A story out of CBC Saskatoon over the weekend made me despair for the state of our democracy once more, which is about how partisans of all stripes are flocking to buy Saskatchewan Party memberships in order to vote in the upcoming leadership race to replace Brad Wall. After all, this is not only about who will lead the party, but it's also about having a direct hand in choosing who is going to be the next premier of the province, and who wouldn't want to take part in that? The problem? It's utterly corrosive to our system of democracy in this country.
To be clear, this isn't a Saskatchewan problem. It's been happening for decades, and Alberta perfected it when the Progressive Conservatives were in power over the course of over four decades, and toward the end, it's certainly part of what led to their eventual downfall. We also recently saw a similar phenomenon with the federal Conservative leadership contest, where people who nominally support other parties all took out memberships in order to vote for someone who wasn't Kellie Leitch, but for as much as they tried to channel that toward Michael Chong's bid, it certainly wasn't nearly enough to make an impact. And in the end, its more lasting damage is the way in which people believe our system operates.
Part of these problems stem from the way in which Canadian parties have bastardized the Westminster system when it comes to choosing party leaders, going back to the Liberal Party in 1919, when they opened up the process from the caucus to a delegated membership convention to choose a new leader, settling on William Lyon Mackenzie King. The eventual rupture that the move caused for how accountability works in our political system when King faced a caucus revolt in the face of a scandal, he reminded them that they didn't choose him and thus they could not remove him later widened when one-member-one-vote systems became more widely adopted. When that happened, leaders started to claim a "democratic legitimacy" of thousands of voters who supported him or her directly instead of the handful of caucus members, and thus they were secure in centralizing their power and authority. Accountability in our system has suffered greatly ever since.
But while this particular problem of removing the accountability of leaders is a big enough issue, the process of instant memberships is a much more insidious problem for how our system operates, because it subverts the entire party system. Party memberships are supposed to be the way for ordinary citizens to interface with the process it's how candidates get nominated in order for their names to be on the ballot in the forthcoming election, and it's how party policy gets debated in order for it to be forwarded to a policy convention so that an election platform can be hammered out. What instant memberships for leadership contests do, however, is sever that link between the grassroots and the party, and instead empower a leader who then gets to ignore the entire grassroots process.
Witness how it has become standard for leadership candidates to bring forward policy packages that they run on for their members to confirm, and their victory is seen as tacit support for those policies to be what the party runs on. Where then does the grassroots, bottom-up policy development go? While it may still happen on a pro-forma basis, its validity is largely devalued because policy has become the domain of the leader, and they can and on many occasions, have overridden the will of the membership in order to run the platform development out of their office.
Former Senator Lowell Murray, who was one of the last remaining Progressive Conservatives in the Upper Chamber, made the following trenchant observation shortly after his retirement, in reference to Alberta's instant-membership leadership system, and the loss of cohesion that it engenders:
Where is the commitment? If the membership of a political party at the constituency level is so fluid and so amorphous, how can that party play its essential role of acting as an interlocutor of the people of that constituency and the caucus and government in Ottawa or Edmonton, or Toronto or wherever? The short answer is that it can't, and then the constituency party is just a sitting duck it's completely at the mercy of the well-financed and permanent apparatchiks in the nation's or the provincial capital.
The key word there is interlocutor. Your local constituency association should be the place where you, as the party member, can interface with the caucus, be it federal or provincial, whether or not your riding voted in a member from your party or not. It should be the place where your concerns are funnelled, so that your voice is heard. When the point of memberships is to validate leaders, that role is diminished, if not obliterated.
Leadership contests should not be a quasi-presidential primary system, and yet that's where we are doomed to end up so long as these wrong-headed processes are encouraged, and when they aren't being questioned by experts or the media. And make no mistake there is presidentialization happening, from the centralization of power in the leader's office, to the disconnect between the leader and the caucus in violation of the spirit of the Westminster system, to the fact that we are now seeing leaders like Jagmeet Singh, who no longer feel compelled to run for a seat, and for whom pundits are giving them cover for such a blatantly wrong-headed position in the context of our parliamentary norms. That we empower these wannabe presidents with instant memberships has caused so much damage to the way that our system operates. Instant memberships don't empower citizens as some may claim they merely empower the leaders without any corresponding accountability mechanisms to keep them in check. It's a kind of populism that has eaten away at our institutions, and will be very difficult to walk back from when we realize the damage that's been done.
Photo Credit: Chatelaine