Delegate power
This is no way to choose the next premier,
Who are these selectors exactly? For the most part, they are people of whom you have never heard. Further, they are people who will never have need to be accountable to a single voter.
This weekend, some 2,000 delegates are gathered in Toronto to choose the next leader of the Liberal Party of Ontario. As it happens, they will also be choosing a premier. On matters as important as ongoing labour strife with teachers and other public servants, taming the provincial budget deficit, and setting tax rates, this individual will have the final say. In short, they are choosing a person who is to become the most powerful politician in the province.
Who are these selectors exactly? For the most part, they are people of whom you have never heard. Further, they are people who will never have need to be accountable to a single voter. With the exception of 53 current MPPs and former MPPs, they are executives and regular members of the Liberal Party of Ontario.
This is deeply problematic for our democracy. Indeed, at the core of our current democratic malaise, is the practice of letting party members both select and deselect leaders.
This method of selection — a convention in which delegates are selected in each constituency and sent to collectively choose a leader — is not the only way to choose a party leader. Nor is it the only system that has been used in Canada. Alternatives exist at two extremes. At one end, a leader is selected by the elected politicians in the party’s caucus. At the other end, anyone who takes out a party membership can select a leader, and every vote is counted equally.
At our country’s inception, the first method was the norm. The selection of party leaders was made by MPs (or MPPs). After all, they had been chosen by their local electorates and they were expected to work with this leader. Why not let them choose the captain of the team? There were good reasons not to. Caucuses were rarely representative geographically. Politicians were collectively, rarely representative of the ethnic or economic diversity of the electorate.
Concerns with the undemocratic fashion of this method of leadership selection led to the delegated convention and eventually to many variants of a onemember, one-vote system. There is an unfortunate irony in this evolution of leadership selection mechanisms: they have made leaders more powerful and less accountable. Our democracy has not been improved.
The principal justification for change in how leaders are chosen has nearly always been expanding the franchise of who can select leaders. Those who argued for giving the decision not only to party officials but also to regular members claimed that this would “democratize” the process, giving regular people a chance to choose party leaders. After all, why should the selection of a premier or a prime minister be left just to elected representatives? These same advocates imagined party ranks swelling into the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Unfortunately, little of this has materialized. Despite occasional spikes in memberships at the time of leadership selection races, most Canadians will never even be a passive party member. Still fewer will take an active, sustained role in a party. Rather than great recruiting drives and exercises in democratic decision-making, these races most often resemble media sideshows. Potential leaders can conceal their policy plans while discussions of the superficial abound. Party members cast their votes in isolation or at a convention where there is little time for deliberation or sustained debate.
It gets worse when we consider what happens after leaders are selected by these party members. First, winning candidates are rarely constrained in terms of their policy options. Consider but one example. In the 1983 contest for the Progressive Conservative leadership, Brian Mulroney openly scorned John Crosbie’s support of free trade with the United States. If the National Policy was good enough for John A. Macdonald, it was good enough for Brian Mulroney. Then he won the leadership and the premiership and made a complete about-face. There were no party members in the room to remind him of that broken promise.
Second, once a leader is selected, there is no clear mechanism for them to be deselected by their caucuses. Instead, every few years, leaders must stand before a convention of party members who will decide to reaffirm their leadership or withdraw their support. Such conventions are as often a gathering of political staffers as they are genuine party members. They are rarely exercises in democratic deliberation.
This is not the only way to remove leaders. Australian party leaders live under constant threat of removal by their caucuses. Indeed, such a “leadership spill” removed Kevin Rudd from the Australian premiership and replaced him with Julia Gillard. You can be sure that Rudd now regrets running roughshod over his MPs’ preferences and the preferences of those they were elected to represent. One can be equally sure that Julia Gillard listens carefully to the concerns of her MPs.
Lest one think that only marginal leaders are brought down in such spills, remember that Margaret Thatcher was also done in by her caucus. A prime minister one day, a regular MP the next.
Such a system forces party leaders to maintain the confidence of their caucus, just as a government must maintain the confidence of the legislature. Leaders who lose this confidence should be removed quickly.
Canadian party leaders face no such obvious threat. While there are occasionally caucus uprisings, they are few and far between. This is not least because our party leaders hold the ultimate say over who represents their party in each election in each constituency.
The result of all of this is that party leaders can toss aside the promises they make to win the leadership. Once ensconced in office, they can ignore the preferences of their caucus.
Each system of leadership selection involves trade-offs and none is perfect. What is clear is that in the name of democratizing our political parties, we have weakened our democracy. We have traded selection of party leaders by one set of unrepresentative individuals — elected representatives — for another unrepresentative set — that small part of the population persuaded to be a member of a political party. In exchange, we have created more powerful party leaders with less accountability to other elected officials. The process may appear more democratic. The outcome is another matter.