TORONTO – It is sometimes beneficial to recall that other people, other cultures, impact on our experience. Special Alert: someone had the audacity to live Life before we decided to be born. In the early 50’s, the television stations beaming their programs out of Buffalo New York into Southern Ontario, as a public service to combat crime and mayhem, were in the habit of interrupting all programming with a public service message that went :”It’s ten o’clock [PM], do you know where your children are?”.

The message seemed eminently clear: seize your responsibility! Today, we have almost come to accept the truism that democracy and its benefits can only survive with unending vigilance and public engagement – we only protect what is “ours”. Looking elsewhere for assurance that we may be on the right track, we find societies that do not share that view as “politically repugnant”. We are quick to point out that it is almost beyond ridiculous that 1/3 of one percent (.033 ) of a country’s population could claim to speak for everyone (to decide foreign and economic policy; to determine whether your tastes are acceptable; to declare what is “the Law”‘; to dictate whether or not you should have children, how you should raise them….I think one gets the point.

Yet, we propagandize fear of what China’s elite Communist Party members (50 million adherents out of a population of 1.5 billion souls) may do to the rest of us, if they run amok. But someone has to emerge at the helm to guide the rest of us mortals through Life’s challenges, to fashion a stamp of character to what we do as a people.

This weekend, in Canada, a country with a population of 40 million, 140,000 residents who “registered”, online, with no personal monetary expense, to be included as “registered” members of the Federal Liberal Party, will decide who will emerge as Prime Minister. If you gave been using your calculator, that equals .0035 percent of Canadians who will make almost all of our public decisions – good or bad – on our behalf.

Mathematically, that suggests China’s ruling Party is ten times more democratic than Canada’s ruling Party. Alas…