Choosing party leaders: a rethink
If Parliament matters to you, that is
It has been an eventful time in the Conservative leadership race. One prominent contender, Kellie Leitch, after months of scarcely encoded appeals to voters with a fear of immigrants in general and Muslims in particular, found herself — to her astonishment — at an event put on by an antiMuslim group. A rival, Kevin O’Leary, vowed to invoke the notwithstanding clause to throw asylum-seekers out of the country without a hearing; another, Maxime Bernier, promised to call in the army.
Meanwhile Brad Trost took it upon himself to declare, through a spokesman, his problems with “the whole gay thing.” He and others have seen fit to address rallies sponsored by The Rebel, the driving force behind the preposterous fear campaign over Motion 103; one, Chris Alexander, has since disavowed the group, but only after the target shifted to Jews. The campaign of Steven Blaney has been issuing fundraising emails written in tones of mounting hysteria: the latest begins “Should Allah kill all the Jews? I don’t think so, but frighteningly, some do.” And so on.
This was not, needless to say, the kind of race the party had hoped to see. Historically a party that has struggled to make inroads with immigrant and urban voters, the Conservatives had an opportunity in the current race to dispel the bitter taste left by the past election campaign, with its niqab bans and snitch lines.
Well, fat chance of that now. The pandering to the most extreme elements of the party has left many longstanding Conservatives aghast. There are, to be sure, candidates who have resisted this tendency, in favour of the more expansive pitch the party will need to win elections: Michael Chong, Erin O’Toole, Andrew Scheer and Lisa Raitt among them. Alas, all are thought to be well back in the pack.
What will be noticed about at least some of these candidates, however, is that they have strong support among a particular subset of Conservatives: members of Parliament. O’Toole leads all candidates with the endorsement of 26 sitting MPs; Scheer is not far behind with 23. If it were up to the party’s MPs to choose the next leader, it would probably be one of the two. By contrast, the three candidates currently judged the frontrunners in the race — Bernier, O’Leary and Leitch — have the support of just 11 sitting MPs between them.
This is odd. If anyone would know the candidates best, at least among the 12 current or former MPs in the field, you would think it would be their fellow members of caucus. These are people, moreover, who have to get elected for a living, and have had some success at doing so: as such their sense of which candidate had the most electoral appeal ought to carry some weight. Perhaps most important, they will have to work with, and under, whoever is elected.
It is simply bizarre, when you think about it. Government with the consent of the governed is a bedrock principle of democracy — except when it comes to members of a parliamentary caucus, who must submit to be led, under the rules by which all of the parties now choose their leaders, by someone chosen by an entirely different group: the members of the party at large, many of whom may have only just joined the party, and may never have anything to do with it again.
This leaves the leader accountable, essentially, to no one, at least on a day-to-day basis. And it leaves members of caucus saddled with a leader who may be repugnant to them — and, not coincidentally, the public — but excites the enthusiasm of the party base. The examples of Alison Redford, in Alberta, or Jeremy Corbyn, in Great Britain, are not the happiest ones. And yet the federal Conservatives may be about to repeat the experiment.
Suppose instead the party caucus had chosen the leader from among its number, following the classic Westminster model, as party leaders were for the first several decades of this country’s existence, as leaders in Australia still are — as indeed are the party leaders in the U.S. Congress. At the very least, the party would have had a leader these past 18 months; the vast amounts of time and money spent dragging the party to its current degraded state might have been put to other uses.
More to the point, it would have a leader who was battle-tested and ready to do the job a party leader is supposed to do in our system: lead a caucus in Parliament. Being the choice of that caucus, he or she would be more assured of their support — and yet, being removable by the same caucus, also more accountable to them. If that sounds less democratic, then make MPs, in turn, more accountable to their riding associations, by eliminating the abuses we still see in nomination races, from the recruitment of busloads of instant members to the fixis-in manipulations of the leader’s office.
Ultimately which model you prefer comes down to the assumptions underlying each. If you think Parliament is irrelevant, MPs are nobodies, and the role of the leader is to look good on TV, then the current model will appeal to you. If, on the other hand, you think Parliament matters, and that members of Parliament should matter, then it is time to rethink how we choose party leaders. As the Tories may soon have cause to consider.
MODEL YOU PREFER COMES DOWN TO UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS.