“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” These words by Oscar Wilde were taken to heart by a group of economics students in Paris. Five years ago they signed an open letter declaring themselves “to be generally dissatisfied with the teaching that we receive.”

I could not find an appropriate opening quote for today’s essay on our perfunctory democracy. I did find a little poem by William Butler Yeats to provide solace:

A statesman is an easy man,
he tells his lies by rote;
a journalist makes up his lies
and takes you by the throat;
so stay at home and drink your beer
and let the neighbors vote.

“One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, av-erage ones to habit, and petty ones to fear.” This is a quote out of “Human, All-too-Human” by Friedrich Nietzsche, published in 1878. It is an appropriate summary of present-day political expe-diency.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” This is a quote out of “The Red Lily” by Anatole France, published in 1894. Could Anatole France have imagined that 110 years later the City of Toronto would ban people, the rich as well as the poor, from sleeping in Nathan Phillips Square, and that the Province of British Columbia would enact the Safe Streets Act, a law to forbid people, the rich as well as the poor, from aggressively soliciting in designated areas throughout the province?

“People of quality know everything without learning anything.” This quote from Molière’s satire Les Précieuses ridicules is an appropriate introduction to an examination of British Columbia-style democracy.