What Happens When Democracy Loses Its Instruction

What happens to a country when its citizens inherit the responsibilities of democracy without the instructions?

Orientation matters — especially when the system still exists, but the instructions no longer do.

Democracy Requires More Than Participation — It Requires Civic Literacy

A reflection on what we lost when the user manual disappeared — and why orientation matters now.

I grew up learning how Canada works as a system — imperfect, sometimes frustrating, but legible. My children grew up learning Canada as a feeling, a set of values, and a stream of headlines. Somewhere in between, we lost the user manual.

I didn’t notice this all at once. It crept in during conversations at the table — about elections, housing, climate, healthcare. Not disagreements about goals, but uncertainty about where decisions were actually made. Federal anger aimed at municipal problems. Provincial blame for federal limits. A general sense that everything was political, and nothing was actionable.

It wasn’t that my children were disengaged. If anything, they cared deeply. What was missing was orientation — a sense of where power lives, how it moves, and how ordinary people can still engage it effectively.

It also wasn’t that these conversations never happened at home. They did. But like most families, we were busy raising well-rounded human beings — juggling school, work, community, and all the ordinary demands of life. What I came to realize, years later, was that we had assumed something important: that our children were receiving the same foundational civic education at school that we had.

They weren’t.

The kind of structured, early civic literacy many of my generation absorbed — often beginning in late elementary school — had been compressed, delayed, or treated as optional by the time my children encountered it, if they encountered it at all. When I was growing up, civic education wasn’t perfect. It was often dry. Sometimes simplistic. But it existed. We learned the rough outlines of how the country governed itself — what municipalities did, what provinces controlled, what the federal government was responsible for. We learned how elections worked, how laws were made, and, crucially, where to direct our frustrations.

We also grew up inside a very different media environment. News was not constant, but it was shared. It arrived at set times, through a limited number of outlets, and carried a sense of common reference. Morning papers and weekly locals anchored communities. National and local broadcasts structured the day. When something mattered, regular programming stopped.

Local and regional news did more than report — it connected. Municipalities used print, radio, and television to announce meetings, invite feedback, and stay in conversation with the people they served. Civic life wasn’t abstract. It was visible, scheduled, and close to home.

There was also, simply, more room for it. Not ease — but space. The pace of daily life allowed families some margin, and civic engagement and volunteering were woven into ordinary routines: coaching teams, organizing school events, serving on local boards, showing up because that’s what people did.

None of this made the system fairer or wiser by default. But it made participation familiar. It taught people, often without naming it, how to function civically within a democracy in practical terms.

It’s also impossible to talk about civic engagement without talking about time. Over the past few decades, paid work has steadily expanded its footprint into family life — not always in hours alone, but in intensity, unpredictability, and mental load. Two incomes became standard. Commutes lengthened. Work followed people home. Even when the workday ended, attention didn’t.

When time becomes scarce, the first things to go are rarely the urgent. They’re the communal. Meetings get skipped. School councils thin out. Local boards struggle to recruit — not because people stopped caring, but because participation began to feel like a luxury rather than a responsibility.

Civic literacy doesn’t erode in a vacuum. It erodes when the conditions that support it quietly disappear.

Just as paid work has expanded its reach into family life, our media world has morphed into something few of us could have imagined even in the late 1990s. Legacy media and social platforms have made distant events feel immediate and local, while quietly displacing attention from the municipal, regional, and community-level news that most directly shapes our daily lives.

We are more informed than ever about what is happening everywhere — and less oriented than we once were about what is happening where we live.

When people are informed but disoriented, civic engagement changes shape. It becomes louder, faster, and more expressive — but often less effective. Energy that might once have gone into understanding process or building local influence is redirected into commentary, reaction, and alignment.

Not so long ago, opinion occupied a modest and clearly marked place in public life: a column or two on an inside page, a short segment at the end of a broadcast, the occasional call-in show. It existed alongside reporting, not in place of it.

Today, opinion doesn’t merely accompany the news; it often crowds it out. Commentary travels faster than verification. Reaction is rewarded more reliably than explanation. And the line between reporting, analysis, and advocacy has blurred — not always out of bad intent, but because the platforms that now carry our civic conversations are built to privilege engagement over orientation.

The result is a form of participation that feels active, but rarely accumulates. People are encouraged to take positions long before they’ve been given context, and to express certainty in spaces that offer little opportunity for learning, deliberation, or course correction.

What’s missing in all of this isn’t passion, or even information. It’s places where people are allowed to learn how the system actually works — slowly, imperfectly, and without having to perform certainty.

What used to do that work weren’t just classrooms or newsrooms. They were civic in-between spaces — places where people could ask basic questions without being shamed, hear disagreement without being sorted into teams, and learn by proximity rather than performance. Some of those spaces were formal. Many weren’t. They existed in community halls, local papers, school councils, neighbourhood meetings — and, yes, around kitchen tables. They didn’t require everyone to be informed. They required people to be present.

As those spaces thinned, we replaced them with platforms that reward immediacy and certainty. We learned to speak before we learned to situate ourselves. Civic life became something to react to rather than something to participate in.

Rebuilding civic literacy won’t happen through louder arguments or better slogans. It will happen when we create room again for orientation — for understanding where power sits, how it moves, and what forms of engagement actually accumulate over time. That work is quieter than outrage and slower than the news cycle. It doesn’t trend. But it’s how democratic societies remember how to function — not as abstractions, but as lived, shared systems.

Passing the user manual along was never a one-time task. It was always a communal one. And like any good manual, it only works if people are allowed to use it together — in practice, not just in theory.

I’m aware that I haven’t offered tidy solutions here. I don’t have a program to roll out or a curriculum to mandate. I don’t have a fix that neatly reaches my now-adult children, let alone my grandchildren.

What I do have is a clearer sense of what’s at stake. I’ve made space in my own home — and time with my family — to offer those orientation moments when they arise: to slow things down, to talk through how decisions are made, where authority actually sits, and how civic engagement can still matter.

But private efforts, however well-intentioned, aren’t enough on their own. What we need first is a shared recognition of the problem — and of its severity.

The challenges facing us in the second quarter of this century are more complex, more interconnected, and more demanding than those we inherited. Climate, housing, trade, security, technology — none of them can be met with a population that is politically saturated but civically disoriented.

Democracy doesn’t require everyone to agree. But it does require a basic, shared understanding of how we govern ourselves. Without that, frustration multiplies, trust erodes, and civic participation loses its force.

Rebuilding that understanding won’t happen all at once, and it won’t come from a single source. But it does begin with naming what’s missing — and refusing to pretend that passion alone will carry us through what’s coming.

Orientation isn’t optional anymore. It’s foundational.

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Further Reading / You Might Also Be Interested In

What Still Matters — An Evergreen Reading List from Between the Lines

A curated reflection on which ideas, essays, and questions continued to hold up as 2025 closed — and why slowing down to understand systems matters more than chasing the news cycle.
Why it fits: This piece complements the argument about orientation and depth by showing what endures when noise fades.

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Interlude & Conclusion — Drift Is Not Destiny (A Quiet Reckoning)

The closing chapter of A Quiet Reckoning, reflecting on how Canada arrived where it is — and why drift, while powerful, is not inevitable.
Why it fits: Readers who resonate with civic disorientation often want historical grounding. This offers context without re-arguing the present piece.

Why Canadians Are Being Blindsided: The Broken Infrastructure of Communication

How the collapse of local media and the narrowing of news funnels are leaving citizens in the dark
As civic literacy erodes, so does the infrastructure that once helped Canadians see decisions coming before they landed. This piece examines how the collapse of local journalism, the narrowing of national news funnels, and algorithm-driven outrage have left citizens structurally cut off from timely, actionable information — not apathetic, but blindsided.
Why it fits: If democracy requires civic literacy, it also requires communication systems that actually reach people. This article shows what happens when those systems fail — and why rebuilding them is now a civic priority.

This article is published on Substack for conversation and sharing. The canonical home for this work is Between the Lines (between-the-lines.ca).