When it was first proposed, Michael Chong's Reform Act was full of promise. Pundits sang his praise, and people thought that this would finally do something to rebalance the power of MPs in parliament, that they would finally have a way to start checking the power of their leaders. Well, most people did anyway, but a few of us were sceptical for the main fact that MPs already have all of that power already through expressions of confidence, but simply choose not to exercise it for whatever the reason.
But then the tinkering began, and Chong made concession after concession to get the bill passed. What began as a dubious bill succumbed to the weight of parties to make careful nips and tucks so as not to affect things too much after all, the NDP still wanted to be able to run nomination contests with affirmative action, and so on. And while the pundit class lamented that the bill was effectively neutered, it was at least a symbol of a desire for reform. And what is that political syllogism something must be done and this is something, therefore we must do this? The Reform Act was the epitome of it.
What emerged from committee was not a harmless and neutered bill it's one that is actively destructive to our political system, and will do further damage to it. As MPs decide how they're going to vote on it, we can hope that they will come to their senses and vote down this very bad bill, but I'm not optimistic because they don't want to be seen to be voting against reform. That will leave it up to the Senate to do their due diligence and if not defeat it outright, then to at least do what they can to ensure that it dies on the Order Paper when the election is called.
To begin with, the only good part of the bill removing a party leader's veto on nominations has been watered down to uselessness. Because parties protested that they didn't want any one system imposed on them, the language of the bill now says that the sign-off is done by a "designated officer," who can be pretty much anyone, including the leader's chief of staff. Unless parties have that conversation with their membership about who the designated officer is going to be and put in safeguards to keep it out of the leader's hands, the provision is useless. (There is also nothing stopping them from doing that process now and making the leader's veto pro forma, but none have made that effort).
It gets worse. Parliamentary parties in our system are creature of convention the same kind of constitutional convention as our system of Responsible Government, and this bill seeks to start codifying that into law while it further blends the parliamentary party and the extra-parliamentary party. This is the division between caucus and the grassroots membership. Canada already has a problem with the blurred lines between the two after we started the practice of having the membership vote for the party leadership, which is precisely the root cause of the problems that Chong's bill is supposed to address. Legislating that practice suddenly solidifies those problems.
Indeed, if Canada returned to our original system whereby caucus chooses the leaders of the party, the whole bill wouldn't be necessary. MPs, having chosen the leader, would be empowered to dispose of those leaders as they saw fit. Clear lines of accountability would be there, where they do not exist currently. The current bill makes a return to this more accountable and empowered system a near impossibility because no future government would want to be seen to be undoing these "reform" measures and I do use the term "reform" loosely, because it is more akin to the sabotage of our system.
With these changes in place, it would enshrine into law that caucus only includes MPs and not Senators, undoing nearly 150 years of convention that will have vast, unintended consequences for parties. After all, senators are the institutional memories of parliament and caucuses in particular, and excluding them by law will simply fuel the attempts to further de-legitimise the institution in the popular opinion. This is dangerous for our parliamentary democracy.
Another major problem is that the bill mandates into law that party leaders must be elected by the party entrenching our currently broken and unaccountable system with little hope of being able to restore it to caucus selection. After all, leaders elected by a nebulous membership can't be held to account by them. It also means that if there was a leadership removal, or death or incapacitation of a sitting leader, that there must be an interim leader selected before a full membership election, depriving parties of any flexibility.
Most alarming is that while the bill purports to empower MPs to remove a leader, what it perversely winds up doing is raising the threshold to start a process for that removal. If you look at some of the recent provincial leadership removals Alberta in particular, but Newfoundland, Manitoba and the NDP leadership in BC these processes were started by a small number of MLAs who made their discontent known. Raising that threshold to 20 percent means that any time those discontented MLAs come forward, media will start counting for that 20 percent of MPs to trigger the leadership challenge vote. This will inevitably wind up discouraging more MPs from dissenting publicly without sufficient numbers greater numbers than we've seen previously.
Canadian parliamentary democracy is replete with examples of attempts at "reform" that are intended to make us "more democratic," but which inevitably backfired and made things worse leadership selection by party membership being a prime example. Chong's bill is one more example of good intentions that will inevitably go terribly wrong and make things worse for another generation. MPs need to realise this and put a stake in the bill now, before it's too late.
