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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waits for a meeting of the North Atlantic Council to begin at the NATO Summit, on July 12.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

In case anyone wasnt clear on how the Liberal government views the stakes in its battle against Google and Facebook, here is the way Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described them at a press conference last week, after Facebook started blocking Canadian news media on its platforms, and Google threatened to do the same:

Journalists should be paid for their work they do serving our democracy. Canadians have a long history of standing up to bullies, and Facebook made the wrong choice in attacking Canada. We defend democracy around the world. Its what were doing by supporting Ukraine. Its what we did in the Second World War. Its what we do at the United Nations every day. We are there to defend the principles and values of democracy.

Our response is twofold. One, wow. Mr. Trudeaus rousing defence of our way of life may be lacking a bit of perspective. And two, could we get a little more of that enthusiasm for democracy right here at home?

Here are nine things Mr. Trudeau can do to defend the principles and values of democracy without leaving Ottawa, spending much money or storming the private beaches of billionaire tech CEOs:

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Globe editorial: There must be (at least) nine more ways for the Liberals to defend democracy - The Globe and Mail

Ukraine must prepare now to ensure democracy isnt crushed by the necessary restrictions of wartime.

Once the war is over, and Ukraine has restored its territorial integrity, the country will be focused on reconstruction and getting back to normal life. This will mean returning to full democracy, with clear and protected free speech and political competition.

Since Russias full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, Ukraine has been under a state of martial law. The Constitution explicitly forbids holding elections or attempting constitutional changes while this remains in force. Until complete victory is secured, all our efforts must be put into defeating the invaders. However, there is increasing concern that aspects of our democracy are under threat.

The war and occupation of parts of Ukraine have had a destructive effect on the countrys political infrastructure, and our ability to conduct the business of democracy hasbeen undermined. Our people are scattered (more than 6.3 million have fled to other European countries and 5 million more are internally displaced), our institutions are strained and our democracy is under attack from a neighbor determined to destroy it.

Others have been less lucky. One million Ukrainians have been kidnapped and deported to Russia, whilearound 9,000 civilianshave been murdered in blatant acts of ethnic cleansing and Russification (this number is an extremely low estimate given the 20,000 deaths in Mariupol alone), a plague that has ravaged Ukraine since the time of the Tsars.

These people are forever Ukrainian, regardless of their location, and are still at the core of our nation. Yet they cannot participate in the democratic processes set out in our constitution.Acombined system of majoritarian and proportional democracy such asourssimply cannot function if a massive section ofthepopulation is unable to vote.

This has been caused by A range of issues stemming from the invasion. For example, the mechanisms for voting when abroadare simply not there, and mostof our embassies do not have the capacity to deal with the Ukrainian diaspora. In Poland alone, there are 2.3 million Ukrainians, anumber our embassy in Warsaw is unequipped to deal with.

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Digital elections via Dia,an e-governance application developed by the Ministry of Digital Transformation, have been considered, but the constitution demands a secret ballot, which Dia cant ensure. Another problem with Dia is that sections of the population are unable or unwilling to use it, due to issues with internet access orpeople, particularly the elderly,being unfamiliar with the system.

It is clear that Ukraine will be unprepared for an immediate return to democracy after the war has ended. We will therefore need a transition period to properly reestablish the necessary infrastructure.

But democracy is not just voting, it is the manifestation of the collective will of a population, most clearly expressed through the right to free speech. While we are at war we cannot forget that suchasacred institution may be used by rogue elements to damage thenation.

As a result, our constitution forbids any peaceful meetings, rallies, marches, and demonstrations while the countryisunder martial law. The warhasnot only chained the hands of democracy but silenced its voice.

The government fought against this deficit by launching United News, a program shown on several channels since the day of the full-scale invasion. It provides 24/7 access to information concerning the war but has led to questions over democratic representation. Servant of the People, the ruling party, takes up a disproportionate amount of airtime, and other parties have been sidelined. In the second quarter of 2023, out of 100 appearances in the marathon, 68 were made by Servant of the People compared to only four each by European Solidarity or the Holos party The ruling party thus appears to be using the primary source of news in Ukraine to further its political goals.

The Russian invasion has not only ravaged our country and our people through fear and flame, it has also damaged our ability to conduct democracy and debate.This war isstealing the peoples voice and their ability to participate in democracy by scattering, imprisoning, and murdering them.

We must drive back the enemy for a full return to democracy and progress. The war for our country and the war for our democracy are one and the same.

I understand there are issues around balancing security and freedom, as well as the difficulty of fighting a war and conducting a fully democratic process at the same time, but the fact democracy has become difficult means we must fight all the harder to defend it.

There must now be a sustained effort to secure our democracy in the present to ensure we have it in the future.

Oleksii Goncharenko is Member of Parliament for Odesa and represents the European Solidarity group.

Europes Edgeis CEPAs online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or viewsof the institutions they representor the Center for European Policy Analysis.

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CEPAs online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.

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Ukraine's Democracy Is the Point of Our War Against Russia - Center for European Policy Analysis

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Washington, D.C. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ) issued the following statement on the recent threats to Guatemalas democracy following certification of the June 25 first-round presidential election results.

We firmly support the Guatemalan Supreme Elections Tribunals (TSE) certification this week of the results of the June 25 presidential elections, which was independently verified by the Organization of American States as having no serious irregularities. In light of the TSEs decision, however, we are deeply concerned by the Guatemalan Attorney Generals Offices attempt to illegally revoke the legal status of the political party of an opposition candidate in advance of the countrys August 20 runoff presidential elections. The Attorney General Offices decision is a blatant attempt to undermine the will of the Guatemalan people that attempts to circumvent the electoral certification made by the TSE and violates Guatemalas electoral laws.

The people of Guatemala must be able to elect their next president without interference, and the second round of presidential elections must take place on August 20with the top two candidates supported by the Guatemalan people in the first round. We stand with the Guatemalan people in their peaceful demonstrations in support of the integrity of their countrys democratic institutions, and will continue to closely monitor and respond to further attempts to jeopardize the credibility and fairness of the countrys electoral processes.

As the lead Republican on the Northern Triangle Enhanced Engagement Act, McCaul also calls on the Biden administration to make full use of the Section 353 sanctions authorities in response to the undemocratic and corrupt actions taken by Guatemalan political actors.

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Chairmen McCaul, Menendez Statement on Recent Threats to ... - House Foreign Affairs Committee

What would it take for China to gain the upper hand in a potential confrontation over Taiwan? Interrupting American telecommunications would be a good start. So the recent news that China successfully infiltrated critical telecommunications systems in Guam home to an American airbase that would be central to any potential confrontation over Taiwan raises urgent questions about Americas cybersecurity and that of its key allies.

Cyber competition and preparation for cyber warfare is at the forefront of the contest between the United States and its democratic partners, on the one hand, and authoritarian adversaries such as China and Russia on the other. And just as autocracies support each other in their malign activities in the digital space, America must lead a coordinated campaign to shore up cybersecurity within the democratic world.

Coupled with direct attacks on American assets, China and Russia use cyber-attacks to undermine the internal politics and institutions of U.S. allies and democratic partners. Pro-Kremlin hackers recently used distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to crash Frances National Assembly website and Polish e-government websites. Pro-Beijing actors have increasingly integrated cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. Last year, after U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosis visit to Taiwan, cyber attackers disabled the website of the Taiwanese presidents office and its Ministry of National Defense, and propagandists spread disinformation about the Taiwanese governments actions aimed at undermining confidence in the governments handling of the coronavirus pandemic. RedAlpha, a hacking group linked to China, has consistently targeted civil society groups that the Chinese Communist Party calls the five poisons: Tibetans, Uyghurs, Taiwanese, democracy activists, and the Falun Gong.

These activities have already proven to be incredibly disruptive and destructive. A more aggressive campaign could be used to devastating effect in the event of an international crisis, such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or as a means of interrupting core governmental functions, such as attacks on the machinery of elections. Absent a strategy and associated resourcing to prevent, mitigate, and counter cyber-attacks, China and Russia will continue using existing and evolving tools from DDoS to generative AI to support autocrats and weaken our democratic allies.

Important Steps

The United States has taken important steps to address this threat generally and with respect to democracy assistance in particular. The State Department established a Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, including a unit on International Cyberspace Security (ICS), with the goal of using foreign assistance funding to build cybersecurity capacity globally. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) created its Cyber Cavalry, a mechanism that leverages Americas private sector to deliver cybersecurity technical support to the agencys democracy-building partners and beneficiaries abroad particularly those threatened by malign actors and influences.

While such initiatives represent a step in the right direction, they are far from sufficient. For example, even though 98 percent of the USAID budget is earmarked, or directed for a specific purpose, none of these pre-allocated funds are dedicated for cybersecurity. This means the United States has little, if any, resourcing available to support a strong defensive posture for partners to prevent attacks in the first place. And while the United States has implemented and allocated some resources for cybersecurity assistance to allied governments (through USAID as well as the Department of Defense) and, to a less extent, to vulnerable NGOs, the assistance level needs to be substantially higher and matched equally with a more intentional and more coordinated approach to cyber defense.

Simply put, the U.S. approach to protecting its partners against cyber threats has not kept pace with the scale and scope of cybersecurity challenges. The lack of sustained funding has made it difficult for the United States to develop a forward-looking, coordinated strategy and operational plans with local partners to not only respond to attacks but, more importantly, to firm up defensive posture for future deterrence. To change this, Congress and the relevant agencies and departments within the U.S. government should consider four specific measures.

Sustained and Predictable Funding

To begin with, policymakers must find a way to allocate sustained and predictable funding to bolster the cybersecurity capabilities of key democratic allies, with an emphasis on those in the Global South that lack the required resources or capacity. This could involve Congress establishing a fund that would support partner governments and civil society organizations with their cyber defenses or augmenting existing democracy and governance resources.

Second, the United States can help partner nations strengthen their domestic laws and regulations to improve cybersecurity. Such interventions could support executive branch institutions, judicial institutions, and legislatures, as well as bolster awareness and training within political parties and civil society. (Full disclosure: our organization receives U.S. government funding to implement democracy and governance projects.) Subsequent support could be provided to ensure implementation across national and subnational governments. The U.S. House Democracy Partnership, a congressional diplomacy initiative, could leverage its global platform to spotlight and share comparative examples of quality cybersecurity frameworks with allied governments for consideration and adoption.

Third, the United States should require that the information systems of all partners and implementers meet or exceed minimum standards and requirements for best practices. That might mean, for example, accelerating movement to secure cloud services, and ensuring investment in technology and personnel to match these goals. This could involve an Executive Order applying to foreign aid comparable to that on improving the cybersecurity of the United States. To address resource and capacity constraints, partners should adopt a risk-based approach which prioritizes the most critical assets and systems.

Finally, to understand the threat landscape better, the United States can encourage partner governments and organizations to increase the sharing of cyber incident and threat information. This could include a more coordinated and centralized cataloging of incidents, tactics, and countermeasures. The U.S. should also engage directly with civil society organizations and activists who often are in the crosshairs of China, Russia, or the autocrats they enable to inform U.S. interagency cybersecurity working groups and promote information and resource sharing. These groups can share insights with the United States on the latest tactics the CCP or Kremlin are using to infiltrate their organizational technology infrastructure, which the United States can then use to inform tool and resource development.

The cyber domain is pivotal in the contest between democracies and autocracies. As leader of the free world, it is past time for the United States to spearhead a robust effort to inoculate the democratic world against the predations of its adversaries.

Authoritarianism, China, civil society, congressional authorization, Cyber, Cybersecurity, Democracy, Digital Authoritarianism, Foreign Aid/Foreign Assistance, governance, Russia

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In the Contest Between Democracy and Autocracy, the US Must ... - Just Security

Members of the Los Angeles City Council have disgraced themselves over the past year with scandalsincluding leaked plans to disenfranchise voters of colorforcing out several members. But Angelenos now have an opportunity to improve the design of their government in 2024, at a time when our nation desperately needs solutions for strengthening democracy.

An interim report from the LA Governance Reform Project released earlier this summer provides a crucial starting point for a public conversation to address reforming the Los Angeles City Council in the wake of racism and corruption of the redistricting process that was revealed in an October 2022 report by the Los Angeles Times.

The report makes three important recommendations: ethics reform, the establishment of an independent redistricting commission, and enlarging the size of the council. In the words of the authors, they hope that this process adds momentum to a longer-term commitment to governance reform in Los Angeles, with due consideration for a host of improvements that might make a difference.

As an expert in redistricting and electoral system design, I hope to expand the conversation about what effective electoral reform requires. The groups recommendations on ethics reform and the establishment of an independent redistricting commission are well-reasoned and evidence-based, but I am concerned that the recommendations on increasing the size of the council to 25 members, including four seats elected citywide or at-large, errs too far in the direction of what is deemed politically viable, falling short of what is politically necessary to achieve their stated goals of creating a city structure that is responsive, accountable, representative, and equitable.

The research teams recommendation of a 25-seat council is based on looking only at average council sizes in the United States. This makes our largest city councils, New York (51) and Chicago (50), appear to be outliers. The appropriate comparison is with other large, global cities, which shows what comparative urbanists have known for some time, that council sizes in large US cities are unusually small. The current 15-seat council in Los Angeles is ridiculously small for its population by global standards, among the smallest per-capita councils in the world (see Figure 1).

As Figure 1 shows, Chicago and New York are not outliers compared to other global cities. A 45- or 50-seat council for Los Angeles would bring the city closer to several other economic and cultural capitals like Amsterdam, Dublin, and Rio, but still be well below Paris 163-seat council, or the enormous 231-seat council in Cape Town, South Africa. At the other end of the scale, many of the worlds global cities including London, Mexico City, and Tokyo, are agglomerations of multiple smaller municipalities. Chicago and New York fit well within the normal range of 45-100 seats typical of large, cosmopolitan cities. A 45-seat LA council would be at the low end of global norms, given the citys population and global status.

The small councils characteristic of many US cities partially reflect the legacy of institutional racism, specifically early 20th-century Progressive reformers efforts to exclude ethnic and racial minorities from political power. Equitable racial representation must be a priority in LA council reform, as racial divisions within the city were at the heart of the redistricting scandal.

US cities have achieved approximate proportional representation for protected racial groups through the design of single-seat, minority-opportunity districts, enforced through the Voting Rights Act. However, this solution only works where groups are geographically concentrated and where there are relatively few communities of interest to represent. Los Angeles today is one of the most diverse cities in the world, where hundreds of racial, ethnic, and language groups make up the citys population. It is difficult to see how 21 single-seat districts, in which only one coalition achieves representation in a district, will adequately address the competition over racial representation that Los Angeles faces.

The city of New York increased its council size from 35 to 51 in 1991, facing some of the same problems, and in the hopes of advancing similar democratic goals. The General Counsel to the New York City Districting Commission, an attorney from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, focused specifically on problems of interracial conflict and the inevitable trade-offs required when only one racial group can be represented within a multiracial district. These trade-offs, and the carving up of populations along racial lines to determine who gets represented, were the topic of discussion in the now infamous LA city council phone call.

That NAACP attorney, Judith Reed, recommended that New York adopt multi-seat, proportional districts, which would allow multiple representatives to serve a single constituency, incentivizing multiracial coalitions to work together. Instead, the Commission adopted a single-seat districting strategy, forcing them to address questions like, Is a geographically dispersed minority better off with white voters, who may or may not have any sympathy for Latino interests, or with other minority groups, with whom there is the presumption of destructive competition? Today, New York, like many large US cities, continues to struggle with interracial conflict, low turnout, and largely uncompetitive single-seat districts. They are trying other reforms to induce competition and improve representation, like ranked choice voting schemes in primaries, but the fundamental problems with single-seat representation remain.

Los Angeles has an opportunity to break out of these constraints. Research in the US and abroad has shown that multi-seat districts are less prone to gerrymandering and other forms of manipulation, which is the motivation for reform in LA. Most large, global cities rely on multi-seat, proportional districting and achieve robust representation across racial, gender, language, and other boundaries. Coalitions and parties across the ideological spectrum run, and seat, more candidates of color, and more women, than we often find in US municipal elections. For example, in Amsterdam, five major political parties, including the Greens and Socialists on the left and Christian Unity on the right, in addition to the smaller, ethnic rights DENK party, run and seat candidates of color on the city council. Los Angeles, by contrast, is effectively a one-party regime.

Consider the opportunities that a 45-seat council, built out of eight five-seat districts drawn by an independent commission, would offer residents. Each multiracial district would reflect geographic interests beyond race, while ensuring representation for any coalition, racial or multiracial, successfully organizing just 20 percent of voters, because that is all it would take to win one of five seats.

In line with the LA Governance Reform Projects recommendations, an additional five seats could be elected citywide to incentivize broader coalition building. But instead of using the worst electoral system devised for minority representationat-large plurality votingthese seats could be elected using the same method as the district elections, commonly known as an open list system.

A common method of election in large cities around the world, the list system was first proposed in the US in 1844 by Thomas Gilpin for Philadelphia elections. From a voters perspective, little changes, as you simply vote for a single candidate from a slate of candidates. The vote counts toward the candidate AND the candidates slate (the other candidates they are running with), which determines how many seats the slate wins in each district. Competing candidates of color then do not risk splitting minority voters. Broader, multiracial coalitions that transcend district boundaries are also rewarded with more seats.

Even a modest proposal of eight three-seat districts and one five-seat citywide district, for a total council size of 29, would likely be more equitable for racial representation than the proposal from the Governance Reform Project. Every voter would have a variety of candidates competing for their support, and every district could represent up to three competing electoral coalitions, better reflecting the true diversity of Los Angeles.

Public opposition to enlarging the council and demands on the capacity of the mayors office are cited as major impediments to more effective electoral reform. But a larger city council does not require an expanded role for the mayor or mayors staff, as many of the global cities already mentioned rely effectively on a council-manager form of government, with relatively decentralized administrative agencies. As for public opposition to a larger council, that is a question of political will. If the advantages of improved descriptive representation and government accountability are adequately communicated by the reform coalition, I am confident that an initiative on the 2024 ballot would have a fighting chance.

Residents of one of the most diverse cities on the planet could vanquish part of the legacy of institutional racism that continues to plague the politics of our nation. Whether or not a reform coalition is able to mobilize support to adopt meaningful reform depends on the level of community engagement that we will see over the next year. At this stage, Angelenos deserve to at least be informed about how the rest of the world addresses the challenges of equitable racial representation and municipal governance.

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Angelenos Could Lead the Nation in Strengthening Democracy - The Equation