Democracy Watch is Canada’s leading citizen group advocating democratic reform, government accountability and corporate responsibility, and the most successful national citizen advocacy group in Canada over the past 10 years in winning systemic changes to key laws.

Democracy Watch is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan Canadian organization that opened its doors in October 1993 and launched its first campaign in April 1994.

Democracy Watch works with Canadian citizens and organizations in pushing Canadian governments and businesses to empower Canadians in their roles as voters, citizens, taxpayers, consumers and shareholders. Our aim is to help reform Canadian government and business institutions to bring them into line with the realities of a modern, working democracy.

• Canadians need access to full and timely information about government and business activities
• Canadians need meaningful rights to participate and be represented in Canada’s political system;
• Canadians need easily accessible remedies against government and corporate waste, abuse and misrepresentation;
• Accountability measures are needed wherever there are concentrations of power in society…»

A word about Power and the media: spinning the news

“Information straight out of the spin dryer is bad news for democracy. When citizens get their take on reality from fiendishly choreographed news conferences, press releases, slick videos, and other one-sided tools of mass-marketing, truth is usually the first casualty. The measure of success is not whether the spin conveys good information, but whether it makes a sale, a convert, a self-interested point.

…”Objectivity used to mean an unbiased and independent search for the facts — the touchstone of a free press. The new “objectivity” of the mass media is a mantra of equal time and no reality check, a free ride for those who would spin the news legitimized by the dubious proposition that insiders in a field like politics know best.

…In Canada, the typical network television political panel now looks something like this: One talking head from each of the political parties given more or less equal time by a mellowed out moderator who rarely does more than start and click a stop-watch and buddy up to his guests.” [