This past week has demonstrated that even as our governments and entire political apparatus have been dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, that some of the underlying awfulness of Canadian democracy hasn't gone away.  The way in which the Liberals sprung the unconstitutional provisions into the emergency aid bill that would have allowed the minister of finance to control taxation without parliamentary approval is a symptom, but so are the kinds of juvenile frat boy antics that are marking the utterances of the two main leadership contenders in the Conservative leadership race.  The through-line is that there is a kind of incestuous cliquishness in most of the political parties in this country, and it is manifesting itself in ways that are doing the country no favours.

One of the prime examples of how the Liberals are managing to feed this cycle of bullshit is the fact that the party in its current iteration has ignored one of the key lessons of governing effectively, which is that you keep your campaign team and your governing team separate.  Justin Trudeau didn't do that when he formed government, and nobody was more evident of this failure than the fact that it was Gerald Butts who went from the guy running the campaign to the guy effectively running the PMO.  It doesn't matter that Butts and Katie Telford had experience in Queen's Park to draw from when it comes to governing rather, it's the fact that when the people running the campaign try to run the government, there is an underlying element of political gamesmanship that never goes away, and that's bad for governing.  In fact, I know of long-time staffers who have been so put off by this constant gamesmanship that they have been making the decision to flee the scene.

This gamesmanship was evident in how the unconstitutional provisions in that emergency bill both presented themselves and were defended by the government both in that it was sprung on the opposition without having been agreed to before like other provisions in the bill were, but also in how it was justified with complaints from the likes of Mélanie Joly who insisted that the parliamentary process was "too cumbersome" to deal with during a pandemic.  Now, don't get me wrong one of the strengths of our system is that we have a strong enough executive that it can be very responsive in times of crisis, but not at the expense of the constitution or the rights and privileges that our parliamentary system fought for (and decapitated a king over).  And the fact that this appears to have been coming from the same group in Bill Morneau's office who apparently took it upon themselves to "totally not pressure" Jody Wilson-Raybould over SNC-Lavalin in the Double-Hyphen Affair smells a lot to me like the heady aroma of the campaign guys worrying more about the next election than they are about governing.

This has also presented itself in the Conservative leadership race, and one of the clearest manifestations is the fact that it's the same dozen or so faces running those races as have run the previous one, and several provincial ones (most especially in Ontario) as well.  The cabal of talent atomizes and re-coalesces at the end, but it's the same core group of people being courted by the various candidates, which is a big reason why Erin O'Toole and Peter MacKay's campaigns have both been strikingly similar and mired in similar kinds of awfulness, each manifesting in slightly different ways but with little daylight between them.  The people running their campaigns are the same people who ran Doug Ford's campaign in Ontario, and Maxime Bernier's campaign during the last contest, to name but a couple.  There is really no new blood in this contest, and when the leadership contest was announced, it was a race as to which candidate could attract these same faces to their camp.

All of the parties have this problem of these small groups that recycle themselves from the federal and provincial levels.  A number of Liberals went from Ottawa to Queen's Park and back again, just as a number of the Harper people dispersed to Ontario and Alberta, and the NDP dispersed to Alberta and BC when their heydays of official opposition federally ended.  The talent pools have become so small and stultified across the country in political life in part because the incentives to bring in talent aren't there.  A big part of that are the ways in which ethics and conflict of interest rules have become so cumbersome that we can't attract reasonable talent into public service at the ministerial level, especially if they're not going to be able to have meaningful work for the next two-to-five years after they leave.  Instead, we get a bunch of twenty-something new graduates who are learning the same lessons from the same small cabals, who pass along the worst aspects of Canadian politics.  What new blood there is gets polluted quickly, and how politics is practiced gets reinforced.

The political backrooms in this country need to be flushed out and hosed down, and as much as I am a believer in institutional memory and continuity, that has more to do with the practice of governing than it does with campaigning, which is one of the reasons why the twain shouldn't mix.  If we want to be serious about governing and not simply carrying on four-year campaign cycles, then we're going to have to make a concerted effort to keep the governing team and the campaigning team separate, to not simply rely on the same six or eight people to run the party and its provincial cousins, and to meaningfully bring in fresh ideas and fresh faces who don't quickly become the Sith apprentices of the dark lords that run the inner circles.  The current gamesmanship nearly derailed our ability to see the government through a global crisis.  It's time to cut that out, and ensure that the grown-ups are doing the work of running the country.

Photo Credit: CBC News