During the lengthy interview with former prime minister Joe Clark on the CBC's West of Centre podcast over the weekend, there were a number of very interesting things that came up for discussion, but something that I find of particular interest was something that largely got overlooked in the write-up, which is what Clark diagnosed as one of the changes in the nature of political parties in this country, and what effect that has on national discourse within the country and it's something that we should be paying attention to.

Around eighteen minutes into the interview, Clark made the following observation:

There's been a quite significant change in the nature of our political parties, and that has had a significant impact on the sense of participation and contentment in the nation. We're accustomed, political scientists in particular, to looking at countries in terms of our formal institutions. One of the realities about political parties when I first began to get involved, was that they were very important informal instruments of reconciliation in the country. They were parties that would, on the one hand, let anybody in they didn't distinguish ideologically. People were quite fierce in their affiliations but they were not closed-minded.

He went on to say that one of the greatest economic debates in our country's history happened within the Liberal Party itself, and pointed to the hard work of Progressive Conservative Party leader Robert Stanfield in defending the Official Languages Act in the parts of the country where it was difficult to do so.

"The parties were determined to not only welcome people, but to reconcile differences," Clark added.  "Its deterioration coincided with the growth of interest groups in the country.  Interest groups have made a lot of profound, positive change a lot of important issues, the rights of women, the environment, others were not getting enough attention until interest groups embraced them, but nonetheless, they have eroded the breadth of national political parties.  People draw their own in."

And this, I think, is starting to narrow in on a definite change within parties that has weakened their ability to be useful vehicles of federalism, and of good governance through bottom-up, grassroots engagement in this country.  But it's only part of the problem.  It also goes hand-in-hand with the way in which parties undermined themselves the more they moved toward American presidential primary-style leadership contests, which centralized power within the leaders' offices and drew it away from the grassroots.

Clark has a very good point about interest groups, quoting Stanfield's warning that political parties are being replaced by interest groups, and citing that political parties reconcile interests, and interest groups insist on them.  Clark cited the environment and women's rights as two successful interest groups that succeeded where parties failed in their traditional approaches to find some kind of consensus among their membership to drive policy, but I think it also speaks to how forces outside of the political system bolstered these interest groups.  After all, if we look at what abysmal civics education we get these days, people are taught that the way to make change is to sign petitions and join these interest groups, rather than joining a party and agitating for change from their grassroots process.  That has become self-reinforcing.

But this also couldn't happen without the power within parties shifting from the grassroots to the leaders, where bottom-up policy development has become top-down, and leadership contests involving full slates of policies that said leader intends to impose on the party.  When your focus is on the leader, the grassroots imperative toward reconciling positions, policies, and even regional differences, withers.

It's also something that former Progressive Conservative Senator Lowell Murray diagnosed in a 2011 interview when he heard about the horrific gong show in how Alberta's PC leadership contests were being run, where people were buying memberships between the first and second ballots.

"Where's the cohesion in that?" Murray asked.  "Where is the commitment?  If the membership of a political party at the constituency level is so fluid and so amorphous, how can that political party play its essential role of acting as an interlocutor of the people of that constituency and the caucus and government in Ottawa or Edmonton, or Toronto, or wherever?  The short answer is that it can't."

This feeds directly into the problem that Clark diagnoses about the ability for parties to act as instruments of reconciliation.  These leaders, sometimes interlopers to the caucus who have never held a seat before, come in without an agenda of reconciling themselves to their own caucus, let alone their positions with those of the grassroots.  Their assumption is that the grassroots voted for them, and therefore their word is law within the party.  And when Clark talks about how there used to be a stronger sense of "us" in a party, and that is now turning into a sense of "us" and "them" both within and outside of the party the ability to engage the country's points of division become strained.

To this end, Clark diagnosed part of the Liberals' problems in engaging with Alberta as part of this loss of an ability to reconcile within its own membership.  In turn, he sees that Alberta's interests are exacerbated when they appear to be ignored (though I would argue that the Liberals have not ignored them, but they simply didn't tell many Albertans the lies they wanted to hear, and those Albertans turned to those who did).

"The Liberal Party in the past, much like the Progressive Conservative Party in the past, used to be much broader than that," Clark said.  "It used to reflect the whole of the country.  It was a reconciling instrument in a country that always needs reconciliation.  I'm quite disappointed about all of the parties in that sense."

He's right in that this loss has impacted our political institutions, but when he said that our political system requires significant changes, he didn't really elaborate as to how.  I think we do need change, but that change has to be getting us to the place where we used to be where leaders were not dominant, where the grassroots could engage, could reconcile, could have broad tents that drew in Canadians to the conversation.  Simply doubling down on how things have devolved will only serve to further stress and strain our system.

Photo Credit: The Chronicle Herald