What if MPs had more power?
IF THE REFORM ACT CAN BE FAULTED, it is for leaving the means of picking a leader to the parties to decide
Amid the hail of conflicting complaints about the Reform Act, one stands out. It is the most often cited, and the most substantive, rooted as it is not in conjecture but in principle. It rejects the bill not for of what it might lead to, but for what it is.
It concerns the proposal to give the parliamentary caucus of a party the power to remove the leader. This strikes many people as profoundly anti-democratic — a few dozen MPs, a hundred at most, presuming to annul the choice of thousands of party members (or, in the case of the Liberal party, nonmembers). I do not share this view, but it cannot be lightly dismissed.
That it is so widely shared reflects a deep divide, not just over how best to choose party leaders, but over the nature of our parliamentary democracy. The bill’s proponents and its critics are working from entirely different premises, based on two quite distinct models of how Parliament works, or should.
The model the critics have in their heads is the system we have now. The party at large votes for the leader, not so much to lead it in Parliament but to lead it in the country at large: raising funds, performing in commercials and so on. MPs bob along in his wake, surfing into Parliament on the strength of his appeal. They owe their jobs to him, and would even if his signature were not required on their nomination papers.
As such all power rests with the leader, none with caucus. Choosing the leader, accordingly, takes on overwhelming importance: hence the outrage among many grassroots members at the suggestion this right might be taken away from them. Tell them they can vote for their MP, or that MPs, in deciding the leader’s fate, might be acting on their behalf, and expect a bitter laugh in return. MPs? Who the hell are they?
We are caught in a vicious circle, and circles within circles. As leaders wax, MPs wane, and vice versa. The less Parliament matters, the more leaders are chosen for their extra-parliamentary abilities, and the greater the argument for electing them by the widest possible constituency. Which only accelerates the whole cycle. Armed with a mandate from the membership, the leader is free to lord it over members of caucus, for years at a time.
The question is why we do not use the same model when choosing a prime minister. We do not elect prime ministers, after all. We elect a Parliament, and we entrust members of Parliament with the task of choosing who should lead them. That choice, moreover, is permanently contingent. The prime minister must sustain the confidence of the House at all times; the House, in its turn, may withdraw that confidence at any time.
True, this is increasingly a formality: MPs are so strictly whipped that the likelihood, in a majority Parliament, of a prime minister ever suffering their censure is slim to none. Nevertheless, most people understand and accept the confidence convention. Calls for direct election of prime ministers are few. We grasp, intuitively, that accountability to the electorate does not begin and end on election day, but must be maintained every day in between.
And so, because it is impossible for 35 million people to hold a prime minister to account in this ongoing sense, we hire people for the job: the 307 other members of the House of Commons. Why, then, should the same not apply to party leaders? And indeed it does, in other coun- tries, as it is supposed to here: The confidence convention has never explicitly been repudiated. It just sort of withered.
But the basic logic remains. Presumably we all want party leaders to be accountable. But accountable to whom? Others have made the point: the body that chooses a leader under “one member one vote,” or even delegated conventions, ceases to exist the minute the business is done. The only people who can really hold him to account are the members of caucus, and the only way they can do so is if they have recourse to the ultimate sanction: removal from office.
So let me suggest a different model. Suppose we began, not with a powerful leader, but with a caucus full of powerful MPs, each strictly accountable to the members of his riding association, with the legitimacy that goes with it. Suppose, that is, that MPs were seen not as errand boys for the leader, but as powerful and legitimate representatives in their own right.
Like any group, they would need a leader. How would they choose him? The same way any group does: they’d elect one. If MPs mattered, this would not be seen as an assault on democratic rights. Rather, it would add new weight to their role, and new urgency to democratizing the process by which they are nominated: among other things, these would be the people to choose the leader.
If the Reform Act can be faulted, then, it is for leaving the means of choosing the leader to the parties to decide. Election by the membership sits uneasily with deselection by caucus: if MPs don’t matter, as the first implies, it is hard to justify investing them with such power.
I can understand why this was not proposed. To give caucus the power to hire, as well as fire, must have seemed a harder sell. And the combination seems to work tolerably well elsewhere. But it does rather limit the credibility of the sanction: the knowledge that a vote to remove the leader would lead, not to a quick whip-round of caucus, but an expensive, monthslong leadership campaign is a serious disincentive to ever deploy it.
It’s not fatal. But if there one thing I’d amend in the Reform Act, this is it.