Let those who know best pick a leader — and that’s the caucus

Take heart, Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario supporters. Yes, your leader has been forced out for allegedly making unwanted sexual advances on drunken teenagers. Yes, your president followed him out the door just as it was about to be reported he had been accused of sexually assaulting a party staffer. Yes, your divided, demoralized, decapitated party must fight an election campaign in a little over four months time.

But all is not lost: Doug Ford is running for leader.

Actually, the party has a leader already. In interim leader Vic Fedeli, they have an experienced businessman and former mayor, a well-regarded MPP and well-briefed finance critic who was the unanimous choice of the party caucus: the people who know him best, the people whose seats are on the line in that campaign, the people a party leader is supposed to lead, not only during quadrennial election campaigns but every day in between.

The option was open to the party simply to let Fedeli lead it in the campaign. It has instead apparently chosen, once again, to subject its MPPs and candidates to the leadership of someone they did not choose, but whose choice was imposed upon them.

The group that will choose him or her will in many cases have no prior connection to the party, nor any involvement afterward. They will have scant knowledge of the candidates, and no ability to hold the winner to account for his actions subsequently. Many will vote solely because the candidate or his agents bought their memberships for them.

I speak, of course, of that most hallowed of democratic institutions, “the membership” — whoever they may be on the day.

This was the system of electing party leaders that gave the party Patrick Brown. It could very well give them Doug Ford.

Or if not him, someone equally unsuitable, but with the ability to sell a lot of memberships in a short period of time, to whomever they can find, from whatever special interest group, by whatever means is at hand.

It is the system that, time and again, saddles parties with leaders who are not just intolerable to the caucus they are supposed to lead, but elected with the help of a lot of people who are at best tenuously connected to the party’s aims and beliefs, and at worst wish it ill.

Cast your minds back to the PCPO leadership campaign of 2015. A little-known and lightly-regarded federal MP, Brown had the support of just four members of caucus. He had scarcely more support, according to a poll taken six weeks before the event, among PC-leaning voters (11 per cent) or Ontarians generally (6 per cent). He had little relevant experience, stood for nothing in particular, was unimpressive personally.

What he could do was sell a ton of memberships — 40,000 of a total of roughly 76,000 — with the help of a lot of money raised who knows how, or where.

Were there skeletons in his closet, waiting to jump out? Not that his instant supporters knew, or cared. I suspect more than a few caucus members did. But by then it was too late.

Under his leadership, it is true, the party raised a lot of money, moderated some of its stands, added thousands more members — aided greatly by the imminent prospect, so it was assumed, of power.

But the Conservative lead in the polls was always more a matter of the unpopularity of the governing Liberals then any great enthusiasm for the party, or its leader. Never mind the private uneasiness of party officials, the sense that there was something out there, waiting to blow up. Even on the basis of what was known publicly, it was hard to imagine him as premier.

The question is whether the party is about to repeat the same mistake. Perhaps it is impossible to turn back, the now-departed president having peremptorily announced that the party would install a new permanent leader in the short time left before the election, by a speeded-up version of the usual elephantine process. Perhaps that will preclude, formally or practically, the unseemly free-for-all that usually marks the leadership race-as-recruitment drive.

Only, please don’t call this “more democratic.” Leave aside the likelihood of irregularities and warlordism in such a hastily-organized campaign. Ignore the violation of the core democratic principle of government with the consent of the governed. No, what is most galling about the travesty of democracy to come is its virulently undemocratic premise: that members of caucus are just a bunch of nobodies — or what is worse, “elites.”

Those would be the nobodies who won first the party nomination, then the general election in their ridings. Each was the democratic choice of tens of thousands of voters; collectively, of hundreds of thousands. True, their independence and authority as elected representatives has been allowed to atrophy, in favour of the party leader; and true, in today’s obsessively leaderfocused campaigns, the individual candidate owes his or her seat more to the leader than to his own efforts.

But to cite this in defence of the status quo is circular reasoning. The present weakened state of the caucus, and its members, is precisely because the leader, being neither hired nor easily fired by them, is no longer accountable to them — or to anyone.

In any case, they are best placed to judge the electability or otherwise of those who would seek to lead them. And they will know, better than most, that before all else — before name recognition, or ideology, or I dare say even gender — the most important quality in a leader, the question the voters will ultimately decide, is: who can be premier?