Party conventions are no place to discuss ideas anymore

This spring’s gatherings will focus on raising cash, building the base — not debating policy

All three major political parties, the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats, are holding their big conventions within the next two months.

They’ve all chosen to hold them west of Ontario, but that’s not the only thing they have in common.

All three post-election gatherings will be far more focused on leadership and organization than on policy or ideas. Put simply, party conventions are not idea factories anymore, if they ever really were. That work in politics is being done elsewhere.

Start with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberals. When they gather in Winnipeg in late May, it will be more than two months since the budget was delivered and nearly six months since the party took power.

Like all governments before them, this new Liberal one often has to make policy on the fly; in reaction to current events and in collaboration with the public service, provinces and even other countries. Trudeau isn’t likely to seek detailed advice from the grassroots party members in Winnipeg on how to come to a carbon pricing deal with the first ministers, for instance.

Winnipeg will be more of a victory party: high-fives all around for returning to power, and probably very little public criticism of policy steps taken to date. If there are Liberals feeling some reservations about running up deficits or any of the measures in the budget delivered this week, they probably won’t be taking the stage at the convention and spoiling the celebratory mood. Power is a great discipline over dissent. Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper wasn’t a big fan of forming policy at party conventions, either. As Tom Flanagan, his former mentor and campaign chief, wrote in one of his most recent books, “policy development within the party . . . had to take second place.”

Flanagan called this a product of the “permanent campaign” in Canada — a central feature of politics in the Harper years, which included two minority governments.

“Election readiness has largely replaced policy development as the party emphasizes fundraising, campaign training and building grassroots teams for signage, door-knocking and phonebanking,” Flanagan wrote in Winning Power: Canadian Campaigning in the 21st Century.

The focus on organization over policy has become even more acute among all parties since fundraising limits were introduced in Canada a decade ago and the government subsidy to political parties was wound down completely last year.

The more urgent need for political parties now is cash, not ideas, so you can expect that the Liberals’ convention, as well as the Conservatives’ gathering the same weekend in Vancouver, will be loaded with sessions on fundraising and building the base. Liberals will be talking about what went right in 2015; Conservatives will be talking about what went wrong.

The New Democrats’ convention in Edmonton in early April, meanwhile, is the opposite of a victory party and the big story there will be whether leader Thomas Mulcair survives his leadership review vote.

Mulcair is in a tight spot, it seems to me. If the NDP convention-goers are in a practical mood, focused on winning power, then Mulcair has to persuade them he can do in 2019 what he failed to do in the 2015 election.

If they’re in a principled mood, on the other hand, focused on getting the party back to its progressive left roots, then Mulcair’s centrist approach is going to face some pointed challenges.

Either way, none of the big existential or policy questions for the NDP are going to be worked out until the matter of leadership is settled.

So when they’re not talking leadership in Edmonton in April, they’ll likely be talking about the state of the party machine, too, not policy.

Policy discussions at conventions aren’t totally meaningless. Before I sat down to write this column, I pulled up the policy resolutions from the Liberals’ 2014 gathering in Montreal and found a lot of parallels between the motions passed on the floor and the contents of the new government’s latest budget, especially with regard to indigenous issues.

Liberals are also fond of reminding people that the policy on marijuana legalization was passed at the 2012 convention — the same gathering that got Trudeau thinking about whether he wanted to run for the leadership.

But all parties also now have sophisticated databases and resources for tapping into the mood of the membership, if not the country. If Trudeau wants to find out where Liberal partisans are leaning on any particular issue, he needs only to consult Liberalist, not wait for resolutions from a convention floor every two years.

So perhaps we in the media who are attending these conventions can take a pass this year on attending the policy sessions. All three parties are far more fixated now on the state of the machine and winning — or losing. sdelacourt@bell.net