Parties aren’t purely private groups
State has place in caucus rooms of the nation
Even people sympathetic to the Reform Act’s proposals blanch at the idea of legislating them into effect. This is especially true of the process set out in the bill, introduced this week by Conservative MP Michael Chong, for a party’s parliamentary caucus to dismiss the leader — or rather of its requirement that the parties add this provision to their own bylaws.
Maybe it’s a good idea, these people will say. Maybe, in concert with the removal of the leader’s veto over members’ nominations, it will correct the current imbalance of power between leader and caucus. Maybe it will improve MPs’ ability to hold the leader to account and, the leader’s grip having loosened a little, to represent their constituents.
But why put it into law? Isn’t this the sort of thing best left to the parties to decide for themselves? Should Parliament really be in the business of regulating the way these private organizations select (or in this case deselect) their leaders? Isn’t that the parties’ prerogative?
It’s a legitimate concern, if you buy the premise: that political parties are really private organizations, their internal affairs a kind of bedroom in which the state has no business. But they aren’t.
These are not church groups we are talking about. Political parties are not purely private organizations, of the kind who wish only to remain private, separate and apart from the public square. They are well-oiled machines for combat in the arena of public opinion, whose raison d’être is to win, and wield, power over the rest of us. That makes them quite different than any other private group.
Corporations are at least as private as political parties. Yet corporations must submit to quite intrusive regulation of their internal affairs, including how their directors are elected — or removed. (From the Canada Business Corporations Act: “the shareholders of a corporation may by ordinary resolution at a special meeting remove any director or directors from office.”) The same applies to not-forprofit corporations. Still more intrusive regulations apply to “public” companies, i.e. those that offer their shares on the stock market.
We don’t leave these private organizations entirely free to decide these matters for themselves. We spell out what they must do in some detail — in part because of the legal privileges and immunities corporations enjoy. That doesn’t mean corporations have no rights, or that any regulation is justified, no matter how over-broad or illadvised. It does mean they do not exist in a sacred realm, beyond reach of the law. As it happens, neither do political parties.
The Canada Elections Act runs to hundreds of pages, half of them to do with the parties and their affairs, including nominations and leadership races. Parties are subject to regulations governing how they raise funds, and from whom, the number and type of officers they must have, who can serve in what position, and so on. That’s if they want to be registered parties, the kind that are eligible to contest elections. If they don’t want to be registered, if they just want to meet and discuss amongst themselves, they can do what they like.
But as seekers after power, they are wholly creatures of the law: They cannot exist except as it prescribes. How then can it be improper that they be regulated by the law? Or if the general rule is conceded, what is it about the leadership selection process that makes it an exception?
Like corporations, what is more, parties benefit from a range of privileges and exemptions, not to mention public subsidies: the 75-percent tax credit on donations, for example. The least they can do in return is to be accountable to Parliament: accountable in the sense of being subject to its laws, and accountable in the political sense, as proposed in the Reform Act — by submitting the leader to the judgment of the caucus.
This is not actually optional. In addition to the standing orders, the people’s House is regulated by certain conventions, notably the confidence convention: which is no more than the principle of government by consent of the governed. But like every other convention of parliamentary government, we have allowed this to slip into disrepair, to an extent observed in no other Westminster-based system.
So it is that a party leader can be elected by one group and rule over another — while remaining accountable to neither. A bunch of people, many of whom have never had any connection with the party before then nor ever will after, meet in a hockey arena or vote online to pick a leader, who then marches into Parliament and demands unquestioning obedience from a caucus of MPs, any one of whom may have been elected by more people than he was and who collectively may have been elected by millions.
No. If you want to lead MPs in Parliament, you get a mandate from them. If a majority of MPs would like to formalize this convention in law — if they decide they are fed up with running errands for the leaders and their entourages — I see nothing untoward in it.
And of course, that is the only way the bill could become law. Ideally it would pass with the support of all parties — for then its constraints would be self-imposed. The parties, through their legislative representatives, would have agreed to bind themselves, separately and collectively. Isn’t that their prerogative?