The continued meltdown of the UK's Labour Party in the wake of the Brexit referendum is proving to be an object lesson on why the adoption of Canadian-style leadership elections is, and always has been, a problem.  That it took this long to manifest in such a manner is probably more happenstance than anything, but here we are, and the results are not encouraging.

To recap, the way leadership selection worked in the UK until the past decade was that MPs in the caucus chose the leader.  It's a system that keeps leaders on a short leash because a leader has to maintain the confidence of his or her caucus if they want to keep leading.  It makes the leader accountable to the caucus, and it empowers MPs because they have a direct stake in how their party is led, and it gives them agency as elected representatives, rather than treating them as agents of the leader.  (Side note: Australia has proven that this can go too far in the other direction, with constant leadership spills creating an air of paranoia).

This was the case in Canada's too, but in 1919, the Liberals decided to change that by having a delegated convention to choose their new leader, and William Lyon Mackenzie King was the result, and he knew that he was no longer accountable to his MPs.  He reputedly told them so during one particular scandal, reminding them that they did not select him, and could not remove him.  The chain of accountability had been broken, and as parties moved away from delegated conventions to one-member-one-vote systems, the Liberals again pushing this extreme to offering leadership votes to anyone who wanted them, even without a party membership, any semblance of accountability has evaporated because there is no longer a cohesive group to which that leader must be accountable to.  And no, "leadership review" votes are not accountability because it relies on the same nebulous membership, and when you're accountable to everyone, you're accountable to no one.

This lack of accountability is playing out in the UK's Labour Party right now.  In the wake of the Brexit vote, and accusations that leader Jeremy Corbyn didn't do enough to promote the Remain campaign allegedly eschewing any chance to present a united front with Prime Minister David Cameron along the way his party has rebelled.  The vast majority of his Shadow Cabinet resigned or were sacked.  A vote of non-confidence was held in caucus, and Corbyn got a mere 40 votes of support (another seven of which subsequently called on him to resign), with 172 against.  And yet he refuses to budge.  Why?  Because he has a "democratic mandate" given to him by the 59 per cent of Labour party members who voted for him.

The problem with the constant push to be "more democratic" is that it tends to upset the balance of accountability, and making systems "more democratic" almost inevitably makes them less accountable. Corbyn feels no accountability to a caucus that largely did not support his leadership (he managed to get past the caucus-control threshold of 15 per cent of party MPs supporting him because some "lent" their support just to get his name on the ballot), and the segment of the party membership that continued to feel burned by the Blair years voted the noted socialist Corbyn in as a way of taking their party back. Several times in Canadian history, we've seen party leaders be elected with little or no caucus support Alison Redford and Christy Clark being notable examples. Redford quickly flamed out but had enough self-awareness to resign once the caucus grew restless enough that there were resignations and MLAs started going to the media. Despite virtually the entire caucus being vocally against him, Corbyn refuses to step down, because of this imagined "democratic mandate" given to him by a membership that he cannot actually be accountable to.

Surely there must be some kind of compromise that can be reached so that caucus still exercises a measure of control but the membership still has that "democratic" right, you must be thinking. And there have been attempts. The UK has gone the route of instituting some controls on the front end that the candidate must be a sitting MP and has 15 per cent support of the caucus with Labour, while the Conservatives have caucus narrow it down to two candidates that the membership votes on. But that still leaves the problem of the "mandate." In Canada, we had Conservative MP Michael Chong's Reform Act, which promised to give caucus the ability to remove a leader, but put into law that new leaders must be chosen by membership vote.

The problem with Chong's plan which no party adopted despite it passing into law is that it too cannot overcome the "mandate" problem of selection. In fact, during debate, a number of Conservative MPs insisted that even as elected representatives, they shouldn't be given those powers because it was tantamount to "elites" overruling the grassroots membership. And that disconnect is precisely why both the UK caucus controls and Chong's plans for caucus removal votes are half-measures that cannot overcome the basic problem. You cannot have a legitimate removal mechanism that is divorced from the selection process, and this is what the Corbyn example is proving in spades.

So long as anyone can claim a "democratic mandate" from a nebulous membership, they can continue to avoid accountability and pursue a reckless course that will split a party, as it may yet do with UK's Labour. We have been fortunate that in Canada, this has largely not happened (but did come pretty close during the cabinet revolt under Manitoba's Greg Selinger in 2014). With a leader like Justin Trudeau, under whom party power has consolidated greatly while accountability has evaporated, the potential is even greater. Accountability matters in a democracy, which is why we need to return to a selection process that reflects it.

Photo Credit: The Telegraph