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In an interview over the weekend, putative Conservative leadership candidate Erin O'Toole opined that Canada needs fewer "lifers" in politics justifying that he isn't one, and by inference is throwing some shade at other "lifers" such as Andrew Scheer and Pierre Poilievre, who went directly into political life at a young age and haven't really had any experience outside of it (unless you count Scheer's six months as an office clerk in an insurance firm).

"I'm not a career politician," O'Toole stated in the interview.  "I think Canada needs more doers in politics and less lifers, and that's going to be part of the discussion."

O'Toole, however, is dead wrong about this.  At the federal level, Canada is already a country with an unusually low rate of incumbency in the House of Commons.  We already have a very high rate of turnover among MPs, and this in turn means that there is a deficit of institutional memory in the lower chamber, which can make for poorer decision-making and a loss of necessary perspective.  To an extent, we compensated by means of the Senate, where the major parties would have a great deal of their institutional memory invested both for Parliament as a whole, and for the caucuses themselves but with prime minister Justin Trudeau's insistence on banishing senators from his party's caucus, and appointing independent senators with little to no political experience, we are already losing that particular repository as well.

The sentiment behind O'Toole's rhetoric is fairly common in Canada, even if instances of "career politicians" are exceedingly rare in the broader scheme.  There is a particular fetishism for those who have had business success to go into politics in this country and indeed, the Conservatives tried to make a great deal of hay about the fact that Trudeau had never had to make payroll during the 2015 election (which was funny because neither had Stephen Harper, nor did Andrew Scheer when he became leader).  When I recently got a call from a polling firm doing a survey on the Conservative leadership contest, a great many questions were about whether or not I, as a voter, would have a more favourable opinion of someone who had success in business and wealth from said business success than someone who had been in politics a long time, including with some fairly loaded language around preferring an "outsider" with business success to someone with political "baggage."  This is clearly in the minds of those who are trying to determine what the party needs going forward if they want to win the confidence of Canadians.

O'Toole draws on his career in the military as a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force, as well as a time spent doing corporate law, to prove his credentials as not a "lifer," but doesn't seem to put any particular credence to the fact that those may not always be skills that prepares one for a life in politics there are some particular social skills that people who excel at politics may possess that those in other fields simply have a hard time grasping, which is why some particularly brilliant people can have a difficult time in political life something I think we've seen a great deal of in this country.

If we look across the pond to Westminster, there is a greater culture of political "lifers" within their own House of Commons, which has made for a few different dynamics in how their political culture plays out as compared to ours.  Part of this has to do with the fact that they have nearly twice as many seats as we do, which has increased the number of "safe" seats in their Commons, which allows for some members to enjoy long parliamentary careers, and that can lead to some greater independence their backbench rebellions can happen as a result of this assuredness that these MPs will likely still win their seats even if they find themselves punished by their party leaders for stepping out of line.

But the "lifer" culture in Westminster extends beyond just "safe" backbenchers who know they'll never make it into Cabinet and can play the role of being a good parliamentarian regardless it also extends to former ministers.  There is a more accepted culture in Westminster of former ministers hanging around the Commons for years after their time in Cabinet, and becoming subject matter experts for Parliament to draw upon.  We see very little of this happening in Canada far too often, we see former Cabinet ministers (or sometimes even current ones who have been in office for a while and who can see their government getting a bit long in the tooth) decide that it's time to go seek greener pastures, and get their hands on some of that sweet, sweet corporate dough, making the kind of money that is pretty much impossible to do within Canadian politics, particularly given how much ethics rules have tightened up in recent decades.  It also gives one a sense of how little we value people in politics that we nurture the sense of righteous indignation about the salaries that our elected officials make which is often far less than they would make in fields such as law that those former ministers feel compelled to leave politics for money.

Given his apparently dislike of long-time political experience, I have to wonder what this signals for O'Toole's intentions to stay in public life if he doesn't win the Conservative leadership.  I also have to wonder about the attitude that "lifers" can't be "doers," or that somehow the work of a long-time backbencher doesn't have value, particularly if they have been a good parliamentarian and have been playing the role of accountability that they're supposed to.  If anything, I fear that O'Toole's sentiments betray a lack of understanding about how politics should be practiced, and instead focuses on the toxic stereotypes that poisons the well for those who would devote their lives to public service.  There is nothing wrong with a "lifer," and we need more of them in our parliament.

Photo Credit: The Canadian Press

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


"You can make a convincing case that Nigel Farage is the most influential [British] politician of the modern era.  He is responsible for mainstreaming Euroscepticism, bringing about the 2016 referendum and then delivering the vote for Brexit and it's all the more impressive because he never reached the House of Commons."

—Professor Matthew Goodwin speaking with the BBC in November 2019

Only able to muster a disappointing result from the 2019 federal election, the People's party has already been brushed aside and forgotten by most political pundits as a failed experiment of a protest party.

But a quick glance at British politics shows just how foolhardy such an assumption could be.

A wave of nationalist populism has beset much of the world in recent years.  While it hasn't profoundly challenged Canada's federal politics — at least not yet — it would be naïve to presume we're inoculated against such dangerous ideology.

Three factors suggest Canada could fall victim to the scourge of populism.  First, such an ideology has risen to power in places previously believed to be immune.  The presidencies of countries such as Hungary or Brazil, nations with admirable economies but at the periphery of international clout, may not raise many eyebrows.  But panic truly set in when the President of the United States of America, the world's most powerful political office, became the latest domino to tumble in 2016.

Closer to home, Ontario voters shocked the entire country in 2018 by electing a government led by a populist.  Admittedly, such a result emerged from a "hard-change" election in a province that rarely strays from the Liberal-Conservative governing duopoly.  But that a populist could become leader of an ostensibly "big-tent" political party entities thought to be impervious from such inclinations and that such a party could subsequently win a general election was once unthinkable.  Until the day it became stark reality.

A second reason federal politics could fall prey to populism is due to the voting system.  First-past-the-post elections normally act as a robust firewall against populist parties, preventing them from gaining an initial foothold of seats that can be used in subsequent elections to increase their stature.  But that's under normal circumstances, when the population is happy and politics is predictably dull.  During more interesting times, when society churns and politics is characterized by turbulence, Canada's electoral system not only fails to keep out populists but can even them assist them in their quest for public office.

Numerous examples scream out at us: the Bloc Québécois becoming Canada's Official Opposition and the nascent Reform party only narrowly trailing in 1993, despite that the Bloc didn't exist and Reform hadn't won a single seat in 1988.  The Progressives finishing in second place in 1921 as a new party.  Provincially, the United Farmers rising from nothing to a plurality of seats (despite lacking a leader!) and establishing a coalition government in Ontario in 1919, or forming a majority government in their first Albertan election in 1921 and remaining in power for three parliaments.  Social Credit catapulting from no seats to a top finish in B.C. in 1952 (albeit under instant-runoff voting), or propelling from nothing to a whopping 56 (of 63) seats and an overwhelming majority government in Alberta in 1935.

Let's also not forget it was an electoral system that ignores the popular vote that installed Donald Trump as U.S. president, despite that he earned almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.

And a third perhaps most important reason Canada could end up incubating populism is that such politicians need not be elected to public office to acquire tremendous informal power and play a pivotal political role.  Over in the United Kingdom, the person most responsible for seeing the country leave the European Union was a man who repeatedly failed to become a member of Parliament.  Nigel Farage had lost seven attempts at winning a seat in Westminster when voters opted for the Brexit he championed in a 2016 referendum.

It's also worth noting that Farage's UK Independence party (UKIP) had a much less auspicious start to life than the People's party: the former won a paltry 0.3 percent of the vote in its first British general election, while the latter led by Maxime Bernier earned more than five times that amount here in Canada this past autumn.

Should the People's party have performed better?  Perhaps, but that was arguably due to its uninspiring leader.  If the party were to secure the services of an anglophone with a knack for rousing oration, its results could be much improved.

But assuming Canada's electoral system plays its usual role of a bulwark against minor parties and we don't witness a populist landslide, it really doesn't matter whether Bernier was elected with a handful of MPs or not.  Outside the most turbulent of times, political office is not where true power lies for the political fringe.  That's exactly why Nigel Farage, arguably the most powerful person in British politics until recently, didn't bother to contest a seat in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.

Instead, power comes from putting enough pressure on the big-tent parties so as to influence their policies.

Brexit was achieved primarily because UKIP grew gradually over time, to the point that enough members of the Tory caucus threatened to cross the floor and join UKIP if the government didn't hold a referendum on Britain's membership in the European Union.  UKIP's public support had also ballooned: the party appeared sufficiently menacing to cleave off enough of the Conservative vote to hand Labour victory in a general election.  In a panic, Conservative prime minister David Cameron conceded by including a Brexit referendum as a pledge in the party's 2015 election manifesto.  The rest is history.

Britain's Brexit debacle illustrates that fringe political parties excluded from Parliament can still wreak havoc on a country.

Returning our focus to Canada, could the People's party become enough of an adversary to cause the Conservatives to head in a populist policy direction?  It already has.  In December 2018, then-leader Andrew Scheer attacked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when Canada voted at the United Nations in favour of an international migration pact.  Despite that it was merely a non-legally-binding cooperative framework, Scheer attempted to spin the pact as a threat to Canada's sovereignty by suggesting the country would lose control over its borders.  The rhetoric marked a hard-right pivot; a would-be prime minister was peddling a fictitious (and easily debunked) conspiracy theory in an effort to dog-whistle to the discomposed far-right and to hoodwink what he hoped was a gullible electorate.

And that startling shift in tone was the result of a meek challenge by Bernier.

Now, imagine if someone similar to Kevin O'Leary ends up in control of the People's party.  Or perhaps a dangerous demagogue.  How far to the right would the Conservatives dare wander to ward off a threat from fringe opposition?

What if the People's party threatens to become the federal voice of Albertan and Saskatchewan alienation, by fanning the flames of secessionism?

And if Ontario voters were willing to elect Doug Ford's party to provincial government in 2018, would the Canadian electorate if sufficiently jaded by Trudeau entertain pushing to power a Conservative party that has veered wildly to the political right?

As Maxime Bernier and the People's party withdraw post-election to lick their wounds and plot for the future, how willing the Conservatives would be to mimic the ideology of a flourishing populist party should be on all Canadians' minds.

Photo Credit: CTV News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.