Democracy needs its champions. Here’s a proposal on how to fund them

Source: The Conversation – Canada

Democracy means more than just holding regular elections. Among other things, it needs a public sphere where citizens can inform themselves about pressing issues, engage in dialogue and form public opinion.

Civil society organizations play a key role. They educate the public and spur discussion about key policy issues. Groups that support free expression, privacy or voting rights are particularly important in maintaining democracy. These bodies have expertise that can make important contributions to the legislative process through testimony before parliamentary committees and other advocacy.

However, Canada’s democracy-focused civil society organizations — known as NGOs — are facing a resource crunch as a result of decreasing government funding for human rights causes and a challenging landscape for private philanthropic support.

National security issue

Amid rising global authoritarianism and growing threats to Canadian sovereignty — many specifically targeting Canadian democracy — the strength of these NGOs is also a matter of national security.

As government budgets currently focus on cost savings, it’s difficult to imagine an increase in public funding for this sector. However, there may be another way to boost Canada’s civil rights community, allowing it to diversify its revenue sources without forcing governments to add a new line to the budget.

Canada could create a funding mechanism that uses fines imposed on those who transgress laws protecting our democratic rights to fund organizations that defend it.

This idea, while novel in civil and political rights movements, is not unprecedented. Courts have a long history of using what are known as cy près awards to direct damages from class-action lawsuits to organizations that work to advance the interests underlying the litigation.

The Environmental Damages Fund (EDF) is a federal fund bankrolled by fines, penalties or other payments imposed by 14 environmental statutes and made available to non-profits undertaking projects that benefit the environment.

In other words, entities that violate environmental laws pay into the account, and entities that help the environment draw on it.

Environmental inspiration

According to the EDF website, the fund has provided more than $255 million to over 600 projects benefiting ecosystems and communities across Canada. While much of the fund is made generally available to non-profits, some is directed to target specific types of harms that gave rise to the settlement, or to redress environmental damage in specific geographic regions in Canada.

If Canada were interested in setting up a parallel program for civil and political rights groups, a fruitful area of focus could be social media platforms and other major tech companies.

Their products are a significant factor in many of the threats facing Canadian democracy, from misinformation to foreign interference and the erosion of the business models underlying traditional news media.

There is already broad public support for more aggressive intervention to hold these companies accountable and there is a range of legislative tools designed to penalize bad behaviour among tech companies, including Canada’s anti-spam law.

But more pertinently, Parliament is currently considering a significant expansion of enforcement powers targeting Big Tech, including through the proposed Digital Safety Act (Bill C-34), which provides for penalties of up to $20 million or five per cent of a company’s gross global revenue, whichever is greater, for a number of online harms.

The Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act (Bill C-36) includes similar monetary penalties for privacy violations. While relatively insubstantial in terms of the federal treasury, the amount of funding that might be made available through these two bills alone could have a transformative impact on the threadbare budgets of Canadian civil rights organizations.

The risks of inaction

There are a number of considerations to ensure such a fund is handled transparently and in a politically even-handed manner.

It would require independence and institutional infrastructure for the administering organization, including sufficient expertise to ensure that grants are appropriately targeted, and not duplicative of existing programming.

Given that many democracy-focused NGOs are wary of accepting government funds directly, it would be worth establishing an arm’s-length entity with its own mandate to distribute funds, similar to the Law Foundation of Ontario’s Access to Justice Fund. That initiative, along with the EDF, is evidence of the beneficial impact a dedicated fund can have on civil society organizations.

More than anything else, it’s important to acknowledge the risks of inaction given the challenging environment that democracies like Canada’s find themselves in.

Canadians, along with many others, are navigating an onslaught of threats to their institutional and physical sovereignty from malign entities, corporate interests and rapidly changing technologies — all of which seemingly transcend state borders and target their ability to discern fact from fiction.

By setting up a relatively small but dedicated fund supported by those who violate Canadian laws to assist groups that protect civil rights, Canada can choose to invest in democracy’s strongest defence: robust, free and open speech. While an NGO fund would represent just one piece of a much larger puzzle, we believe it offers a viable and effective path to revitalize the public sphere at a time when it’s under extraordinary threat.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/democracy-needs-its-champions-heres-a-proposal-on-how-to-fund-them/