The months-long leadership contests of two of our major parties are becoming more absurd by the day. The Conservatives have a growing number of candidates spouting policies they have no business developing, and the NDP can't seem to muster up a single candidate while the ousted leader hangs on to his position in an "interim" capacity for dear life amid growing unrest among his members. It shouldn't be this way.
Canada's is possibly the most broken system of leadership selection amongst all Westminster countries. Sadly, the UK and Australia have started adopting elements of our broken system in the name of making these contests "more democratic," forgetting of course that making them "more democratic" in Canada, going back to when the Liberal Party first changed their process in 1919, was what broke the system. When party members started being given the power to elect the leader rather than the caucus, it meant that there was no longer any real means of holding that leader to account, and because the process has become increasingly presidential over time, party leaders have relied on the strength of their so-called "democratic mandate" to wield authority. This had led to nothing but bad results, with MPs surrendering their agency to these presidentialized leaders.
Making the system more intolerable are the months-long leadership contests, with the NDP's announced contest of a year-and-a-half being beyond the pale. The opposition is supposed to not only hold a government to account, but is also supposed to be capable of forming a new government at a moment's notice. It's a fairly integral part of how our system functions, and yet we consistently have opposition parties who spend months at a time, rudderless and without the ability to credibly form that government if the situation demanded it. If they can't fulfil their basic role in our system, then it's a problem, just as much as it is when the government suddenly finds itself in a similar position.
The fact that we have opted to go this route of presidentialized leadership contests instead of caucus selection has a couple of other detrimental effects, which has weakened the way our parties operate. For one, the way contests are structured now leaves parties desperate for a messiah figure to rescue them from their current malaise or mire. The Liberals tried that with Michael Ignatieff and then Justin Trudeau (though everyone kept hoping that maybe this time, Frank McKenna would come out of retirement for them), while the Conservatives this time were hoping for Peter MacKay (which isn't going to happen), and the NDP…well, we're not quite sure which messiah figure they're hoping for because everyone has decided that they don't want to touch the leadership with a bargepole.
The leadership candidates that we do get, messianic or otherwise, have increasingly been bringing their own personal policy platforms to these contests, which I cannot stress enough is not their job. Policy development is the job of the grassroots membership, but because we have steadily presidentialized the leaders' positions, that development is increasingly top-down. People used to want to know leaders' views on policies to know what they stood for, but those days are long past. Now it's about creating an entire centralized power structure around them, where they have no accountability to the caucus, and only a nebulous one to their party's membership (which gets increasingly diluted the greater that membership pool or "supporter" pool, as the Liberals have since adopted has become).
The other detrimental effect of this means of selective leadership is that it has an utterly corrosive effect on the party's bench strength. Not only have MPs surrendered their agency to the leader, reinforced by the media demands of caucus solidarity in all things (lest that leader look weak before the public), but it also means that there are few MPs in the wings capable of claiming that leadership, especially as the messianic complexes keep demanding an outsider to come an save them from themselves. That can't be a healthy thing for the job that we expect our MPs to do, and especially if we want to ensure that they are more than just drones who vote according to their leaders' wishes, and read lines given to them by the leaders' offices (again, because those leaders have a "democratic mandate" to exert that centralized control).
So where does this leave us now? Currently the Conservatives have leadership candidates whose vision of the party are all over the map, and some of their policy proposals are doing active damage to the party brand (hello, Kellie Leitch), and when interim leader Rona Ambrose is forced to react to them, it's creating an impossible situation for her to deal with. The fact that we haven't given room for backbenchers to deviate from the party line for so long means that when these kinds of public musings happen, it gets blown out of all proportion, and that is a problem.
As for the NDP, they are in an untenable situation where a disaster of a leader has been rejected by the membership, but will still be around for a year-and-a-half because the caucus couldn't be asked to find a suitable replacement for him in the interim for their too-long leadership contest, while they hope in vain that their yet-unknown messiah figure will not only rescue them, but provide new direction to a party that many of their own members feel has lost its way. And worst of all, Thomas Mulcair, whose poor organizational abilities contributed to the party's poor showing, insists that he'll get the organization into "ship shape" for the next leader after he broke it. It's absurd and has created an unworkable situation.
We could fix so many of our political woes in Canada by simply reverting to a system of caucus selection of party leaders, but it will be a tough sell. Will any party have the courage to do it? My optimism wanes.
