BACKBENCHER’S FRIEND

THE LEADERSHIP RACE WAS IDEAL FOR SOMEONE ADMIRED BY CAUCUSES PAST AND PRESENT

Have you ever looked at the Table of Precedence? It’s an absorbing little feature of our republican monarchy: an official rank ordering of Canadian politicians and dignitaries, made for the purposes of establishing who enters or eats or sits or gets announced first in a formal setting. In practice, I suppose it is little used outside royal visits or seating plans for dinners at Rideau Hall or 24 Sussex. But it is an intricate little picture of the apex of Canadian society. You can find out exactly where the associate chief judge of the Tax Court of Canada stands (she is 18-d) in a formal hierarchy rising all the way to the Governor General, personification of the sovereign, at No. 1.

After the GG, at the top of the table, comes the prime minister, the chief justice, and then the Speakers of the Senate and the House of Commons, in that order, followed by ambassadors and high commissioners and then mere federal cabinet members. The Speakers, and particularly the Speaker of the Commons, rank high for a reason. In our constitutional tradition, the Speaker is the symbol of the authority of Parliament as such. The prime minister is the head of a government, but he is only a creation of the House of Commons. The Speaker is its true leader: he, not the prime minister, answers for that House as a body.

When Andrew Scheer won his surprise victory in the Conservative leadership contest on Saturday, there was a certain amount of baffled “Andrew who?” in the press and on social media. I am not suggesting everybody ought to have heard of him just because, as Commons Speaker, he was already neighbours with the prime minister in the country’s table of precedence. But the “Andrew who?” thing is probably a good way to check who is paying at least casual attention to Parliament.

Amidst the number crunching that has followed the Conservative leadership vote, there has been a lot of attention to the way Scheer scooped up social-conservative support as other names dropped off the enormous ballot. But surely the phenomenon demanding an explanation is Scheer’s strong second-place showing on the very first ballot. He had 22 to be boss of a bigtent conservative party. But if you were handicapping the race based on the amount of ink and electrons expended in news coverage of the candidates, Scheer shouldn’t have beaten Kellie Leitch (P.C., O.Ont., M.D., B.B.Q., etc.) three-to-1 in first-choice votes. It should have been 10to-1 the other way.

I had gotten it backward when I was trying to think through the outcome of the race. Being Speaker seemed to me like an eccentric, even bizarre item for a future party leader to have on his resumé. Which it is. The move from Speaker to leader is, as far as I can tell, almost unheard of in Commonwealth

But the right question to be asking was not “Can an ex-Speaker become a party leader?” It was “What’s special about this ex-Speaker?” And for those who have some idea who the Speaker is and what he does, the answer is apparent: Scheer’s most memorable ruling as Speaker, made in 2013, established that party whips cannot exercise exclusive control over whom the Speaker recognizes during members’ statements.

This was an important moment for backbenchers, and particularly Conservative backbenchers, who had come to feel throttled by Stephen Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office. MP Mark Warawa, trying to defy the Harperian law of silence on abortion by smuggling a motion through the subcommittee on private members’ business, had complained to the Speaker about the PMO denying him a chance to air the dispute on the floor of the House.

The standard practice for decades, not written down in the Standing Orders, has been for the whips to tell the Speaker exactly who will catch his eye on any given day. But Scheer ruled that a Speaker maintains the authority to ignore the whip’s list if some member has the frijoles to defy party instructions and rise to his feet out of turn.

You cannot have better friends in a leadership race than backbench MPs, and before the voting commenced Scheer got endorsements from literally dozens of them. Structurally, the Conservative race was a lot like a general election composed of 338 local Conservative nomination meetings. It could not have been better designed to reward a leadership candidate who is both admired and liked by Conservative caucuses, past and present.

Scheer’s blow for backbenchers almost looks, in retrospect, like an important down payment on future leadership hopes.