The Conservative leadership race is back on, re-activated on Wednesday evening by the party's organizing committee. The remaining candidates, who never really did stop their campaigning even if they had to forgo live events in this time of global pandemic, were immediately back to going full-steam ahead in public as opposed to on the down low, now bolstered by a more public appetite to see the back of Andrew Scheer after weeks of an inability to read the public mood during the global pandemic. But as the new leadership deadline has been announced, some of the same nagging questions are back, chief of which is what does it say about the party when this group are its top leadership contenders.
For a refresher, our candidates are:
Peter MacKay Former Cabinet Minister, former leader of the Progressive Conservatives who broke a written promise to his backers in order to join forces with Stephen Harper to form the modern Conservative Party. His opponents deride him as a Red Tory, though he has never actually proven himself to be one. Throughout the race, he has proven tone deaf and captive to a hapless team.
Erin O'Toole One-time late-Harper-era Cabinet minister and current sitting MP, who used to be considered a fairly urbane and stand-up guy but has allied himself with a cadre of shitposters to run his campaign, and now paints himself as a reactionary in order to appeal to the social conservatives for their second-choice ballots, and calling that "True Blue."
Derek Sloan Newbie MP and avowed social conservative whose entry into the race has been to make homophobic and now racist remarks that he refuses to apologize for, instead offering false "context" that contradicts the very statements he made in the first place.
Leslyn Lewis Former failed candidate, lawyer, and the only woman and person of colour in the race, who is anti-choice, considers conversion therapy to be "talk therapy," and has the organizational backing of Campaign Life Coalition.
Of the candidates who haven't made it this far because they could not meet the fundraising or signature goals before the pandemic began to shut life down around the country, sitting MP Marilyn Gladu outed herself as a faithful believer of Trumpism as she claimed in her local paper that the Americans were successfully treating COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine and that we need to re-open the economy because more people die of suicide, cancer and smoking (and then claimed she was misquoted, even after the reporter posted the full audio). Jim Karahalios was disqualified for making Islamophobic allegations against a party organizer, though he has won the right to challenge that disqualification in court.
Over the past week, Sloan's questioning of Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam's loyalties, with the racist undertones that she is an agent of the Chinese government, has put his place in the caucus and possibly the leadership race into question. While people immediately began demanding that Scheer boot him from caucus for it, Scheer doesn't have that power, given that the caucus voted as part of the (garbage) Reform Act that it would be the caucus and not the leader who has the power to kick someone out. There was apparently a move by members of the party's Ontario caucus to demand that Sloan apologize or face that possible expulsion vote, but Sloan only offered a dubious explanation for his comments and did not apologize (apropos given that his slogan is "No apologies"). And media leaks about that demand have certain MPs like Scott Reid wondering whether there are leadership calculations at play, given that a successful candidate would be trying to court the votes that Sloan would otherwise be getting on his first ballot.
This all having been said, I am forced to wonder about the bigger picture, and the way in which our party system has become so degraded in this country, and how the Conservative Party in particular is responding to these perverse incentives. Part of what has demolished the system in Canada is, of course, the way in which we choose leaders. By grassroots members or just party "supporters" voting on the leader has obliterated the distinction between the parliamentary party (meaning the MPs) and the constituency party (meaning the grassroots supporters, who decide on nominations and party policy). Once the parliamentary party leaders started to believe that they had the "democratic legitimacy" that MPs or the constituency party lacked, the parliamentary party leader and his office swallowed up the rest of the party organization. When the Conservatives were formed, the party structure placed the leader in a position where he controlled the national council and Fund which will lead to Scheer's expense scandal. More recently, Justin Trudeau pushed through a complete rewrite of the Liberal Party's constitution that abolished grassroots members entirely in favour of mass centralization in his office.
Why this matters in this context is because this obliteration of the distinct roles between parliamentary and constituency parties solidifies the notion that parties are now personality cults for their leaders. For the Conservatives, where the party is still very much a personality cult of Stephen Harper, and without him at the helm, the organization's identity is drifting. That we have such an uninspiring group of candidates with little intellectual depth to try and helm it, and to brand their own personality over it, gives me pause, particularly because in the case of the two frontrunners, both are taking turns at adopting false personas because their backroom organizers think it will get the votes they think will be necessary to clinch the victory even if it means pandering to some of the worst instincts. If we still had a strong constituency party that would be the bedrock of values and intellect that provided direction to the party, we might avoid a parade of would-be parliamentary leaders vying to build their own cults using party machinery, but as it stands, we are looking at an aimless populist mass, blundering its way across the landscape in search of some message that will stick this time. That's no way to run a democracy.
Photo Credit: CBC News
