Monday morning, in a press availability with his former leader Andrea Horwath of the Ontario NDP, new federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said that his plan is to only be in Ottawa on Wednesdays in order to attend caucus meetings, but that he planned to be on the road the rest of the time. The mind boggles as to how anyone can consider this an acceptable state of affairs for the next two years.
We've already covered off the problems of leaders without seats being a symptom of presidentialization in our political system, and how this particular move is an example of rank hypocrisy from the NDP given Jack Layton's attacks on Michael Ignatieff in 2011 about attending votes and learning how to be a Member of Parliament before asking for a promotion, but it occurs to me that there is a further problem with a constantly absent leader, which is the amount of power that this turns over to staffers in the leader's office, seeing as they are in Ottawa full-time, while Singh is not.
The accumulation of power in the leaders' offices has been growing steadily since we moved away from the system of caucus choosing leaders in this country, and the more the leaders get removed from the bottom-up grassroots policy process, the more insulated they become from the rest of the party. The Liberals, for example, have reformed their party constitution to further centralize power in the leaders' office by now driving policy top-down and justifying it with Big Data. For the NDP, their centralization of power in the leader's office takes different forms.
Part of that centralization is the ability to control staff centrally by means of the quasi-union that their staffers belong to. The inability for individual MPs to manage their own staffers does allow for a greater degree of central control, because they have a centralized management structure in place. As well, since the 2011 election, they clamped down hard over running all of their new MPs through the leader's office and have only slacked off that control in very slight ways ever since. Add to that, the culture of solidarity in the party adds to the lack of public questioning of their own leadership and the unanimous decisions that get reached behind the caucus room doors, means that the power of the leader's office is very effective in maintaining control.
Why I think this becomes an even bigger problem under an absentee leadership by Singh is because it will double down on the ability of staffers to wield the authority in his absence, as they are being given the responsibilities of day-to-day management of the MPs. Sure, Singh might be there for caucus meetings and to do media availabilities on Wednesdays, but can he effectively manage the backroom machinery that is required to keep the wheels churning in the House of Commons. Does this download strategy and planning to other MPs, or does it download it to staffers who then order the caucus around under the aegis of the absent Singh's authority? When you have a party for whom stepping out of line is frowned upon fairly harshly (instances where MPs have voted out of step with the rest of the party have tended to result in some kinds of punishment, such as being taken out of QP rotation or committee assignments for periods of time, and yes, this has happened even to popular MPs in some cases), is it a good thing to have staffers wielding that authority?
Add to this, there is the question of just how much of a role Guy Caron is playing as "parliamentary leader" for the next two years, beyond just leading Question Period every day. How much of this day-to-day management is he being given, and more to the point, how appropriate is it for him to be given this managerial responsibility given that he came in fourth place during the leadership. One has to image that Charlie Angus and Niki Ashton are probably a bit sore over this, given that the most they've been given are their old critic portfolios back Ashton in jobs, Angus solely to focus on the issues of Indigenous youth. Not that you'd ever hear them say that in public culture of solidarity and so on. If Caron is now the public face of the party, both in the House of Commons and at the microphone in the Foyer after QP every day, what does that say about Singh's actual leadership role beyond glad-handing around the country on every day other than Wednesday?
I get that Singh and the party wants to do that thing where they "get out of the Ottawa bubble" and connect with "real" Canadians, but Parliament matters when you lead a parliamentary party. It's more than treating the leadership like a presidential primary where the eventual winner is divorced from the legislature our system demands that leaders are present, and in the case of the opposition, be able to form a government if need be when the current one loses the confidence of the Chamber. Other leaders have managed to both hold seats and be present in Parliament while still being on the road often to reinvigorate the base Justin Trudeau being a good example.
Parliament should not be an inconvenience for leaders, who can simply order their MPs from afar, just as MPs themselves shouldn't solely by ciphers for those same leaders, whether they're in the House or not. Being present and participating in debate is what is supposed to matter in our system, as is voting on legislation, and if you're in opposition, doing the work of holding government to account. Normalizing this absentee leadership for a two-year period as Singh intends is a bad precedent to set, and the fact that nobody is calling this out is problematic. Parliament matters, as does our system of government. Singh's inconvenience in not running in a by-election should not excuse the long-term damage this move is doing to our system.
Photo Credit: Toronto Star
