Former Bloc MP doesn’t quite cross floor
Just because Maria Mourani has joined the NDP doesn’t mean she has joined the NDP. True, the former Bloc Québécois MP has taken out an NDP membership card. At Wednesday’s news conference, she sang the praises of the party and its leader. In all likelihood, she will be a candidate for them in the next election; until then it would not be at all surprising to find her voting with them in Parliament.
But she will continue to sit as an Independent MP. She will not be a member of the NDP caucus; neither will she be assigned a critic’s role, nor be subject to the whip. So the party’s oft-stated position against “floor crossing” — when a member of Parliament leaves one party caucus to join another, as in fact several NDP MPs have left, to indignant raspberries from their former colleagues — remains intact. I guess.
Well, at least they had the decency to observe the formalities: virtue’s tribute and all that. If the party’s opposition to floor-crossing is less than absolute, it is still based on a principle that is worth acknowledging. If a member of Parliament is elected as a member of one party, it would seem at first blush a breach of faith with the voters of his or her constituency to switch to another afterward.
Who can forget, for example, the faithless David Emerson, the former Liberal cabinet minister, who campaigned furiously against the Conservatives all through the 2006 election only to pop up as a member of their cabinet days later? Or the sight of Belinda Stronach at Paul Martin’s side the year before, recruited just in time to provide the single vote needed to save his government?
Hence the NDP’s proposed remedy: a member who wishes to cross the floor should be required first to resign his or her seat and run in a byelection under his or her new party’s colours — to seek his electors’ permission, as it were. But wait a minute. How far do we take this? What if, rather than leave one party for another, the MP chooses merely to sit as an Independent? Doesn’t that leave a dissident MP, genuinely consciencestricken at the direction his party has taken, in a bit of a fix? Resign from caucus, and immediately face the full weight of the party in a byelection. Worse, it makes expulsion from caucus — as Mourani was expelled from the Bloc, over her opposition to the Quebec Charter of Values — into a potential career-ender. Even the threat of it would be a hammerblow against caucus dissenters. As if party leaders did not have enough of these at their disposal already.
The flaw in the prohibition position is the notion that MPs are only elected as standard-bearers of their party. By that logic, they should also be prohibited from ever voting anything but the party line. But in truth, we don’t elect MPs solely on the basis of their party affiliation — or there would be no need to elect MPs at all. Rather, we also take into account their qualities as individuals, their character and judgment. Presumably, we want them to exercise these, even if — especially if — these conflict with the dictates of party.
I think we want to leave room for MPs of conscience — a Brent Rathgeber, for example — to make the ultimate protest, that is of repudiating the party whose tutelage they had hitherto enjoyed, with all of the sacrifices and hardship this entails. To be fair, the NDP would make allowance for these, so long as they chose to sit as Independents. But I can’t see why they should be confined to such solitude, or why, if their conscience leads them to another party, they should be prevented from following it. But what do we do with a situation like the Emerson or Stronach crossings, which seemed impelled less by conscience than expediency? Perhaps that’s unfair: perhaps they were moved by some genuine if unstated question of principle, and not, as it appeared, the promise of a cabinet post. The problem is that the public is left in the position of having to wonder which it was. That question — whether elected officials are serving the public interest or their own — should never be left hanging. And the best way to resolve it would seem to be to ask the people themselves.
Rather than requiring a byelection every time an MP leaves his party, then, I’d limit it to situations in which an MP crosses from the opposition to the governing party benches. Even if no explicit promise of office were attached, the suspicion of some private understanding, to be fulfilled sometime later, would still warrant putting the matter to the people’s judgment.
Indeed, not so long ago we had a rule quite like that — though it applied not to floor crossers, per se, but to all appointments to cabinet. Until the Second World War, it was the convention (I think it may even have been the law) for newly appointed ministers to first resign their seat and run in a byelection. Their role, you see, had changed: from a watchdog on the government — yes, even as a member of the governing party — to a minister in it, and as such they, too, were required to seek their electors’ permission.
I’m not saying we should go back to that rule. It had certain obvious shortcomings: appoint a cabinet in a narrowly divided House and you risked losing your majority. But what a world we have lost.