To Whom are Political Parties Accountable?

May 25, 2024

HERE'S MY TAKE

Will there ever be room for idealists again in Canadian politics?

It’s getting harder to see how that’s possible, as political parties increasingly resemble over-caffeinated marketing machines for party leaders. And yet, maybe there is some hope.

Textbook descriptions portray Canadian political parties as the institutions that mediate a wide range of political opinions into coherent alternatives, making political debate manageable and voter choice possible. Parties are a vehicle by which the roughly 28 million eligible Canadian voters express their choices. Those voters elect a Parliament from which can emerge an accountable executive government that has something resembling a democratic mandate.

It doesn’t always work out so neatly.

Several recent news stories have renewed the debate about the governance of Canadian political parties. Allegations of Conservative nomination shenanigans and the ever-present discussions about political fundraising prompt commentary on fairness and access for citizens who may want to become candidates.

Andrew Coyne has long argued that Elections Canada should regulate candidate nominations, something that the testimony to the Hogue Inquiry suggests is subject to the active interference from Beijing and other foreign powers. Political parties, or so the story goes, are incapable or unwilling to appropriately regulate themselves and so for the sake of democratic integrity, the state needs to step in.

Insiders reject all that. They acknowledge that nomination races are sometimes messy and involve tactics that disturb purists. That’s just politics, they argue, which no Elections Canada rules will change.

Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney spent significant time on The Line podcast exploring the debate. They basically concluded that the complaints tend to come from those who are losing at a local level because they may not be very good at the political game.

Over at The Curse of Politics podcast (with four participants who’ve played national campaign roles for the major political parties), the consensus remained that political parties are and should stay private organisations.

Conservative strategist Kory Teneycke went even further. He claims local candidates are just “franchisees” of the leader’s brand and that all the power should belong with the leader—the product the political marketing machine is selling. Teneycke doesn’t even want elected MPs to have much power to hold leaders accountable. His take seems to be that it’s the leader’s office that holds MPs accountable.

For Teneycke, opinionated caucus members are a nuisance to efficient government. He’s right. Accountability mechanisms are always a nuisance, as they should be. Caucus powers are more restrained in Canada than in the UK, Australia, or New Zealand where MPs vote out leaders more frequently. However, the 2014 Reform Act created a process that enabled the Conservative caucus to oust Leader O’Toole in February 2022.

So to whom does the political party belong?

• The public, in order to give voters neat and clean choices at election time?
• Party members who should get to run things in order to express their democratic desires?
• The elected caucus, which ends up deciding who gets the chance to form government?
• The party leader since today’s politics is primarily about whom we want as prime minister?

It takes more space than I’ve got to answer that in a nuanced way—there is something to each of these. I mused in this space a few weeks back about the increasing disconnect between politics and policies in our system. The evolution of our political parties certainly has had something to do with it.

A few decades back, all parties had leadership conventions where the local members in each riding would elect ten or so delegates. Then the delegates would show up at a convention where, in real-time through a series of ballots, they’d elect a party leader. Today, most party processes use a form of the one-member, one-vote system and hold a general election-type process to select the leader. The local party structure has no meaningful role in the process (apart from organising the logistics).

Direct voting of this sort sounds more democratic than a delegate convention, but I wonder if it actually is less democratic. It reduces party politics to a general marketing game. The local forums where candidates discussed policy and political realities in living rooms and tried to win delegate support personally (my experience in 1985 when I was a delegate to an Ontario leadership convention involved almost a dozen such events where a leadership candidate would meet with the riding delegates) is history now.

It was democratic politics available even to a teenaged Ray Pennings, just interested in politics who had no connections or special reason to be accepted. And those thousands of local discussions had a way of coalescing into an effective national discussion among party members at a leadership convention where, despite the booze-soaked hospitality suites, meaningful conversations among delegates from all over informed the votes cast the next day. Today’s activists get conscripted into a marketing army where they can serve as extras and photogenic props to surround leaders’ latest pronouncements.

A side benefit of that local process is that (at least in my experience) the local elected member, as well as those who were thinking about potentially serving as candidates in the future, were part of that process. It wasn’t a tight, sanitised consultation process with online surveys in which you rank your preferred policies like the parties run today; it was meaningful engagement and, although imperfect, it was political accountability.

While I find Teneycke’s view of the political party as a leader marketing machine problematic, he raises a valid point about current nomination races (and I would add one-member, one-vote leadership races). They tend to result in groups with intensely held views organising to have a disproportionate influence in the party. He notes that on the Conservative side, it is socially conservative and pro-life groups who’ve exercised that influence while on the left, it is the woke crowd and, especially today, the antisemitic activists who are the loudest.

He rightly asks whether the Liberal Party nomination process (which allows anyone to vote, without even requiring membership) doesn’t risk one-issue, antisemitic activists dominating the nomination slate. And just to augment the concern, if Prime Minister Trudeau were to step down causing a Liberal leadership race, would the party be effectively taken over by activists on that issue?

The debate isn’t straightforward but I do wonder whether the change in how political parties choose their leaders has reduced the organic checks and balances within those parties. The unintended consequence is that the local party apparatus, and even by extension the caucus of elected members, lose their local and face-to-face connections. Meaningful accountability takes place in the context of structure and relationship.

If we’re rethinking party organisation, maybe we need to pay more attention to leadership elections, not just local candidate nominations.

WHAT I’M READING

A Global Mineral Race

This Globe and Mail op-ed by a mineral executive and military expert soberly warns that North American “purpose-driven investing” combined with decade-long approval processes have conspired to give China and Russia especially a soon insurmountable advantage. The implications of this are not only relevant for our energy and military supplies but also will result in foreign control of essential supply chains with the potential for significant economic disruption.

The Economics of Religion

The Economist ran a major feature on the economics of religion this week, making arguments that are significant not because of their uniqueness but their placement. Cardus has done research that has resulted in a website that calculates the “halo effect” of religion in local communities and on the GDP more generally. Check out haloproject.ca to get the results for your own local community. The Economist reviewed a 500-page tome by a Princeton prof—all indications that sometimes the data just force conversations about reality that many in the mainstream culture prefer to overlook.

What's Left to Say about Educational Pluralism?

Regular readers will know that educational pluralism is something that both Cardus and I think is pretty important. This week, my colleague Catharine Kavanaugh brought to the attention of Canadian readers the counterintuitive data point that only one net new non-government school opened in Alberta in the past decade, while 491 opened in Ontario in that same time period. This data lands during a growing movement for different models for delivering education on both sides of the border. Cardus Senior Fellow Ashley Berner highlights for U.S readers in The Hill piece for U.S. readers that important arguments in favour of pluralism and choice come from the progressive left, as well as from the political right.

Abortion Politics

Jonathan Van Maren argues in First Things that Donald Trump is leveraging his past credibility as “the most pro-life president the U.S. has ever had”—to change the definition of what it means to be pro-life. He shows how Trump’s shifting position and rhetoric for political reasons is different than the prudence that is often required in politics to avoid “letting the perfect become the enemy of the good” when advocates are supporting some advance on an issue. Instead, Van Maren claims the arguments now in play are reframing and misconstruing core issues in the pro-life debate.

Constitutional Scholars

Forgive the shameless self-promotion but a front-page National Post article describing me as a “constitutional scholar” (thanks to my coauthor Howard Anglin who I would note has the professional and educational CV to warrant the label) gets a link in my newsletter. The article drew upon a piece for The Hub that Howard and I wrote predicting a constitutional crisis in the not-too-distant future given the Senate changes that are happening mostly under the radar screen. University of Waterloo Political Science Professor Emmett MacFarlane isn't that impressed with our take, although his rebuttal was one that the Canadian Constitution Foundation dubbed the “bad take of the week” on its podcast.

MEANINGFUL METRICS

Fifty-Year Lows

Full disclosure: After the better part of a decade collaborating professionally, I consider Shachi Kurl a friend and have the emails and texts of smart-aleck repartee to back my claim. When we are in the same city, we usually meet over a glass of wine (her tastes are much more refined than mine) and while we’ve never specifically discussed the federal election campaigns of the 1970s, I suspect her first-hand memories of them are even more imprecise than mine.

None of that, however, disqualifies the findings released this week based on data research conducted by Shachi and the Angus Reid Institute team, usually led by the indefatigable research director David Korzinski who has a knack for converting spreadsheets of doom into reportable data. The report notes that the combined approval ratings of the three main federal party leaders are currently at a low that has not been seen in the previous 50 years.

The report suggests the supply and confidence agreement between the NDP and Liberals is a major contributor to this reality. Sure, Misters Trudeau, Poilievre, and Singh all can be rightly critiqued, but I wonder if this is also a commentary on how our culture views leadership in general, institutions in particular, and politics as a sphere in which cynicism rather than confidence is the default response.

TAKE IT TO-GO

Eyes of the Tiger

Last week’s long weekend provided an opportunity for the Pennings family to enjoy both Disney's Tiger documentary, as well as the accompanying documentary about the making of the first documentary. It’s not that I have the eco-expert stripes to be an expert on tiger tales, but I did pounce on the tactics that wildlife experts are using to enable remote villagers and tigers to live in peaceful co-existence. I learned that as the tiger population grows and tigresses no longer have enough jungle territory to satisfy their needs (they seem to be turf protectors), they have wandered from the jungles into adjacent villages, finding herds of cattle easy prey to stalk.

I hadn’t contemplated the possibility, but there is even an academic study backing the claim that painting realistic-looking eyes near the buttocks of the cows may spook the tigers such that the incidence rate of losing cattle to the wild cats plummets. It turns out that it is the cows and not the cats who have nine lives in this case, and the story’s twist in the tail gives the “eye of the tiger” a very different end than its rocky roots. 

That’s all for this week, but look for us to be back in your inbox next Saturday morning.

'Til then.