it had been able to use Turkey as a recruiting ground, come in and out, also have jihadists pass through. Now Turkish authorities are cracking down on ISIS cells, ISIS presence, arresting people. We do not have a number, in terms of the exact number of ISIS militants in Turkish jails, but anybody who follows Turkish papers would know that every week there's a story about six guys arrested who were on a suicide mission, a crackdown on a cell - in various parts of Turkey, not Istanbul at all – South-eastern Turkey, eastern Turkey. Just last week, six people with suicide vests who were planning an attack had been caught. There is intelligence sharing on this with Western governments and United States, in particular. But this is the kind of thing that's really very, very difficult, as we’ve seen in Brussels and Paris. When you have people that have come in and fought, what they think is, a holy war and come back in and return to their normal lives - what are you going to do? Short of arresting them, basically incarcerating them and their networks and the people they associate with, it's merely impossible to know 100 per cent that you can prevent these attacks.

MF: Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, thanks for speaking to us this morning on show short notice. We appreciate it.

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Thank you.

MF: Glad you're safe.

ASLI AYDINTASBAS: Thank you.

MF: Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a journalist based in Istanbul. She was on a plane on her way to that airport when the explosions went off and we reached her instead in Ankara, the capital. Stay tuned to CBC News for updates on the situation - at least one Canadian wounded - throughout the program. And coming up next in our next half hour, a referendum may see my grassroots in action, but detractors argue quite the contrary. They say it lets elected officials off the hook. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Post-Brexit results: Is governing by referendum democratic?

Guests: Eoin O’Malley, Jason Brennan, Michael Pal

MIKE FINNERTY: Hello. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Intro]

MF: Coming up, of the wisdom, or not, of putting a country's future in the hands of the general public.

SOUNDCLIP

We will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice: to stay in the European Union on these new terms or to come out altogether. It will be in a referendum.

MF: It was a simple question with an answer that grows more complex by the day. Since the results of the Brexit referendum were announced last Friday, there's been widespread alarm and dissatisfaction over the United Kingdom's choice to leave the European Union. Of course, many Britons are happy to cut ties with the EU. It's what they've wanted for years, but thousands who gathered in London's Trafalgar Square last night defying a ban on their protests, urged the British parliament to renounce the result of the vote. The referendum was not binding legally. Others have called for a second referendum on the actual negotiated terms of Britain's departure or to allow leave voters who now regret their choice to reverse it. Today we debate the value of a referendum as a democratic tool and ask if a public consultation is truly the best way to solve such crucial complex issues and I'm joined now by three guests: Jason Brennan is the Flannigan Family Chair of Strategy, Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and he is in Cleveland this morning. Eoin O'Malley is a senior lecturer in political science in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University and is in Dublin, and Michael Pal is an assistant professor in the faculty of common law at the University of Ottawa and he is in our Ottawa studio. Hello to you all.

GUESTS: Hello.

MF: It is nice to talk to you. I am normally in Montreal and we say referendums, so if you don't mind, I’m going to go with referendums through this. I know that there are some who say referenda. Jason Brennan, how effective are referendums in making political decisions?

JASON BRENNAN: My main worry about referendums is that you are taking a very complicated political question that requires knowledge of a bunch of background facts in the social sciences and you're handing that question to people who don't know those facts and in fact, are systematically misinformed about them. So, the polling firm, Ipsos MORI asked the British voters about the very basic questions about how many immigrants are there, what's the amount of foreign investment, how much money is going from the UK to the EU and vice versa, and it looks like the voters got those systematically wrong. They overestimated some things, underestimated others, sometimes by a factor of 100, and there was that detail too about search results on the day after people voted where people were [chuckles] suddenly asking you know pretty basic questions about what the European Union was. The problem with voting is that because your individual vote makes very little difference, you're voting with a mass of others, you have very little incentive to take care in carefully considering what your vote would mean. When I'm crossing the street, I look both ways and I process the information rationally because if I make a mistake I get hurt, but when I cast a vote, kind of regardless of how I voted, doesn't make a difference and that's sort of a recipe for uninformed and irrational voting.

MF: You make an argument to that you wouldn't try to advise your plumber on how to fix your pipes or a doctor on how to perform surgery.

JASON BRENNAN: Yeah, it's often considered elitist to say that well maybe voters are uninformed and that they should know more before they cast their votes. It's strange to say that because it's also elitist to say that to run a radio station requires skill or to be a plumber requires skill and background knowledge. For some reason when it comes to democracy, we seem to think that political knowledge doesn't make any kind of difference or we shouldn't say that it does, like it would hurt people's feelings.

MF: Eoin O'Malley in Dublin, Ireland holds referendums you know fairly frequently. How effective have they been there?

EOIN O’MALLEY: They're effective in the sense that they give you an answer because they have to give you an answer, and so one of the problems is that they have to yield to a decision and then yielding to a decision you see some of the problems that Jason has mentioned. They have the issues, very complex issues, that become boiled down into simple yes or no answers and very often we make the decision on something that's not actually relevant to the question. So, sometimes voters will look at issues such as whether they like the government or not. If it's the government proposing a change, do we like this government and then we make our decision on the basis of that rather than on the basis of the substantive question.

MF: But there's also, as I understand it, involvement by citizen experts, I believe like yourself, who help to decide what actually does go to a vote. Could you explain the system a little bit?

EOIN O’MALLEY: So one of the things that just happened recently is that we had a constitutional convention because there was some sense that the Constitution needed to be updated. For changes in the Constitution, it normally came from government and then was put by referendum to the people, that's in the Irish Constitution that you have to. It's the people that make changes to the Constitution. This time they decided to put a number of issues to ordinary citizens in the form of a citizen's assembly and those 100 citizens then made a decision to recommend to government that certain things would be put to the people, and the government then decided judiciously or injudiciously to put certain issues to the people—

JASON BRENNAN: So, it puts a citizen--

MF: It puts a body in between the people and parliamentarians?

EOIN O’MALLEY: Yes, so one of the advantages is that people no longer think of it as a government sponsored amendment, but rather think that it's something that comes from the people so it gets away from the problem that people are judging it in the wrong ways. So we saw, for instance, issues such as the Marriage Equality referendum that came originally from the Constitutional Convention. We also saw somewhat more complex issues about the electoral system went to the Constitutional Convention and there what you saw was experts saying, no you shouldn't change your system, your system is fine. The people in the Constitutional Convention agreed and so what may have gone to referendum no longer went to referendum.

MF: Michael Pal in Ottawa, let's bring this back to Canada and there are, of course, the two big referendums on Quebec sovereignty which still [chuckles] scarred those of us who were involved in them in Quebec, but what other questions have referendums been used to make decisions on here?

MICHAEL PAL: Well, the Quebec sovereignty-- we don't use them as often as lots of other countries, especially at the federal level. The 1995 Quebec sovereignty is the one people will think of provincially. When we had major constitutional change in the Nineties, that went to the people in a referendum and there was one on conscription which had the very unfortunate outcome that since a massive majority rejected it in Quebec and it was accepted in other parts of the country, so kinds of divisions arose there that I think left people quite hesitant to use referendums. But now it's potentially on the table for electoral reform and the government has suggested it's not interested in a referendum, but I don’t understand that they've ruled it out. Probably the odds of a referendum on electoral reform have decreased after Brexit because I think no matter what you think of the outcome, the process and the debate and some of the recrimination afterwards and the backtracking on campaign promises that's happened has all sort of left a sour taste in the mouth about Brexit, so I'd say the odds of a referendum in Canada on electoral reform were probably already low but they've gone down even further.

MF: It's interesting you say that because basically you're saying the take away from the Brexit referendum, certainly for Canada, is that we shouldn’t have one.

MICHAEL PAL: I mean, it's a very different context. I think the Prime Minister actually said in a press conference yesterday, and I think that's right, electoral reform is a very technical issue. There are those of us of us who spend a lot of time studying, but the average person has much better things to do in their day. The evidence we have from provincial referendums, there were two in BC, one in Ontario, one in PEI, people were not that well informed about the options, to go back to Jason's point. I take from that if we are going to have a referendum, we should have voter education. Maybe that's something we should be doing anyway, building that into civics curriculum in schools to make sure people can make more informed choices, but there is an issue about what do people know about the difference between a single transferable vote system and a mixed member system, or even all the details of our current first past the post system. Those are all big issues that are out there when you want to think of whether to use a referendum or not.

MF: Jason, do you have the same take away from the Brexit referendum?

JASON BRENNAN: Yes, but I'm also skeptical about even educating voters as a chance for being successful. You know, when we look at what people retain from high school a year after they've graduated, they've forgotten most everything about history and civics and everything, and I think the main worry here is that because your individual vote counts for so little, you just don't have a strong incentive to invest in the knowledge, to retain the knowledge, to process information in a rational way. I think this is why we want, in a democratic system, a system in which the elites keep the populace in check but the populace keep the elites in check, rather than just letting the majority of the moment decide things.

MF: And Eoin, in Dublin, how do you see the Brexit referendum and compared to the way, the seriousness with which your own people in Ireland took their referendums, their many referendums?

EOIN O’MALLEY: One of the things you see in referendums in Ireland is that very often it boils down to an emotional thing; do you like, say gay marriage, or are you against it, and in the UK, in the Brexit referendum, you saw more or less the same thing, and so issues such as attitudes towards migrants, attitudes towards Europe were to the fore in people's information processing and decision making. Probably what you saw was people only now realise the enormity of the decision they've made and are only now trying to figure out what it was that they should have done. It comes down to an emotional decision; do you think there are too many immigrants in your country or are you annoyed because there aren't as many secure jobs as there were 30, 40 years ago.

MF: Is that what you think it came down to yourself?

EOIN O’MALLEY: It was indisputably an issue about do you like the number of immigrants that are coming into the country and then there was an issue of people’s own job security and whether they felt that the country has gotten worse in the last 40 years or so.

MF: I want to play a clip for you and for the other two of you as well. Her name is Grainne Healy, a co-organizer of the campaign to legalize same sex marriage in Ireland last year, and we asked for her thoughts on referendums. Here is what she had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

I'm not in favour of referenda even though we had such a decisive result, we had a 60-40 win. But really, on social issues, particularly issues that are to do with minority rights, I'm not in favour of referenda because I think protecting minorities is the job of legislators. It's up to them to stand up to those who would have, perhaps, bigoted or biased opinions against minority groups and legislate for them. In Ireland we ended up having to have a constitutional referendum because legally that was the advice the government got, and it was decided that's the route it would go.

MF: Eoin, is there something dangerous, or even wrong, asking the majority to decide on minority rights?

EOIN O’MALLEY: Yes, and you’d think it’s the job of the Constitution to protect those rights and then the courts to enforce that, and I disagree with her somewhat in the sense that it did have a positive impact in that for the lives of gay people in Ireland, suddenly you had for a couple of months people were talking about your life and what the experience of being gay and probably that conversation was probably a useful one for gay people, for their families, and for everybody generally, but that's one thing about having a motive issue where you know you're either for it or against it. We've had other referendums on something called the fiscal compact, which was essentially whether to lower Keynesianism or not and there it was very difficult to ask people to make this decision. Most people didn't know what a long term deficit was, or a structural deficit was. What happened then was people were going, how angry are you with the European Union at this moment, and I think a lot of the vote came down to that.

MF: Jason, I want to ask you, because you're the most skeptical I think of our three guests on the whole idea of referendums as a democratic tool, about this Irish referendum that was on gay marriage because I mean in the final analysis, even though it was the majority or minority rights, it was tremendously empowering and it really allowed the country to have a moment and to make a move forward. Doesn't that argue in favour of referendums?

JASON BRENNAN: Yes, I wouldn’t say that they always get them wrong or they always get them right or anything like that, so yes I think in Ireland's case it is sort of beautiful to have a majority coming together to say yes to rights rather than no to rights. So I think for me the question is look at referenda as a hammer, as a tool, and then ask how frequently is it likely to arrive at the just or the correct answer. I'm skeptical in general, that's not to say that they're always mistaken.

MF: Okay, so if we could, let's look at what maybe you can do to try to use that tool because a hammer can be a very useful tool. Every tool has its own purpose. Michael Pal, with a referendum is there a way to make it a better tool? Here in Canada we passed something called the Clarity Act which the government and the Supreme Court thought would help us to come up with a result that would be less divisive. Was that a positive way of kind of framing referendums in the future?

MICHAEL PAL: Right. I mean I think one of the things you bring up there is a reason why any federal government of any political stripe might be hesitant to have a referendum is because there's so much baggage attached to it; the constitutional referendum from the Nineties, the Quebec sovereignty referendum, and the whole debate about needing a clear majority and what a clear majority actually is. So we don't know what number clear majority means from the Clarity Act or from the Supreme Court case, and law professors, and political scientists, and we frequently debate that all the time political parties but we don't have an exact number. I think you can see a little bit from Brexit that when you have a very close result, people know how tenuous the outcome was. It could be turned on a different campaign ad or a promise that end up being retracted, so the idea of a clear majority pushes towards the fact that it builds more legitimacy in the outcome. On the other hand—

MF: Presumably the Brexit result, 52-48 thereabouts, wouldn't have been enough for a Quebec referendum under the Clarity Act.

MICHAEL PAL: Under my understanding what the Supreme Court said, I agree. It would not have been enough. British Columbia had two referendums on electoral reform. The first, it had a supermajority of 60 per cent, so 58 per cent of people voted to move to a single transferrable vote system. That's a quite a large number, but that did not pass because of the supermajority threshold. There have been debate about what an appropriate threshold might be in the electoral form context in Canada, I don't understand that to be that to be settled at all, but that's been the context. The other process is, we've been debating about whether a referendum on Canada electoral form would mean you wouldn't get change because it looked like you didn't get change at the provincial level, and if you look around the world, it seems harder to get a kind of yes vote but maybe Brexit also factors in there where the leave campaign didn't look like was going to win and in the end, they did. Maybe it is possible to get change through referendum.

MF: Eoin O’Malley, what do you think of that Canadian solution, the idea that it's not good enough 52-48, that you need a result that is quote unquote “more clear”?

EOIN O’MALLEY: It might seem a bit unfair that the minority is preventing change and so, it’s obviously a conservative move, and I think one of the other things that one could look at as something that was relevant to Brexit, was that it wasn't clear what the alternative was, so you knew if you were voting to remain, what remain meant because you had lived it, whereas leave was something that meant a lot of different things to different people and so you kind of threw whatever dream you had into the leave basket, and then lots of people picked it up and said, okay, this is what it means to me. It might mean a kind of free market for some people, it might mean an end to the power of corporations to others, so if you had, instead of a pure referendum between yes and no between two options, you could offer a number of different options, so for instance in the Brexit you could've said you want the Norwegian model or the Swiss model, then there might have been a more nuanced debate about exactly what you were voting for.

MF: Jason Brennan, do you have a view on checks and balances or ways to make referendums less of a blunt tool?

JASON BRENNAN: Well, one possibility would be to have multiple referenda; have multiple votes staggered over time. So, you take James Madison who helped write the US constitution, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. His main goal in creating checks and balances was to slow down passion. He thought that democracies tended to become overwhelmed by passion and become emotional, and if we just make people take multiple steps, they'll be calmer and a level head will prevail.

MF: What about the idea, and this is to all three of you, of a second vote in Britain on the actual terms of exit because a lot of people are arguing that people didn't understand the consequences. Well, the consequences will become real once a deal is in place. I'll start with you, Jason.

JASON BRENNAN: Well, I'm worried that in the same way that just leaving the EU in general is a very complicated question that takes tremendous economic knowledge, which most voters lack, choosing among the different terms also requires more knowledge than they're likely to have, so again I think it's important for parliament to step in here and make a better decision than we can trust sort of the UK voters as a whole to do.

MF: Eoin O’Malley, a second referendum on the actual terms of Brexit?

EOIN O’MALLEY: I suspect they won't want to go for that because—

MF: But do you think it's a good idea?

EOIN O’MALLEY: I think it's a bad idea for the same reason that it was a bad idea to hold it in the first place. I mean, it was a parliamentary democracy and it should have allowed parliament to make the decision and maybe do something a little bit like how Sweden does it, where you would have an election in between so people are clear that when you're voting for say, the Conservative Party or the Labour Party, you're voting to remain or leave. Then, at least you have the authority of two parliaments. I think that might be a better way to go than go back.

MF: Michael Pal, a second referendum, which was the plan for the 1980 Quebec referendum.

MICHAEL PAL: I leave the United Kingdom to make decisions themselves. I think whatever the process is, people should know it in advance and that factors into the electoral reform debate in Canada. People should know what they're voting for and what the next steps will be.

MF: And that'll be the last word. Thanks to all three of you, fascinating. I appreciate your time. Jason Brennan, associate professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He was in Cleveland. Eoin O’Malley, a senior lecturer in political science in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University in Dublin and Michael Pal, associate professor at the University of Ottawa. He was in Ottawa. Now it's time to get some feedback on the stories we've been covering over the past few days. On Monday, as the EU and Britain started coming to grips with Brexit and the long path to unravel their so-called marriage, we spoke to Brexit-ers and looked at how the polls got it so wrong, and that provoked quite a lot of feedback from you. We will begin with Ruth Ruth Karelia who wanted to weigh in from Lethbridge. She writes: My brother, nephew, and cousin voted to leave and they are generally conservative voters but they felt such a disgust at politicians. UK politicians have been enjoying all the benefits of belonging to the EU. My brother is physically handicapped but worked for over 20 years until his handicap prevented him. Each year now he has to go through a government means test to prove his disability. Here's Gail Lunn from Gabriola, BC. She says this was a vote against globalization, CEO's multimillion dollar salaries, currency traders, entrenched self-serving bureaucracies, entitled politicians from all parties, the IMF, foreign workers, stagnant salaries for lower and middle classes, the influence of banks, corporate welfare, immigrants who don't integrate, free trade agreements, dispute resolution mechanisms, environmental degradation to enrich resource corporations, levels of student debt, elites in all our institutions, rigged stock markets, unaffordable housing in cities, growing inequality, etc etc etc. The free movement of people, she writes, is a wonderful idea but it only works when it's free movement between countries with similar standards of living and the institutions to support liberal democracy. Here's Dave Weaver with a different view posted on Facebook. Leave, he says, prevail due to something the media elite weasels like you cannot fathom, nor can you understand it. Cold anger. But Mark Hilliard is embarrassed. He says every time I hear a fellow Brit speak about how great it is that the people spoke, I'm reminded of just how dumb the average voter has become. And finally, John Wright in Waterloo says, well it’s some advice actually, advice for Scotland. He writes: Find some money in your infrastructure budget to a margin, strengthen Hadrian's wall to keep out the flood of Brits who will leave England when the economy of the disunited Kingdom tanks. Send your comments to us, go to The Current web page and click on the Contact link. That's our program for today. I'm Mike Finnerty, thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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June 29, 2016 full episode transcript

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