Westminster Meets Digital

The challenges and opportunities introduced by the rise of digital culture and technology, along with shifting public expectations, an evolving public sphere, and associated pressures for change in our governments and public institutions, may even suggest a fundamental challenge to the traditional relationship between the citizen and the state – a push to rethink the social contract in modern indu [...] To identify the points of friction created by the intersection of digital culture and Westminster institutions, it is useful to highlight the importance to Westminster democracies of ministerial responsibility and accountability to Parliament for the exercise of executive authority. [...] Nominally, the Crown remains the locus of power in all three branches of government – legislative, executive and judicial, such that the democratic elements of the system are not to be found in the law of the constitution but rather in unwritten conventions.3 Within this framework, Parliament (the legislative branch) is considered ‘supreme’ and the executive is accountable to it under the traditio [...] The rise of social media and the transformation of traditional media outlets, for example, has led to freer access to information and a greater capacity for public thought and action on issues that may not previously have received the attention they deserved, but also to the breakdown of traditional authorities for discerning truth from fabrication and the spread of pseudo-science and conspiracy t [...] Control in an Era of Networks Having considered some of the core features of the Westminster system in its Canadian incarnation, and the key pressure points in the Canadian governance landscape, we turn now to a discussion of one of the central tensions inherent to Westminster governance in a digital context – the tension created, on the one hand, by the demand for control on the part of a siloed,