It's not actually that novel that NDP leadership hopeful Jagmeet Singh has said that he wouldn't run for a seat in the House of Commons right away if he won the party's contest.  The current leader of the Bloc Québécois doesn't have a seat either, and has no plans to resign her provincial seat before the next election.  During the Conservative leadership contest, Kevin O'Leary had no plans to run for a seat anytime soon either (for as serious as his leadership bid actually was).  But these kinds of pronouncements are becoming increasingly commonplace, and we should ask ourselves about what kind of message this is sending about how we value our Parliament.

There used to be a time when you had to be a Parliamentarian to win the leadership.  Up until 1919, to be a party leader meant being an MP or Senator, and yes, we did have two Senators who served as Prime Minister in the years following Sir John A. Macdonald's death.  But regardless of their not being MPs at the time, they still had seats in Parliament and were part of the parliamentary caucus.  But it was in 1919 that things started to change in Canada, when the Liberal Party decided to open up the contest to outsiders, and to let the party membership hold a delegated convention to choose that leader William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had lost his seat in the previous two elections and didn't have one when selected.

The practice that followed for the next few decades was that when a party leader was chosen that didn't have a seat was that someone in a "safe seat" would resign and then the new leader would run in a by-election.  Usually that works, but not always just ask John Tory about when he lost a by-election in 2009 after having lost his bid to displace Kathleen Wynne in Don Valley West in the 2008 Ontario election.  But while the safe seat gambit became the compromise to get the leader into Parliament as soon as possible, this was again broken in 1984 when John Turner became prime minister without holding a seat, and didn't plan to immediately run in a by-election.  Instead, nine days after he was sworn in (after Pierre Elliot Trudeau stepped down earlier than planned, which was in exchange for Turner agreeing to a list of patronage appointments that Trudeau had planned to make), Turner called a general election and was soundly defeated, though he did manage to win his seat and stayed on as leader of the opposition for another election.

Why this history matters is because of the ways in which it has contributed to ways in which we have slowly been divorcing party leadership from Parliament in Canada.  The tradition of caucus choosing the leader has remained in the UK until just recently, where their attempts to turn that selection power over to the party membership has wound up with problematic leaders like Jeremy Corbyn with Labour, who has managed to alienate his caucus on a continual basis, but they can't oust him because of Corbyn's dedicated activist base a major problem when the basis of our shared Westminster system is that leaders must have confidence, and he is a leader who has not managed it.  Australia still largely has the caucus selection system, but they too have been trying to move to a more Canadian system after successive back-and-forth spills of their prime ministers over the past decade, and some people desired a process that would garner more stability, forgetting that the rule of unintended consequences for this has long played out in Canada.

By attempting to "democratize" the leadership selection process in this country, we inadvertently created party leaders who no longer felt bound to respect the wishes of their caucus.  Mackenzie King is reputed to have told his caucus during a revolt over a scandal that they had not selected him, and therefore they could not remove him like they normally would.  It broke the accountability that leaders feel toward their caucuses and with the later addition of new rules that mandated party leaders sign off on nomination forms (for perfectly benign reasons at the time), it gave those leaders another tool to keep their members in line.

Leadership contests have become increasingly like presidential primaries in this country, and we're now to the point where we are demanding that leaders produce policy rather than let the party grassroots develop it for themselves.  By selecting leaders who are not in caucus and who don't feel the need to get a seat as soon as possible, we are slowly but surely formalizing this quasi-presidentialization of our political system.  At the same time, it diminishes the roles of MPs to becoming the Greek chorus of that leader's pronouncements, under penalty that they won't have their nomination forms signed again, and it undermines the role of the party grassroots when it comes to determining policy.

When a leadership candidate says that their time is better spent crossing the country to "engage with Canadians" rather than actually doing the job of being a parliamentarian and holding the government to account, it continues the marginalization of our parliament.  And we've even seen this happen when new leaders already have a seat witness when Justin Trudeau was selected as Liberal Party leader, he only showed up in Question Period on days that Stephen Harper did (read: one day a week, maybe two if you were lucky) and spent the rest of the time doing that party outreach.  You could argue that it helped to win him the election by energizing his base, but it also gave Canadians little sense of how he would comport himself in the House of Commons in a leadership position not that performance in the Commons helped Thomas Mulcair, mind you.  Nevertheless, if the signal that a leader sends by not even bothering to get a seat or to show up when they do is that parliament doesn't matter, then we might as well start replacing our MPs with drones that can read their canned speeches into the record and vote as ordered to.

But if we do value parliament, then maybe we need to send a signal to the leaders that it matters that they have a seat, that they show up, that they do their jobs because democracy matters, and that Canada doesn't have a presidential system.