This week has seen the slow departures of more than one political figure, for vastly different reasons, but if you scratch beneath the surface of two notable ones, there is a common thread between them. In this case, I'm talking about former federal Conservative leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch, and Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown. While Leitch opted not to run again in 2019 after being marginalized by the party following her disastrous run, and Brown was forced to resign following allegations of sexual misconduct, the tales of both of their woes has a common cause in the broken way in which we run our leadership campaigns.
In a way, Brown's leadership win of the Ontario party was an inspiration for Leitch, who saw how he managed to out-organise his establishment rival, Christine Elliott, and Leitch made a sincere effort on the ground, selling memberships and trying to replicate Brown's magic. The method that she decided to spur those memberships sales, however, was to tap into the vein of populist xenophobia that was bubbling up from the United States, and she stuck to those guns all the way through in spite of the slings and arrows hurled at her. In the end, she came in sixth place, her reputation in tatters, and she was further denied a critic portfolio under Andrew Scheer's leadership. She damaged not only her own reputation, but that of her party. When her nomination for the 2019 election was contested, she ultimately decided to bow out and not run again.
As for Brown, he was an interloper into the Ontario PC leadership race who didn't have a seat in the Ontario legislature (in fact, he retained his federal seat throughout the run), and he didn't have a history at Queen's Park. While there are some organizational crossovers between the federal and provincial parties, the MPPs in the caucus likely didn't have a sense of what the talk surrounding Brown was. In the hours since the allegations around Brown surfaced, journalists in both Toronto and Ottawa noted that there was a bit of an open secret mentality around these misconduct claims, and that various outlets had been pursuing investigations into them, with CTV getting the story out first.
What each of these incidents show is that the way in which parties conduct leadership contests in Canada is failing us, and it's failing us in more spectacular ways the longer it continues. With each passing iteration, it takes on an increasingly Americanized tone, mimicking some of the worst aspects of their presidential primary system. The Leitch example in particular draws heavily from the American experience of having primary candidates appealing to the far fringes to win the primary before trying to appeal to the centre during an election. When you add that to the fact that it's not leadership candidates who are supposed to be making policy for the party, but rather the party membership itself, it gets all the more perverse, which is why Leitch's candidacy is a textbook example of why the way our system has evolved gave us something monstrous under the rubric of "more democracy."
What Brown's ouster reminds us is that this "more democratic" system of selecting leaders has given us a system of weakened accountability, and a nightmare to replace a problematic leader especially this close to an election. Brown was forced to resign when his staffers abandoned him mere minutes after his disastrous press conference, and several of his caucus members made statements calling for his ouster, but in the hours between his denouncing the allegations and his eventual resignation, it became clear that the party had no mechanism to remove him. This in turn led to speculation about the need for "formal mechanisms" to do so, and I have no doubt that we'll see renewed calls for more Michael Chong-esque Reform Act equivalents, despite the fact that Chong's bill would have actually protected leaders by setting the bar for removal so high that it would provide insulation. As for the current state of the Ontario PC Party, their rules specify that they need to have a membership-driven process, and with four months until an election, that is going to be nigh-impossible (seeing as leadership contests seem to be getting longer and longer), and going into an election with an interim leader would almost certainly be suicidal.
The real lesson with both Brown and Leitch is that, above all, we need to return to a system of caucus selection of leadership. People may grouse that it's "antiquated" or "elitist," but it's accountable, and it keeps the leader in fear of the caucus as opposed to the caucus being made subordinate to a leader who they had no role in selecting, and who lords over them with a "democratic mandate" that abuses authority. With Leitch, there is no way that the caucus would have even considered her candidacy, nor would they be put into a situation where a rogue actor pandered to fringe elements in the base in the hopes of doing an end-run around the party establishment.
With Brown, it's two-fold. On the one hand, had he been in the caucus at that time, there is reason enough to believe that the allegations floating around would have reached caucus colleagues and they would have thought twice about selecting him something that your average rank-and-file party members, and most especially those that Brown himself signed up, wouldn't hear about. At the same time, there would have been a way to both remove him from the leadership and select a replacement within the space of days, so that there could be an actual leader that they can go into an election with who has the caucus behind him or her. It keeps the leader accountable, it empowers the members of that caucus, and it's quick and inexpensive. Their respective parties would almost certainly have been spared the messes that Leitch and Brown created, and Canadian politics would be better off for it.
Photo Credit: National Post
