Reporters were breathless with anticipation last week as the Conservative caucus gathered for the first time post-election to see if there would be a blood-letting, and if Scheer would be deposed by means of Michael Chong's garbage Reform Act. It was never, ever going to be anything other than a fever dream that the caucus would not only vote to give themselves the power to do this, given how they like to flatter themselves with the fantasy that they're a "grassroots party," and even if they did give themselves that power, it would only serve to protect the leader rather than put the fear of his caucus into him. This leaves Scheer safe for the moment, though the party's leadership review in April may yet spell his doom.
From its very inception, the Reform Act was never going to live up to its promises of "empowering" MPs to push back against their leaders, because it only ever treated the symptoms of what is wrong with the centralization of power in our political system, and not the root causes. In fact, it did quite the opposite it entrenched those root causes in such a way that would make it harder to actually tackle them if we want to get an effective re-balancing in our system. Nevertheless, credulous journalists and pundits swallowed Chong's lines, even when Chong himself knew they were false, but bulldozed ahead with them anyway. And when Chong saw an opportunity to make the Act relevant again during the ouster of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus, it only fuelled the belief that the legislation was somehow effective when it never was and never could be.
The simple fact is that Chong's Reform Act actually makes it harder to depose a leader because it imposes a high bar to make it happen. We've seen instances where it only takes one or two outspoken MLAs in some provinces to cause a leader's ouster a classic example was when Alison Redford was premier in Alberta, and it took one of her MLAs to leave and sit as an independent and another one to start publicly expressing his dissatisfaction with her leadership, and she took the hint and resigned before it spread. Chong's Act requires that twenty percent of the caucus present themselves before a vote can be held to oust that leader. In the current Conservative context, that's 25 MPs who would need the intestinal fortitude to put themselves forward to say that they're dissatisfied and be subject to the intimidation, bullying, and harassment from loyalists, or those who feel the need to be seen as loyalists. That offers more protection to any leader, no matter how unpopular particularly when they brandish the fiction that they somehow have the "democratic legitimacy" to be the leader, and shouldn't be pushed out by the "elites" in the caucus.
It is this fiction that is at the root of the problem with problematic leaders in this country, and it's something that Chong's Act merely reinforces. By putting into the Parliament of Canada Act that leaders need to be elected by their parties, Chong has legitimized and codified the bastardized system of leadership selection that Canada has adopted, which is one of the root causes of the centralization of power in this country. This makes it even harder for parties and indeed Canadians to reclaim the way in which our system is supposed to work, where the caucus elects the leader and in turn can fire the leader when they fail. This is the only way to ensure that there is a direct line of accountability that keeps the leaders in check something Chong's Act could never do because it pretends that you can separate selection from removal something that is untenable.
Oh, but what about the grassroots, comes the plaintive wail. Doesn't the current leadership election system "empower" them? That may be the theory or the spin, but because it gives the eventual winner the false sense of "democratic legitimacy," they use that to cow their caucus into doing their bidding and surrendering the power that they have to the leader, and as power concentrates in their offices, they take over the role that the grassroots used to play particularly when it comes to things like policy development. Because leadership elections are now more like American presidential primaries, leadership hopefuls are coming in with fully policy suites of their own, which shouldn't be allowed and yet this is what our media have demanded and have received. That means that it's now the leaders who are setting the party's policy direction rather than the grassroots members, and even when they have policy conventions and come up with a suite of policy resolutions that are supposed to be the basis for the party's election platform, they have since become reduced to mere suggestions that the leader might give a nod to as he or she and their staff draw up the platform based on their own ideas. Absolutely nothing about this has empowered the grassroots rather, it has robbed them of their power while flattering them about the process.
Unless parties and Canadians in general start coming to grips with this reality, we will keep going around in circles, pretending that the grassroots are the ones who hold the ultimate sway when they are merely being used to legitimize the system that creates and incentivizes the very abuses of power that they decry. Nothing in the Reform Act addressed any of this, and only reinforces that system that incentivizes that abuse of power. It's now up to the grassroots to oust Scheer if that's their choice, but even then, it will be entirely dependent on who can organize enough delegates to get to their convention in April. If accountability depends on who is best able to organize, that's not actually a meaningful exercise in how democracy should be run. This is just one more reminder that if we want to restore the proper functioning of our democratic system, we need to break this cycle, restore caucus selection and removal of party leaders, and ensure that accountability rests at the heart of our system.
Photo Credit: CBC News
