Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at the Vector artificial intelligence research institute in Toronto, on Nov. 7, 2025.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
When Prime Minister Mark Carney took the floor at the recent Liberal convention, he described a future where artificial intelligence benefits all Canadians – not just a lucky few.
“Our goal is AI for all,” he said at event. “AI governed by Canadian values, accountable to Canadians and serving Canadians.”
It’s an optimistic vision. But according to political theorist Hélène Landemore and democratic innovator Peter MacLeod, our current political system just isn’t capable of delivering on it.
Instead, Landemore, a Yale professor and the author of Politics Without Politicians, argues that ordinary citizens – not politicians – should be the ones calling the shots. MacLeod has spent more than 20 years putting that idea into practice in Canada. His new book is Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs The Public.
This an excerpt from the latest episode of Machines Like Us, The Globe’s podcast about technology and people, hosted by Taylor Owen.
Machines Like Us: Does 21st-century politics still need politicians?
Taylor Owen: Peter, you say democracy is stuck. Why?
Peter MacLeod: Well, because for the past 30 or 40 years, we’ve been watching all of the trend lines pointing in the wrong direction. The reality is that political parties are largely hollowed out in the West. Their memberships have collapsed. Voter turnout continues to decline and trust and confidence in government continues to erode.
Hélène, you say it’s not just the system that needs fixing, it’s the politicians themselves.
Hélène Landemore: I’ve come to the conclusion that the selection mechanism for legislators is partly at fault. It’s a very oligarchic selection mechanism. So it’s no surprise when you send to power the representatives of socio-economic elites that you end up with a system that is overly responsive to the affluent, as has been measured consistently for the last 40 years in political science studies.
And we can try to fix it at the margin by trying to take money out of politics, but I actually think we might want to consider a system that would be purely based on sortition. Whereby you would send to the legislature a [randomly selected] representative sample [of the public]. And I think if you had a sample like that in power, you would end up with laws that are much more for the majority.
You both argue we should expect more of citizens, not less. What does that look like in practice?
MacLeod: Most people are at best a spectator to democracy. We have a tendency to tell this account of a public that is too emotional, too ignorant and too apathetic to get involved. But I think apathy is a kind of fancy word for blaming the victim. I think people look at what’s on offer and they recognize that actually they’re not all that welcome and the opportunities to make a difference are very few.
Peter, you’ve spent the last 20 years doing citizens’ assemblies. How do they work?
MacLeod: The best comparison is one that most people are familiar with, and that’s a jury. Letters are sent out to thousands of households. They’re invited to spend as many as 12 days examining a single topic. Then, you’ve got all of these people in the room. What do you do with them? And they have the opportunity to hear from each other, to change their minds, to have access to experts. But here’s the kicker. They work towards finding consensus. The challenge to assembly members isn’t to jam your angle and work your wedge. It’s to find common ground with people.
Hélène, you describe assemblies as being filled with love, which is a striking way to describe politics. What do you mean by that?
Landemore: That came straight from observation because I didn’t really anticipate it. There was no room for it in my theoretical framework going in. Within two to three meetings, most people in the assembly were starting to express their feelings for each other in the vocabulary of love. There is a character in my book named Omar – and when I asked one of his colleagues to tell me what he thought of Omar, he said, “Oh, Omar, I fell in love with him on the first day.” That’s not friendship. I saw them hug. I saw them console each other. One of them said, “we were like a family.” And so it was very hard to not be touched by it.
MacLeod: I think what creates this solidarity and this kind of love is, often for the first time in people’s lives, they feel like they matter and they count. Most people go through life without their employer caring what they like or want. Many of their family relations are not especially affirmative or democratic. And public life has been something that happens over there. So people feel recognized and affirmed, and they come to feel a greater and expanded sense of their own self-worth. Why wouldn’t you want to create politics that regularly produces that sense of solidarity and self-worth – not for the few, but for the many?
AI governance has stumped politicians, regulators and the tech industry alike. Could citizens’ assemblies crack it?
Landemore: Yes, I do see it as a path forward. Currently I just see elected legislatures quite captured by the tech industry and incapable or unwilling to regulate. Assuming those problems could be solved, what are the questions I would put to citizens’ assemblies? Well, for the convenience of being able to use ChatGPT every day, how much are you willing to pay in additional electricity costs, in depletion of natural resources, in the increased risks of war over rare minerals? These are the trade-offs that citizens are good at dealing with. But the difficulty is not coming up with questions. It’s really how we’re going to get the money and the political will to make any of this happen when governments are more or less in the hands of these tech companies.
MacLeod: I think what you would get from a citizens’ assembly on any of these questions is a greater adherence to the precautionary principle – to be a little more conservative, a little more guarded against some of the risks. You’d expect citizens to be less interested in business success and quarterly returns, and much more interested in the public, environmental, social and broader economic impacts that are at stake.
Some argue AI could replace human deliberation entirely with so-called “synthetic publics.” What do you make of that?
MacLeod: If we accept that one of the greatest problems in democracy right now is that people feel cut off from it and cut off from one another – at a moment where our politics may become more extreme because of the very real lack of solidarity that so many people feel – I don’t understand how introducing robots to the equation is supposed to rekindle that sense of solidarity.
Landemore: The change of preferences that happens in deliberation is not just in reaction to good arguments – it’s also a reaction to the love and the solidarity you start feeling for the people with whom you deliberate. If you automate everything to an agentic AI that takes your preferences as given, you will not be able to synthesize that solidarity, because we are human creatures.
Editor’s note: AI tools assisted with condensing the original podcast transcript, which was then reviewed and edited by the Machines Like Us team.