As the Conservative leadership race continues to drag on, and with fourteen candidates still in the race, we're getting a sense about the ways in which there has been a kind of debasement of the party in the process.  There are interlopers about, both inside and outside of the gates, and this whole episode is one long reminder of what is truly broken in our political system the way in which we choose our leaders.

First, the interlopers within.  These are the candidates who are not actually sitting members of the party, and it applies both to those former MPs who were defeated, and to outsiders like both Rick Peterson and Kevin O'Leary two businessmen who boast credentials of not being politicians.  "Not being a politician" has been in vogue for a while, but the recent fetish around this, along with "draining the swamp" and the demagoguery around political elites has propelled Donald Trump to the White House in the States, and it's what O'Leary hopes will help win him win the leadership here in Canada.  Never mind that we've proven time and again being a CEO and a political leader are different skillsets which are not interchangeable, and that there are countless examples of those who promised to "run government like a business" utterly bombed.  No, we're still treating this particular slogan like it's a desirable trait.

And then there are the interlopers without.  From the beginning of this race, when Kellie Leitch got out in front with her "Canadian values" trial balloon that blew up in the media, we saw a concerted effort by non-Conservatives to start taking out party memberships in order to keep her away from the levers of power.  The fact that I saw my socialist Green Party-voting ex on social media last weekend talking about how he was voting in the Conservative leadership contest was proof positive to me about how we've reached the point of utter absurdity with this particular phenomenon.  Of course, it's not unique to the Conservatives the fact that the Liberals opened up their leadership contest to "supporters" instead of party members already paved this particular road, before they then decided to blow up their whole membership base entirely with a permanent "supporter" category, while Michael Chong advocates for free party memberships that people simply declare on their tax forms.

But while some people see this particular party interloping as a way to effect change or exert influence, we're still not sure that this would be an effective tactic in the current Conservative race, given the complex math of both the ranked ballot and the point system assigned to each riding that was designed so that more populous ridings in the west didn't swamp the less populous ones on the east coast.  Meanwhile, the curveball in all of this is not only those left-wing interlopers who are trying to keep Kellie Leitch down, but rather who Kevin O'Leary is signing up as new members, given his plan to target Millennials and those who feel disaffected by politics as usual, not to mention the supposed legions of his TV fans.  Depending on how many he can recruit and what their distribution looks like across the country, that could be the bigger disruption.

Which brings me back to the point about this being the truly broken part of our political system.  While the theory behind membership-driven leadership contests is that they're supposed to be "more democratic" and engage the grassroots, all they've really done is concentrate the power in the office of those leaders at the expense of the caucus as well as the grassroots.  Leaders know that they can't realistically be held to account by that membership base, which emboldens them, and we're seeing more and more examples of how these leaders are running against their own caucus, whether it's with candidates like Brad Trost, O'Leary, or Leitch, or the gong show that is Jeremy Corbyn running Labour in the UK, where an energized activist base has installed him there over the wishes of the broader voter base and his caucus in revolt, and the party is rendering itself unelectable.  Insulting the very people you're supposed to be leading in parliament is a strange tactic, and yet some people clearly see it as the path to power.

There is an additional problem with this move to broadening the membership base for leadership contests in that these recruits are not actually filling the roles that party members are supposed to be.  These are not people who are going to riding association meetings, coming up with policy resolutions to vote on to bring to a convention, or helping to actively organize or provide ground-up input into the party the way that our political system is built to.  They're in it for a single ballot to empower a leader with a "democratic legitimacy" that they should have no claim to, in the hope that they will impose a less awful vision on the party that these new members are normally opposed to.  This should be utterly untenable to all involved.

If anything, this should be an object lesson that it's time to wind the clock back on how party leaderships are decided to the way that it was intended to be so that the caucus decides.  It keeps the leaders accountable to the caucus, MPs are re-empowered to both make decisions and to push back against the centralizing efforts by the leader and their offices, and it restores the place of the grassroots in deciding policy and in holding their local MPs to account so that there is a flow from the ground-up and not the top down.  There are no interlopers either among the would-be leaders, or those who hope to frustrate the membership of the party.  It'll be tough to remind people why it needs to be this way, but we can't keep further debasing our system into one of powerful leaders and a caucus of drones.