COMMENTARY DEMOCRACY AND PARLIAMENT

FIRING THE BOSS AN MP's RIGHT
(First Published in the National Post, Toronto, August 14, 2002)

What this country needs is a political party leadership selection process that is not insane. And any process that cannot sustain or replace a party leader by, say, a week from next Tuesday, fails the test of sanity.

"Here is my conclusion. I will not run again." That is how Jean Chrétien announces it is time for change. Change in 2004, he means. Joe Clark says he has made up his mind to step down. Maybe in about 2003. The New Democrats, real demons for speed, promise to have their leadership "race" wrapped up before next winter is over. The Alliance took years.

Isn't this supposed to be a fast-paced society? Rick Hansen went around the world in a wheelchair faster than our political parties cope with fundamental issues of leadership and accountability.

Democracy, someone said, is not just about how many people vote. It's about who's accountable to whom. Who's accountable when also matters.

The extraordinary achievement of parliamentary democracies all over the world is the way they can deliver that accountability in the blink of an eye.

From Ireland to Japan, from India to Norway to New Zealand, politicians don't platitudinize about the glories of sheep-like loyalty, or about four-year "mandates," or about leaders' absolute "right" to their own futures. Throughout the parliamentary world, governments are accountable to legislatures, because leaders are accountable to caucuses.

Memo to Canada: This works. The Diefenbakers, Trudeaus, Mulroneys, Chrétiens, the leaders who stay too long, infuriate the public and severely damage their own parties, are unknown in the rest of the parliamentary world.
All over the world, prime ministers and party leaders do get out of step with the voters and start to slip in the polls. They do get tainted by scandals and failures. They do begin to look a little tired and shopworn. The public begins to want a change. Just as in Canada.

But out there, backbenchers start looking about. They hear the murmur of the voters back home. They see their own seats in jeopardy if the boss hangs on.

So after a few days, the leader walks into a caucus meeting and learns he or she is being replaced. The new leader junks the offensive policy, cleans up the messes, delivers change. The party has not had to destroy itself, because succession issues are a normal part of the political process.

Out of the ruthless self-interest of backbenchers worried about saving their own seats comes accountability. When a leader is answerable to MPs, MPs can listen to constituents. The political life of a country can be turned around in a moment. Change does not take years, destroy parties, consume millions or require signing up tens of thousands of meaningless, temporary $10 "members."

Ask Tony Blair. Almost alone among parliamentary democracies, Britain has been sliding into the Canadian style of leadership. Blair was chosen by a mass party vote and he has become almost Canadian in his autocratic dominance of his government and his party.

But parliamentary concepts survive in Britain. This summer, when Blair was ready to join George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, half of Blair's caucus read the polls and declared they would not vote for it. Now Blair is temporizing. Labour MPs said nothing about dumping Blair, but they know the rules. MPs who want influence on policy must hold the power, if only in reserve, to dump the boss.

Without that power, a caucus is just another busload of tourists on Parliament Hill. Which brings us to our Canadian caucuses.

Canadian MPs whine about the "unmitigated hell" they suffer during leadership struggles. They sign -- and later repudiate -- grovelling tributes to doomed leaders and beg to be spared the pain. Why are elected MPs the only people in Canada who have no political opinions of their own? Mostly, I think, because we keep telling them to behave that way.

We constantly declare that leadership conventions and mass party contests are "democratic," and become more so according to how many people have bought votes in them -- though a convention dissolves the moment it picks a leader, leaving him or her accountable to no one.

When Warren Kinsella says five and a half million people voted for Jean Chrétien in the last election, Canadians don't laugh out loud. (Those voters actually elected 170 MPs.) Columnist Norman Spector describes opposition to Jean Chrétien's rule as a "coup d'état" and is taken seriously.

Then there is Jean Chrétien, poor guy. He actually said the other day that the integrity of the prime minister's office is tarnished if the prime minister gets involved in "political power struggles." And the caucus seemed to take him seriously.

We take seriously "parliamentary reform" proposals that say the leader should allow more free votes in Parliament. No one asks what's free about a vote if the leader has to "allow" it.

Paul Martin and Stephen Harper promise reform (Stockwell Day did, too), but top-down parliamentary reform is self-defeating.

MPs would achieve parliamentary reform the moment a caucus showed itself truly able to remove or sustain a party leader by majority vote. They might just do it if we told them we expect them to.

No hurry. A week from Tuesday would do fine.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2002

WHY 'FAIR VOTING' - The "Fair Voting" Crusade Takes Wing
(First published in National Post, Toronto, May 25, 2002)

The "Fair Voting" Crusade Takes Wing

"This is going to be big," said Larry Gordon a year ago. "This one really is going to grow."

A year ago Larry Gordon, executive director of the newborn lobby group Fair Vote Canada, sensed a citizens' movement rising in the country. With it, he believed, would come a cure for the dysfunctions of Canadian politics and the cynicism they provoke in Canadians. Gordon thought an answer was at hand. "Canadians are committed to democracy, it's one of our core social values. The disgruntlement is with the process, and the answer is voting system reform. Everyone knows it."

Everyone knows it? Voting reform may be precisely the wrong answer to the disgruntlement of Canadians.

But from BC to Prince Edward Island, there are signs that the movement for proportional representation or "fair voting" (as its advocates prefer to call it) is indeed on the rise.

In BC, Green Party activists are stumping the province seeking signatures on a petition to launch a "citizen initiative" that might bring PR to the province. In Quebec, an electoral commission has expressed sympathy. An expression of interest from PEI's electoral commission prompted Premier Pat Binns (currently facing a one-member opposition) to muse aloud about a referendum on the subject.

Voting reform draws support from small parties on both left and right (as long as they remain small, at any rate). Women's groups see voting reform putting more women into Parliament. Some Toronto law professors are even asking the Supreme Court to invoke the Charter and simply impose Proportional Representation on a grateful nation.

And there's near consensus among academic and media commentators that Canada has, as one national columnist recently put it, "Earth's most primitive and perverse electoral system," and that the solution is easy and obvious.

Advocates for voting reform all start with the election-night horrors most Canadians know viscerally.

"Look how often a premier or prime minister opposed by three-fifth of the voters forms a majority government. Sometimes they even get to form a majority government after trailing a rival party in the popular vote. Remember the 1993 election? Roughly equal numbers of votes gave the Bloc Québecois 54 seats, Reform 52 seats, and the Conservatives a mere two seats. We are wasting our votes."

Look at the "prime ministerial absolutism," that exists in Canada today, fair-voting advocates urge. It's "elective dictatorship." It's "elective monarchy." "Forty percent of the votes produces sixty percent of the seats, which produces one hundred per cent of the power, which produces four years of unaccountable authority for the leader of the lucky party. It's not fair. It is not fair."

In isolation, reasonable rejoinders arise. ("Fifty-four communities concluded that their best representative was someone affiliated with the Bloc, when only two communities put that trust in someone associated with Brian Mulroney. That should have meant something!") But "It's not fair" amounts to a pretty powerful case.

What would fair-voting's fair alternative be?

Proportional representation promises to deliver simple fairness. According to PEI's commission of experts, it's "any voting system that assures that the overall results are proportional to the votes cast."

But on examination, such assurances of fairness prove neither clear nor simple. Many countries use PR voting systems, but no two count votes the same way. They don't even use the same jargon to describe them. "Fair voting" turns out to be a jungle of acronyms and formulas.

The voting system most favoured by Canadian "fair voters" is one known as "Mixed Member Proportional," or MMP. It's a system that has served Germany for decades. It is hot among PR aficionados as the system that New Zealand adopted in 1996 to replace a Canadian-style 'first past the post' race in each constituency.

Under an MMP system, a Canadian federal election might be fought in about 150 single-member constituencies, each similar to but twice as large as the existing ridings. These would elect 150 MPs much as our present system does. But another 150 Commons seats would be used to match each party's seat allocation to its share of the popular vote, province by province. These "proportional" seats would "correct" the constituency results, to ensure that seat totals matched the popular vote percentage for each party.

In an MMP election, the Liberal Party might still lose most Alberta ridings. But from the 150 "proportional" seats, it could acquire Alberta seats up to its share of the total vote in that province. Meanwhile, the Alliance, vote-rich and riding-poor in Ontario, would acquire additional seats there. The Bloc Québecois would probably lose half its seats as ridings doubled in size. Greens and other special-interest parties might win no individual constituencies, but still appoint several members to seats in the House.

"Fair vote" advocates promise a plan like this would reverse the rapidly declining voter turnouts at elections. They promise it would fill our legislatures with women and minorities, introduce new parties full of fresh ideas, and let cooperation replace partisan bickering in Ottawa. It would cure the extreme centralization of power in the prime minister's office and even take sleazy deal-making out of politics. "PR is the cure for that," I heard at a fair- voting conference. "Compromises will happen, but they will be done in the open."

Myself, I was still back at those hundred and fifty seats to be handed over to the political parties, who would fill up the Commons from lists of their favourites. (MMP, indeed, is often known simply as "list" PR.) The political parties, large and small, would be entitled to reward one hundred and fifty of their loyalists with sinecure appointments to the House of Commons.

Do our legislatures need more loyal party hacks? Surely the Canadian problem is monarchical prime ministers, excessive party discipline, and party leaders who do as they please. Far from providing the answer, PR seems designed to entrench these problems forever.

List-PR gives voters what they want -- but only if they want to give their vote to a political party. It is the fundamental principle of list-PR that voters cannot vote for individuals; they must vote for parties. In a PR system, the parties get to appoint their followers and friends to the. It is parties, not citizens or communities that get proportionally rewarded in the distribution of seats

To control arrogant, out-of-control party leaders, Canada's urgent need is not voting reform, but legislative reform -- of which more later. Yet recent experience elsewhere suggests the list-PR solution -- MPs as clones of the party list -- makes that problem worse.

In the last decade, New Zealand has become the poster-boy nation of "fair-voting." In the stormy 1980s, a New Zealand prime minister under fire in a television debate promised to put voting reform to a referendum. In the referendum, list-PR won a narrow victory. New Zealand had its first general election under PR in 1996.

PR has delivered on some of its promises in New Zealand. Twenty-six parties contested the first PR election in 1996, and six won seats in the house, making a coalition government virtually certain. Voter turnout increased, and the number of women and minorities in the house grew.

But for New Zealanders who expected simple fairness from PR, the election results were a shock. The majority of voters supported a cluster of leftwing parties. But the leader of one minor leftist party, seizing what was probably his only chance ever to sit in a government cabinet, made a back-room deal to support the leading right-wing party. Despite being rejected by most voters, the Conservative Party held on to power.

So much for the transparency and fairness of fair voting.

PR in New Zealand has proved it can be just as perverse as the old system in trying to match voters' wishes to actual results. Support for PR among New Zealanders promptly plummeted - but the beneficiaries of PR, now in power, stonewalled pleas for another referendum that might reform the unpopular new reforms.

The decisive long-term change is New Zealand, however, is the unfettered authority PR has bestowed on parties and party leaders. As in every parliamentary democracy in the world -- except Canada -- New Zealand party caucuses had always hired and fired their leaders. Many New Zealand prime ministers have been dismissed and replaced in mid-term by their own backbenchers. The Canadian problem of unaccountable party leaders hardly existed.

Under PR, however, half of New Zealand's MPs are now party clones, appointed by their parties and expected to toe the party line. The consequences have come fast. This spring, New Zealand passed the "Electoral Integrity Amendment Act." It empowers party leaders not simply to discipline dissident backbenchers but to toss them right out of Parliament. That's any MP in the caucus, not just the party-appointed clone MPs. Instead from controlling their leaders as they always did, New Zealand MPs have become absolutely dependent on their favour.

This is the logical consequence of list PR. When voters must vote for party labels, not representatives, they cannot expect MPs to have minds of their own. Ordinary MPs, who used to throw out sitting prime ministers at the drop of a poll, have been reduced to party mouthpieces. "The move to proportional representation … has consolidated the power of the political parties, and in particular the party leadership," Canadian Grant Huscroft, who has taught law in New Zealand, recently observed in the New Zealand Herald.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has pointed to a nightmare version of the same result in his country. When Peruvians thought Alberto Fujimori was the saviour of the country, they not only elected him President but also filled Congress with Fujimori-list appointees. Then, when the country decided Fujimori was corrupt and tyrannical, there was no one in Congress with authority to stand up to him. The Dutch, by PR voting, have recently filled their legislature with Pim Fortuyn clones - followers without even a leader to direct them.

Does this sound familiar? It sounds weirdly like … Canada. Under PR, New Zealand's party leaders now act much as Canadian party leaders always have. Canada has long been unique in the parliamentary world for its toleration of party leaders who treat their backbenchers as just so many puppets and tally-sticks. Canadian backbenchers have been silenced, punished, tossed out of the party, and denied chances to run again by their party leaders -- as if they were simply the clone MPs that list-PR mass-produces.

What Canada has needed for decades is legislative reform, a way to refashion party discipline and to make party leaders once more answerable to the people's elected representatives. Instead, PR advocates tell us to reform our voting processes - to entrench the authority of parties and party leaders even more securely.

In our present context, legislative reform would require only a new consensus that the party caucuses must be able to discipline their leaders as much as any other caucus member - even to the point of hiring and firing them when necessary.

In a functioning parliamentary democracy, Stockwell Day would never have arisen, and Jean Chrétien would have left the prime ministers office whenever the Liberal caucus favoured some other leader. We need reform. But list PR would send legislatures in the wrong direction - actually reinforcing a Parliament of party clones.

Rick Salutin once observed that people want democracy and often they get voting instead. PR's advocates are convinced the two things are the same - that reforming the voting system is reforming democracy.

Is it possible to reform the genuine excesses of our voting system without sabotaging urgently needed reforms to our impotent legislatures?

No. And yes.

As Nobel Prize laureate Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem showed years ago, it is mathematically impossible to run a majority-rule system with three or more contending groups without distortions in the results. The simple promise of "fair" voting is an illusion.

Still, there are alternatives to list-PR that preserve a role for the individual MP, who represents a constituency rather than a party.

Nick Loenen, a former Social Credit MLA in British Columbia who endured Bill Vander Zalm's erratic one-man rule, and Tom Flanagan, the Alberta political scientist and Alliance eminence grise, advocate different versions of the "transferable vote." Instead of handing their votes over to party lists, voters would rank order, 1,2,3, the individual candidates on a constituency ballot.

But transferable vote systems sacrifice the seeming simplicity of list PR for complex and hardly-transparent formulas that would tally first and second preferences. (Louis Massicotte, a Université de Montréal political scientist who has been teaching electoral systems with great sophistication for twenty years, told me he never speaks about the transferable vote without his notes at hand, for fear of confusing the details.

And transferable voting does few favours for small parties, and it provides no benefit for women or minorities. Scholars and policy wonks may see its value, but the organizational support and funding that underpins the fair-voting movement is likely to remain committed to list-PR. Politically, transferable voting looks like a non-starter.

In the end, making Canadian prime ministers and party leaders accountable will demand changes that have little to do with the voting system.

Canadians must reassess the extra-parliamentary processes by which all Canadian parties select leaders who promptly become accountable to no one. They need to remind party caucuses that in a parliamentary system, assessing, controlling, and even firing their leaders is a caucus's duty, not a betrayal.

Faced with that kind of reform, party leaders might begin to jump on the "fair-voting" bandwagon. Whatever else "fair voting" is, it always seems to be "fair" to party leaders and the party faithful.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2002

John Bruton's fate went unnoted in the Canadian media last week. Mr. Bruton is an Irish politician, and, until Jan. 31, was leader of the opposition Fine Gael party in the Irish parliament, the Dáil. He is a former Taoiseach, or Prime Pinister, and has been in the Dáil since the 1960s; a centrist, not very flamboyant, slowly moving toward the top.
Today Mr. Bruton differs from Jean Chrétien in one big way. He was dumped from the leadership of Fine Gael by his own supporters. His ouster and the election of a successor took just 10 days. What happened to Mr. Bruton is so routine in Irish parliamentary life they have an expression for it: The Heave.

Jean Chrétien, meanwhile, remains calm and unhurried about his future as leader of the Liberal party and Prime Minister of Canada. "In the third year, or something like that, I will decide if I still want to do it or not," he said recently.

I will decide.

Like Brian Mulroney, Pierre Trudeau and John Diefenbaker before him, Mr. Chrétien is almost guaranteed to lead his party for as long as he likes. If he leaves 24 Sussex Drive any time in the next five years, it will probably be due more to Aline Chrétien than Paul Martin.

All Canadian party leaders enjoy that kind of security, even in opposition. Lately some Canadian Alliance members have murmured about their leader's performance, but Stockwell Day dismissed them, calling them "ankle-biters." And with reason: To rid themselves of either Mr. Chrétien or Mr. Day, their parties would have to spend the next two years tearing themselves apart. In Canadian politics, The Heave never happens.

Many Canadians believe the invulnerability of party leaders is a natural consequence of the parliamentary system. Parliamentary systems, we hear, are top-down, executive-dominated. "A parliamentary system allows the leader of a majority government a five-year term as 'an elected dictator,' " Allan Fotheringham wrote a couple of days after the Nov. 27 election. He opined that Canadians stick with the parliamentary system, a colonial relic of our British heritage, only because we do not really believe in democracy.

But there is no longer anything particularly British about the parliamentary system. Countries as remote from Britain as Japan, Norway, Italy and Israel govern themselves through systems much like Canada's. Parliamentary systems are blossoming in the former Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. Ireland and India long ago threw the British out in anti-colonial crusades, but neither country gave up the parliamentary form of government when it achieved statehood.
Around the world, parliamentary systems are anything but colonial -- and they are anything but executive-dominated. The Heave is much more typical of parliamentary leadership around the world than the ironclad security even an inept and unpopular leader can enjoy in Canada.

JAPAN
With the Liberal Democratic Party in power almost without interruption since the Second World War, Japan has a long tradition of one-party rule. But Japanese prime ministers come and go with astonishing rapidity -- eight in the past 10 years alone. The LDP's Yoshiro Mori, who became prime minister less than a year ago, is now on his third desperate attempt to form a Cabinet that will satisfy the party.

"Japan has not had strong prime ministers since the 1950s," says Michael Donnolly, a University of Toronto political scientist who specializes in Japan. Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, an 81-year-old former prime minister, is considered more powerful than Mr. Mori, and Japanese media speculation focuses on how soon his parliamentary faction will replace Mr. Mori with someone else. "The common opinion in Japan now is 'We have got to strengthen executive government, we need to strengthen the prime minister,' " Mr. Donnolly says.

NEW ZEALAND
Secure tenure has not been the experience of New Zealand political leaders, either. In 1997, right-wing Prime Minister Jim Bolger found his popularity slipping midway through his third three-year term. But Mr. Bolger got no chance for a Trudeau-style walk in the sheepfolds to consider his future. He went into a caucus meeting one morning and discovered he was being replaced as prime minister by one of his National party Cabinet ministers, Jenny Shipley.

Ms. Shipley's party lost the general election in 1999. But Helen Clark, New Zealand's new prime minister, also knows the dangers incumbent leaders face. As a Cabinet minister in the 1980s, she saw her prime minister, David Lange, dumped in a heated policy fight with his own finance minister, Roger Douglas.

AUSTRALIA
Australians can hardly remember the last time a successful prime minister left office of his own volition. In 1994, Finance Minister Paul Keating dumped Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Mr. Hawke himself came to power by overthrowing a previous party leader. Australia's current Prime Minister, John Howard, will suffer the same fate if his Liberal party should falter in the run-up to the next election.

In India, Norway, Italy, Thailand, Britain and other parliamentary regimes, the story is the same. Prime ministers and party leaders constantly scramble to shore up support, knowing swift dismissal is likely if they or the party's popularity begin to wobble. The Canadian disease -- arrogant, entrenched leaders free from review for years at a time -- is unknown in the other parliamentary democracies. Parliamentary systems are flexible things, and all adapt to local custom. But worldwide, The Heave rules.

In virtually every parliamentary country in the world, party leaders, including prime ministers, are chosen and dismissed by the parliamentary caucus, not by a party convention or a mass vote of the whole membership.
Parliamentarians in other countries express no admiration for the system most Canadians presume to be democratic. "I would be very reluctant to see us go to a mass party vote," says Austin Deasy, an Irish TD (member of Parliament) who helped spearhead The Heave of his longtime colleague John Bruton in favour of another frontbench member, Michael Noonan. "We [in the caucus] are in a very good position to judge the potential of a leader, from seeing them at close hand and knowing their abilities."

Mr. Deasy stresses giving Mr. Bruton The Heave was a question of electability, driven by party and public opinion. "The only question was who would be our best performer." Under Mr. Bruton, he says, "our rating in the polls was getting steadily worse. There was a lot of murmuring from the party, from the constituency organizations, that they were very unhappy with his leadership."

Parliamentarians in countries that use The Heave argue their power to hire and fire party leaders -- even prime ministers -- is the key that makes a parliamentary system democratic. In November, 1990, British Conservative politician William Hague, then a backbencher, took part in the deposing of Margaret Thatcher and her replacement as party leader and prime minister by John Major.

"In many parliaments of the world," Mr. Hague said soon afterward, "you hear people complaining that individual members of Parliament have far too little influence over the party leadership ... or the party leader is too powerful. In the British system, the fact that the electoral college for the leader is the same as the parliamentary party gives the parliamentary party tremendous influence, even when there isn't a leadership election, because the leader knows these are the people who can throw him or her out."

In 1991, Mr. Hague called the power of MPs to dump a leader, even a prime minister, "the nuclear weapon" of parliamentary government. "All of us who are constituency MPs trying to represent our constituents and our interests in different parts of the country ... know we are strengthened by having this colossal power at our disposal in extreme situations.

"Where party conventions do the choosing of the leader, individual members of Parliament have less influence throughout most of the life of the parliament ... Democracy suffers as a result, because in a parliamentary democracy the ability of members of Parliament to stick up for their constituents, to represent particular points of view, to bring influence to bear upon their party leadership, is very important and fundamental to democracy."

Today Mr. Hague is leader of the British Conservative party. Struggling in the polls, unable to present a strong policy alternative to the New Labour government of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, Mr. Hague himself now lives under the threat his backbenchers may soon feel compelled to use their nuclear weapon -- on him.

Backbenchers who hold the power of The Heave do not have to use it. Last year, British MP Peter Kilfoyle resigned from Mr. Blair's Cabinet because he believed he could do more as a backbencher. "I wanted to be a critical friend of the government, and not be muzzled by Cabinet solidarity," Mr. Kilfoyle says. "I think, over time, the kind of stance I have taken has helped the government to rediscover the social-policy and economic-policy positions we were elected to pursue."

The British Labour party has moved in the Canadian direction by including the party at large, and also the trade unions, in leadership selection, but Mr. Kilfoyle insists, "It would be inconceivable to have a leader who did not have the support of the parliamentary party." Recently, in exchange for that support, left-wing Labour backbenchers have forced changes in pension and minimum-wage policy on a reluctant Cabinet.

In parliamentary systems where leaders answer to backbenchers, fighting policy battles from a place within the government caucus is the norm. In Australia, caucus policy fights usually have a regional dimension. "Factions in the Australian Labour party caucus are highly organized," with their own staffs and membership lists, says political analyst Ian Ward, of the University of Queensland. "Left and right rivalry in the party has been fought out in regional terms, with the Victorians and the people from New South Wales trying to engineer additional support from the other states to give themselves control of the party's federal policy-making processes." In Australia, Preston Manning could have prospered as leader of a regional/ideological faction within a party capable of winning power. No Australian party caucus becomes a reflection of the leader's will alone.

Could Canada become a parliamentary democracy like other parliamentary democracies of the world? Could the Liberal caucus in Ottawa meet next week and do as parliamentary parties routinely do in Ireland, Britain, Japan, India and many other countries: hold a vote on whether to give Mr. Chrétien The Heave?

As a practical matter, putting the party leadership to the test would take only some moral courage and a little organizing for the Liberal caucus or, for that matter, the Canadian Alliance caucus. There is nothing in the Canadian constitution or the rules of Parliament to inhibit them. Indeed, the fundamental principle of parliamentary government -- the executive must have the day-to-day support of a majority of the elected legislators -- presumes the prime minister will answer to the majority caucus, rather than vice-versa. In parliamentary systems, sustaining or dismissing governments between elections is supposed to be the principal job of legislators.

However, parliamentary systems function by custom as well as by law. In Canada, the custom that leaders should not be accountable to caucuses is now almost a century old -- and very deeply entrenched in the national psyche. In 1919, Mackenzie King became the first Canadian party leader selected by a party convention. He soon became the first to tell a parliamentary caucus that, since it did not choose him, he was not answerable to it. Other parties and leaders soon followed.

Today, the idea that elected representatives should actually control their leaders is a taboo with as much power among experts and pundits as in public opinion. Donald Savoie, in his 1999 study of centralized power in Ottawa, Governing From the Centre, declares parliamentary control of leadership to be "unthinkable" in Canada -- and fulfills his own prediction by thinking no more about it.

The Reform Canadian Alliance party has defined democracy almost exclusively in populist and extra-parliamentary terms. Its declaration that last summer's leadership race was the most democratic ever held in Canada, because more party members voted than ever, went entirely unchallenged -- though at the time Mr. Day's leadership was opposed by a clear majority of Reform MPs, each of whom represented a constituency of voters larger than the total number of party members whose votes made Mr. Day their leader last summer. The growing Canadian consensus that democracy means direct democracy and the only truly democratic process is a referendum along party lines leaves little scope for the processes by which parliamentary systems thrive all over the world.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2001

VOTE-BUYING -- The Great Canadian Tradition
(First published in National Post, February 14, 2002, in the midst of a leadership controversy in the governing Liberal party and leadership races in the Canadian Alliance and Ontario Conservative parties)

Some leadership candidates are vote-buying too fast. That seemed to be the complaint Stockwell Day and Allan Rock faced this week.

Day's campaign team was discovered to be wholesaling memberships in the Canadian Alliance party through the Campaign Life organization. Stephen Harper's campaign condemned the maneuvre, and the Alliance tut-tutted its disapproval. Meanwhile, Paul Martin supporters announced that, just to prevent any unseemly rush of would-be Liberals into the fold, the Liberal Party in Ontario would hand out party membership forms one form at a time -- conjuring up images of back-alley scalpers waving bootleg forms, calling, "Who needs Liberals?"


Look closer, and it is all smoke. Anyone wanting to buy or sell a leadership vote - Canadian Alliance, Liberal, Ontario Tory -- will still find party memberships readily available. As the headline on the Liberal Party official website declares, "It's easy to join - just fill in this form."

Leadership rival Stephen Harper condemned Day's marketing tactics, but at the Harper campaign website, a headline counts down the days left "to become a member and vote for Stephen." Team Harper will sign up anyone who can click on a Visa payment approval. It's the same with his rival candidates, and with the Ontario Tory race too. Click on the website of your chosen candidate, and you are in.

In other words, leadership selection is being done pretty much the way it always has been. Canadian political parties offer their memberships at ten dollars a vote - and membership means nothing but a leadership vote. (When was Jean Chrétien ever accountable to the hockey-arena crowd whose votes made him leader in 1990?) Anyone inclined to type in a hundred different names on a website can have still a hundred different memberships. It's marketed as openness, and hailed as democratic, but as disgruntled Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett noted this week, selling votes simply delivers political leadership to those with the most money to buy it.

The Liberal Party does require members to sign on ninety days before a vote. In Ontario, the Tory lists have closed more a month before the balloting begins. But the leadership exchange at the Canadian Alliance remains open and busy. "You have to have your membership before March 1," a vote-seller at Canadian Alliance headquarters in Calgary told me. "Voting starts March 8."

"That's what it is all about," says organizer Rod Love, longtime advisor to Ralph Klein, now supporting Grant Hill in the Alliance race. "Whether it's by website, telemarketing, or person-to-person, however you do it, you have to get those membership forms signed and turned in." Love should know. His old boss Ralph Klein lost on the first ballot when he sought to become premier of Alberta. But a second ballot was scheduled for a week later, and a week of furious vote-selling put Ralph into the premier's office for the next decade.

What about the righteous disapproval showered this week on those who want to buy and sell memberships fast and furious? "That's the fucking hypocrisy of it," says Love. "There is nothing new under the sun. Even back in 1967, even under the old delegate system, Bob Stanfield still had to get out and sell memberships if he wanted to win."

What is extraordinary about the Canadian system of selling political leadership at ten dollars a vote is how completely and unabashedly our parties have reduced political leadership to nothing but vote-buying. A few years ago, old leftie David Orchard scrounged up enough memberships to fall just short of bringing off a hostile takeover of the federal Conservative party. Had the Hells' Angels exerted themselves a week or two ago to purchase several thousand votes in the lacklustre Ontario Tory race, they could have taken control of naming the new premier of Ontario as smoothly as they demolished Mel Lastman.

In Ottawa, practically every Alliance MP who has worked with Stockwell Day has concluded he is impossible as leader. But such judgment will count for nothing if Team Day can move more membership forms than its rivals do. In Canadian politics, ten-dollar votes trump accountability and the judgment of one's peers every time.

"If he [Day] should win by undermining the leadership selection process, he will have turned it into a contemptible struggle," David Bercuson and Barry Cooper harrumphed in the National Post on Wednesday. But it is not the speed or scale of vote-buying that undermines the legitimacy of Canadian leadership races. It is the vote-buying itself. A process that sells our highest political offices at ten dollars a vote is contemptible in itself.

"This is the very worst kind of politics," said Paul Martin last week. "For my part I am fed up with it." Like Bercuson and Cooper, Martin has the right sentiments and the wrong targets. It is not Martin's leadership rivals who are the source of the dirty, corrupt, anti-democratic sleaze that envelops all our political leadership contests. The Canadian leadership selection process itself is corrupt. It tarnishes every politician and every citizen who participates.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2002

'A WAY OF THINKING: Ideas and Practices of Political Leadership in Canada 1900-50
(Organization for the History of Canada Conference Montreal,
October 3-4, 2002 "Canada from 1900 to 1950: A Country comes of Age")

In 1995 the political scientist Alan Cairns wrote an essay entitled "The Constitutional World We Have Lost." Cairns cited an observation of another political scientist, J.R. Mallory, who referred to "the once evocative phrase 'responsible government.'" According to Mallory, responsible government "was once "the pivot around which English-Canadian historians developed the theme of evolving Canadian autonomy and the building of a Canadian nation." Mallory also provided a definition: "Responsible government means majority government, but majority government of a particular sort -- majority rule, not by the electorate, but by a majority of the electorate's representatives." According to Cairns, the world evoked by "responsible government" was the constitutional world that is now lost.

All historical worlds become lost in the end, and historians would have little to do if they did not. Certainly, Cairns was not indulging in regretful nostalgia. He welcomed the transformation in Canadian political culture and declared "constitutional imagination" a greater need than "the historian's expertise." But Cairns was right to draw attention to the fact that at some point in the twentieth century, a whole way of thinking about Canadian politics and governance was washed away and replaced by another way of thinking. The lost world drew on a distinctly Canadian heritage of parliamentary government, in which the achievement of "responsible government" was both a key moment in Canadian political evolution and a long-lived model for appropriate political behaviour.

It is widely accepted today that in the Canadian political system executive power is practically limitless between elections, that prime ministers and premiers with a majority government have a free hand during their "mandate." On a day-to-day basis, we agree, party leaders are accountable to no one. Backbench representatives are understood to be mostly powerless and mostly worthless, and any inability of a leader to control his followers is a sign of scandalous weakness. We more or less concede that to bring down one of these incumbent leaders, no matter how inept or unpopular, the only option available is for a rival virtually to destroy the party along with the party leader, in a process that takes years, cost millions, and mostly involves the massive competitive buying of party memberships. The accountability of executive to legislature and of leader to caucus is generally accepted to have ceased to be relevant to Canadian political life.

We don't even have the language with which to analyze its loss, because it's a question of being responsible to a legislature, and the whole language of legislative sovereignty and parliamentary accountability is the dead language of a lost world, as Cairns noted. Canadians entertain proposals for Senate reform, for electoral reform, for transfers of power to the provinces, and lots of proposals for direct democracy to end-run the whole problem of representation. But on the accountability of executive to legislature, the most radical suggestion we ever hear is the pious plea that party leaders should "allow" their followers more free votes on matters that are not important.

For Canadians interested in legislative responsibility and in parliament as a place for political issues to be brokered and political leadership to be tested, the early years of the twentieth century offer a number of examples worthy of attention. In the early 1900s, several episodes occurred that speak directly to our frustrations with unaccountable governments today. They offer a sharp contrast to our early twenty-first-century ideas about the responsibility of leaders to caucuses and governments to legislatures. That they have never commanded the attention they deserve is more evidence of that shift in worldview Cairns alerts us to.

One stark example of a different relationship between leaders and legislatures from early in the twentieth century was the resignation of Interior Minister Clifford Sifton from the cabinet of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier in 1905. In 1905, Laurier was at the height of his influence, and Sifton was among his most influential ministers. Then Sifton disagreed with the language policy that Laurier proposed for the two new provinces being established that year. Laurier wanted to entrench minority language educational rights in Alberta and Saskatchewan; Sifton wanted to give the new provinces a free hand to remove those rights. Laurier used his prime ministerial authority to impose his views on the government's's legislative proposals while Sifton was away from Ottawa. When Sifton learned what his leader had done, he resigned from cabinet. Sifton never returned to the cabinet table; his career in the executive level of politics was over.

At first glance, this looks like a very familiar kind of prime ministerial autocracy: the prime minister imposing a personal policy choice upon cabinet and caucus and country. But it is worth looking closely at what happened here. After Sifton resigned, Laurier in effect surrendered to the new backbencher. It was Sifton who redrafted new language clauses of the Alberta Act to his own satisfaction, and it was Laurier who abandoned his own preferred text and accepted Sifton's draft.

I have drawn most of the details of this event from D.J. Hall's very useful 1980s biography of Sifton. But Hall's book is also useful as an illustration of how hard it is to recapture the way of thinking of that parliamentary world we have lost. Hall, having documented Sifton's success in defying and changing the policy of a prime minister at the height of his power, goes on to say that Sifton, in leaving cabinet, had been reduced to "the impotence of the backbenches."

It seems clear that it was precisely the opposite. If Sifton had remained a cabinet minister, cabinet solidarity would have obliged him to acquiesce impotently in Laurier's language policy. By going to the backbenches, on the other hand, Sifton was able to organize resistance among the western and Ontario Liberal MPs who did not want to vote for French language rights in the new provinces. With Sifton's inspiration, they made it clear to the prime minister that much of the Liberal caucus would not support Laurier's bill, and they forced changes in it.

Sifton apparently wielded more influence on this piece of Interior Ministry policy as a backbencher than he could have done as Minister of the Interior. That is a perfectly normal occurrence in parliamentary systems, where cabinet ministers are bound by cabinet solidarity, but where party leaders must always be alert to caucus dissidence. It is not, however, a process most of our political historians can any longer recognize in Canadian politics. Like Professor Hall, we cannot think "backbench" without thinking "impotent."

The early twentieth century offers many other examples of the Canadian parliamentary tradition in which Members of Parliament asserted this kind of control over party leaders. Robert Borden's leadership crisis of 1910, just one year before he became prime minister, is another example that speaks directly to our contemporary politics. In 1910, Borden had been opposition leader for ten years, and to many Conservatives he seemed outdated, dull, and a constant loser. The Conservatives foresaw endless defeats under his leadership. A Dump-Borden movement surged up in the Conservative caucus.

In 1910, such challenges did not fester unresolved for years at a time, awaiting the emergence of well-financed rivals to orchestrate a mass party convention and a leadership review vote. Borden agreed that he had to face his critics in caucus immediately. He offered the caucus his resignation and challenged his critics to put someone up against him. Then each side surveyed the party membership across the country. When they did, MPs found messages of support for Borden coming from their ridings and organizers back home. The challengers got the message and backed down. Borden remained leader.

We can see in operation here two principles largely unknown in Canadian parliamentary processes today. One is the clear authority of the caucus to review and replace a party leader. The other is the accountability of MPs to their constituencies back home. Not being entirely beholden to whoever held the party leadership, the MPs of the early twentieth century had latitude to consult their supporters' views in the process of making up their own minds. In this case, such consultation dissuaded most of them from a course of action that had seemed attractive from within the caucus room itself.

Borden became prime minister a year after this test, but he continued to face a feisty, assertive caucus. In 1912 Quebec members of his caucus dissented from his naval policy. In 1918 and 1919, the Nickle resolutions on honours and titles (recently made famous by Conrad Black) were pushed through the House of Commons by the Conservative caucus (with opposition support) against the inclination of Prime Minister Borden and his cabinet. And in 1914, there was a backbench challenge to a key piece of Borden's economic legislation, a $300 million dollar subsidy to the Canadian Northern Railway. The challenge did not go far, and almost the whole Conservative caucus supported Borden's policy. Still, the challenge is of interest, not just because it came from a future prime minister, R. B. Bennett, who was then a backbencher, but also because of the language that Bennett and his allies used.

In the Commons debate on the railroad subsidy bill, Bennett justified his opposition to it by saying, "In this new democracy… there must be room in the party to which I belong for independent spirit and independent thought. I must be permitted to exercise the intelligence that Providence gave me." One of his caucus allies argued in the same vein:

"I am not willing to admit that it is necessary to the solidarity of party government that the crack of the party whip should be so loud and its sting so sharp that individual responsibility should be absolutely abrogated."

We should not take these speeches too seriously; they have a large rhetorical content, and they came from caucus dissidents who were about to lose overwhelmingly. Still, given the history of caucus rebellions against Laurier and Borden, there was indeed precedent for the assertion of backbench authority of the kind Bennett hoped to relaunch here. When Bennett invoked the MP's right of independent thought and speech, even against the policy of his party leadership, he was linking his dissidence to a parliamentary tradition his hearers knew and respected. He explicitly linked the caucus's freedom to overrule its leader to "democracy."

I want to cite two more cases from the politics of this era. One is the selection of Arthur Meighen as Robert Borden's successor as leader of the Conservative party and prime minister in 1920. When Prime Minister Borden retired, he canvassed both his cabinet and the caucus about the succession. The cabinet and the party establishment strongly supported Thomas White as the next leader and the new prime minister. The caucus, however, insisted on Meighen, and the caucus got its way.

The other case comes from provincial politics. It concerns the departure from office of Premier Parent of Quebec in 1905. Simon-Napoleon Parent, a Liberal, had been premier of Quebec since 1900, and in the provincial election of late 1904 his party had won 68 of the 74 seats. This was a situation of one-party dominance similar to what we have seen in recent years with Premiers Frank McKenna and Bernard Lord in New Brunswick and Premier Glen Campbell in British Columbia, situations in which those premiers have enjoyed virtually unlimited authority during their four-year mandates.

But historian Bernard Vigod describes the 1904 Quebec provincial election as "the bitterest and most closely fought one-party election in parliamentary history." Many of the Liberal candidates, in fact, were progressives openly opposed to the conservative and uncharismatic Parent. There were fierce battles for Liberal nominations, and in several constituencies, "independent Liberal" candidates ran against the party standard-bearers. Just a few months after the election, the new caucus, by majority vote, removed Parent from office and replaced him with cabinet minister Lomer Gouin. Parent went off to a patronage job in Ottawa, and Gouin remained premier of Quebec for the next fifteen years.

In 1905, in other words, the legislative caucus had, and was understood to have, the authority to hire and fire leaders. An overwhelming election victory was seen as empowering the party caucus, not the party leader. Ideological faction-fighting within the party caucus was understood to be a sometimes-inescapable aspect of parliamentary democracy.

There are other examples I might cite: the fight within the federal Liberal party over reciprocity in 1911, the Liberal party's split over conscription in 1917, the campaigns of Henri Bourassa and Armand Lavergne against Laurier's policies within the Liberal caucus in the early years of the century. Some of these cases, involving the "national question" of French Canadian survival, make bad test cases, for they generated the kinds of fundamental tensions that might split parties in any circumstances and go far beyond the kinds of factional conflicts and leadership accountability issues that I am suggesting were relatively "normal" Canadian parliamentary processes up to about 1920.

The point is clear enough. Members of Parliament, commentators, and the political public in the era 1900-1920 frequently identified the legitimacy of governments with the accountability of governments to the elected legislators. In practice, that meant Members of Parliament claimed the right to contradict, and even to replace, their own leaders. In exercising that right, the backbenchers spoke the language of responsible government. Often tThey invoked Baldwin and LaFontaine and specifically linked the accountability of leaders to caucuses with the triumph of responsible government in Canada, but they could also invoke the concept of "democracy" in the way Bennett did.

This tradition then came to an end, suddenly and decisively enough to justify Alan Cairns' reference to a lost world. The decisive date in the transformation is easy to spot. It came when Leader of the Opposition and Liberal Party leader Sir Wilfrid Laurier died in the spring of February 1919. The Liberal Party turned a scheduled policy conference into a leadership convention, the first extra-parliamentary mass-membership leadership selection process in Canadian political history. To confer leadership selection upon a mass party convention meant an explicit break with the view that the hiring and firing of party leaders was a defining principle of governmental responsibility and must be the prerogative of elected representatives. As we have seen, when Meighen succeeded Borden in 1920, a year after the Liberal Party convention, the Conservative Party stuck with the established parliamentary process. Thereafter, all parties, federal and provincial, shifted to the mass party extra-parliamentary leadership selection process that has been the Canadian standard ever since. (It remains a uniquely Canadian innovation, largely unknown in the rest of the parliamentary world.)

The consequences of this change can be seen to have taken effect almost immediately. It is true that for about three decades after 1919, MPs and party establishments continued to wield great influence upon leadership conventions. No one became a party leader by running against the caucus and the party establishment until John Diefenbaker did it in 1956. (John Diefenbaker, particularly when in opposition, made much of his reverence for Parliament. But he could not have become Conservative leader if the choice had been up to the caucus. Even when he skillfully marshalled his supporters in caucus against the cabinet revolt of 1962-3, he acknowledged the caucus's right only to support him, not to remove him.)

It was to get rid of Diefenbaker that Dalton Camp and the Conservative party established the other aspect of the leadership-convention process in the early 1960s: namely, that if the mass party membership hired the leader, the mass party membership could also remove and replace the leader. But the impact of extra-parliamentary leadership selection upon Canadian politics can be seen long before Diefenbaker's rise and fall.

The first person to identify the implications of transferring control of the leadership from caucus to convention was, not surprisingly, the first winner of a mass party leadership convention, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Wilfrid Laurier and Robert Borden had lived with restive caucuses that frequently debated whether or not to support the leader's chosen policy. King never really had to concern himself with a dissident caucus. Throughout his long tenure, he had extraordinary freedom to make and change policy, with an eye on the electorate certainly, but without the concern that earlier leaders had had to show for the sensitivities of the parliamentary caucus. King understood he was not answerable to the parliamentary caucus.

More important, perhaps, the caucus itself understood the same thing. As an observer of the process, John Lederle, described it in 1947, Mackenzie King:

placed great stock in the fact that he was selected by a democratic convention and not by the parliamentary caucus. On those rare occasions when the parliamentary caucus [had] begun to growl... he... more than once silenced the parliamentary leaders by emphasizing that he [was] the representative and leader of the party as a whole, not merely of the parliamentary group. What the parliamentary group did not create, it may not destroy.

King had the best of both worlds. To the public, he liked to say, "Parliament will decide." But in parliament, it was clear that, as long as he commanded a majority government, King alone would decide, since parliamentarians no longer had any standing to challenge a leader who was not accountable to them. In theory, King accepted his accountability to the party at large, but the Liberal Party held no further conventions between 1919 and his retirement in 1948. Accountability to party, unlike the older accountability to caucus, was a purely theoretical restraint.

Despite his 1914 protestations of backbencher freedom, R.B. Bennett, the first Conservative party leader chosen by the party at large, also came to approve of the freedom from accountability the new system provided. His abrupt reversal of Conservative Party policy in the "Bennett New Deal" of 1935 was undertaken largely without consultation with his caucus. He, as much as King, now made policy without much concern for the once-mighty backbench, and critics and rivals had to depart and form new parties rather than orchestrate opposition within the caucus. "Democracy" had become firmly associated with the impotence of the caucus. (Indeed, as early as 1920, Liberal backbencher Samuel Jacobs had mocked Arthur Meighen in the House for not being "elected in an open convention, as we consider to be the custom in a democratic country." )

I suggest that 1919 was the key moment in the death of that old, parliamentary "world we have lost." It remains a maxim of Canadian parliamentary theory that the government is responsible to parliament. From the establishment of responsible government in 1847-8 until 1919-20, however, the leader of the government was genuinely responsible to the majority caucus, both for the policies he wished to initiate and for his own continuance in office. Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hypolite LaFontaine, the first two government leaders under responsible government in the Province of Canada, had each proven the rule by leaving office, not when they lost an election, but when as they lost the confidence of their caucuses. In the decades that followed, party leaders in Ottawa and the provinces - Alexander Mackenzie, Mackenzie Bowell, Robert Borden, Simon-Napoleon Parent, to name a few - had to work with, and sometimes surrender to, caucuses confident in their authority to hold their leaders accountable - they would have said "responsible" - to them.

That tradition stopped dead with Mackenzie King, and it has never come back. When this was written in the fall of 2002, it was generally accepted that at least a hundred of the 170 members of the governing Liberal caucus in Ottawa did not support the current leader and prime minister, Jean Chrétien. This was seen as humiliating to the prime minister, but only the prospect of defeat in a mass party leadership race could force him to yield office. Pending the formal mass party vote, his right to remain in office for months or years and to retire at a time exclusively of his own choosing went unchallenged. It remained universally accepted in Canada that only a mass party leadership review could remove a party leader from office. Prime Minister Chrétien took the same position in the face of caucus dissidence as Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker and Stockwell Day. Since 1919-20, all leaders in all parties have denied that the caucus holds any power over their tenure in office, forcing their rivals either to form new parties or to appeal to the party at large, usually from outside Parliament. A party leader's freedom to remain in office until a date of his own choosing - unless the mass membership of the party has been slowly and cumbersomely mustered against him or her - is fundamental to the modern concept of Canadian "parliamentary" democracy.

1919 marked a very important transition in our politics. It was the end of the seventy-five-year tradition of responsible-government ideology as a practical reality in political leadership. Mackenzie King's version of responsibility, in which leaders are immune to caucus control, has displaced the older version, in which leaders were constantly responsible to the people's elected representatives. Since then, our political culture has been unable even to entertain the question as to whether something may have been lost.

Is it too simple to link the whole change, the extinction of a way of thinking about legislatures and accountability in Canadian politics, to a simple technical change in Liberal Party internal politics in 1919? I have not done primary research into how politicians and political thinkers in 1919 interpreted the new leadership-process the Liberal Party inaugurated; indeed, it might be a useful research project for anyone who finds these issues interesting. So far as I can judge from the secondary literature, the thing seems to have been largely a non-issue. It is at least possible, odd though it seems, that by 1919 nobody cared enough about the accountability of leaders to parliamentarians to comment on the end of that tradition.

There is some evidence to that effect in the writings of Eugene Forsey. Forsey is generally considered a parliamentary traditionalist, indeed the keeper of parliamentary traditions in Canada, always ready to unearth an obscure parliamentary precedent from the Rules of Order or from English political history. And Forsey despised and loathed Mackenzie King precisely for King's abuse of Parliament. In his article, "Mr. King and Parliamentary Government," first published in 1951, Forsey went hammer and tongs after King for a whole series of failings in constitutional theory and practice. The article posed one great question about King: "Was his basic constitutional creed really parliamentary democracy or plebiscitary democracy with a thin parliamentary veneer?"

Answering his question, Forsey observed that King consistently acted as if the prime minister was above Parliament, as if he were not confined by cabinet or caucus or by House resolution, and as if he had unlimited authority to dissolve a House of Commons that failed to supported him, even to the point of holding several successive general elections until the voters elected the kind of government the prime minister approved of. Parliament, in Forsey's paraphrase of King's views, "was a mere creature of the cabinet."

The Houses may still meet; laws may still, in name, be enacted by the Crown, the Senate, and the Commons; the ancient pageantry, the time-honoured forms, may still be preserved. But the breath will have departed. Nothing will be left but a lifeless image, a puppet dancing at the end of strings held by the prime minister.

What is striking, however, is that Forsey blamed the new situation of parliament-as-puppet mostly on the sheer evil malignity of Mackenzie King's character. He made no attempt that I can find in his published writings to link King's vast - and in Forsey's view, illegitimate - authority over cabinet, caucus, and legislature to the fact that his selection as leader had been an extra-parliamentary process.

King did, in fact, have a new relationship with his parliamentary caucus, and that status had given him new and unprecedented grounds for claiming that he did not bear the accountability that his predecessors had accepted. If the parliamentary majority could not hold Kinghim to account, then he was not responsible to Parliament in the way all his predecessors had been. Forsey makes no mention of the fact. As early as 1951, the greatest thinker and commentator on parliament and parliamentary processes of his time had lost the ability to speak the dead language from the lost world of responsible government almost as completely almost as anyone else in Canada.

In his essay, Professor Cairns dates the time when the whole Westminster-derived language for discussing, analyzing, and defending parliamentary democracy through the concept of responsible government lost its currency in Canada, to "around the time of Diefenbaker." But an intellectual change preceded the political one. In English Canada at least, mainstream historical interpretations had already shifted decisively away from the old tradition of worshipful attention to the grand traditional themes of constitutional reform, increased liberty, and national independence for Canada.

The most effective historical critic of that older tradition was Donald Creighton. Creighton called the Canadian political history written up to his day "merely lives of Robert Responsible-Government and Francis Responsible-Government and Wilfrid Responsible-Government," and dismissed it all as merely Grit propaganda. Creighton argued it was economics and geography and power that drove Canadian history. The significant political leaders were the ones who understood those forces, not those who engaged in what Creighton called "a highly unreal voyage of discovery for first principles," certainly not those who had campaigned for parliamentary reform.

Dismissive commentary on the nineteenth-century Canadian political tradition has remained practically universal among Canadian historians since Creighton's day. Ask for a statement about confederation from any Canadian historian of the last fifty years, and the first thing they say is, "The Fathers of Confederation were not democrats." I've been making a collection of uses of this phrase, at least in English. Creighton said it, and Arthur Lower said it, and J.M.S. Careless said it. In more recent times, Philip Buckner, from the constitutional history mainstream, has said it. So have Allen Greer and Ian Mackay from the social-history and Marxist perspective. So has even Jack Granatstein, the most articulate advocate of restoring politics to Canadian history. [Add: Essentially, all are making the same point: they disdain all association with the "responsible government" view of parliamentary democracy and, in fact, dismiss its claim to be as a form of democracy.]

It was Creighton's argument was that Canadian history was not about political or constitutional ideas at all. And ever since, there has been consensus among our historians and political scientists that if we are interested in issues of democracy and good government, there is really no Canadian historical tradition to guide us, that we can and must start from scratch to create viable Canadian political traditions. Cairns largely takes that view in "The Constitutional World We Have Lost," but the argument comes most strongly, perhaps, comes from a book by another political scientist, Peter Russell's Constitutional Odyssey, whose significant subtitle "Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People?" expresses the widely-held assumption of Canadian political experts that with regard to the most fundamental aspects of government, Canada has no political traditions to preserve or to build upon.

The history Creighton mocked, that old textbook celebration of responsible government and Canadian progress, was mostly superficial, complacent, bad; I don't want to suggest we should all start reading George Wrong again. But the older tradition was a history that took Canadian political history seriously. It began from the conviction that the moment when the Crown's executive in Canada was made accountable to the elected representatives of the people was a genuinely transforming event in Canadian history. It did have that core belief summarized by J.R. Mallory's definition of responsible government, that democracy was secured through "majority rule not by the electorate, but by a majority of the electorate's representatives," and that sovereignty was rooted in legislatures rather than in the executive branch.

That's the intellectual world Canada has lost.

Something important and lasting occurred in our politics near the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century. There was a rapid, decisive, lasting, and almost-undiscussed transformation, from a strong and vigorously applied tradition that political leaders should be held constantly accountable by the elected representatives in their own party caucuses, to a new tradition in which there was virtually no leadership accountability at all.

This was not just a technical change but also a change of mind and a change of thinking about parliamentary government. So far, it has been almost completely unstudied, almost entirely unexplained, and almost entirely unnoted by political and intellectual historians who share the new worldview and can barely take cognizance of the old one. We have heard complaints from our political historians that political history, the 'national history" of Canada as it has been called, is undervalued and unappreciated. But there might be a larger audience for political history if political historians gave us a version of Canadian political history that addresses the enduring classical issues of government, parliament, and accountability. As long as we remain sure that, whatever our faults, we are surely superior in all respects to Canadians of earlier times, then we won't even have the language we need with which to describe and analyze our ongoing parliamentary paralysis.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2002

ANNUAL JOHN A. MACDONALD LECTURE, 2004
(Hart House, University of Toronto Wednesday January 14, 2004)

I never was a student at the University of Toronto, and I was uncertain for a long time what Hart House was or what its function was. But whenever I come into the building, I am struck by what a tremendous asset to the university community it is, and by the rich variety of functions even I have attended here. Now that I know a little more about the role Hart House plays in the university, and how much you its members do to maintain it, it is a pleasure to be invited to speak in such surroundings and such company.

We are here tonight to commemorate the 189th birthday of John A. Macdonald, politician and statesman, born 11 January 1815. He was not, as it happens, a supporter of this university when its establishment was being debated in the 1840s. He preferred to support a collection of sectarian religious colleges, and he denounced Robert Baldwin's "great godless university, in which it was proposed to teach men everything but that which it most concerned them to know." But he favoured good dinners, and good company, and the commemoration of his country's past, mingled perhaps with some consideration of its present state and even its future course. So I think he might have put aside his disapproval and smiled upon our gathering.

I want tonight to consider Macdonald the politician and Macdonald the parliamentarian. I think perhaps we make too much of John A. Macdonald the father of his country, the visionary statesman, the one peerless leader carrying the country on his solitary understanding of its fate and its future.

On several of the crucial national choices, it was not that way at all. Actually, John A. Macdonald was on the wrong side of some of the vital turning points that built the Canadian nation. In 1847-8, when Canada was on the eve of achieving responsible government, which made the government answerable to the people's elected representatives, he was actually on the other side, preferring to work with appointed officials from Britain over taking the risk that the elected people might not support his side. In 1864, when federalism and a union of the Canadian colonies were in the air, Macdonald opposed the program until the last minute. "If we have a union it must not be a federal one." Until the last moment, he voted against it with a group of resisters, most of whose members became anti-confederates.

But, as I said, Macdonald never stood against the tide long. When responsible government came in 1848, he was one of the first of the tories to see how conservative policies - and politicians -could thrive within the framework of responsible government. In 1864, when George Brown and George-Etienne Cartier built the Ontario-Québec coalition based on federalism (for Québec) and representation by population (for Ontario), Macdonald, who had opposed both, either had to come in or be left out. He came in.

That's why I say it is not always the vision, the master plan for Canada, which we should attribute to John A. Macdonald. What he brought in when he came in, was the skills to get a deal made and ratified. What a great parliamentarian he was.

It is unfashionable today to appreciate parliamentary skills. Most of us look on legislatures these days as useless talking shops, the helpless tools of who ever happens to be in control of the most seats. These days we prefer leadership…. We look with pity on former cabinet ministers like Sheila Copps or Stéphane Dion, who are in the humiliating position of being merely Members of Parliament, now that the patronage of the omnipotent leader shines on them no more. Today leaders and would-be leaders, like Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper, Jack Layton, David Orchard, and Belinda Stronach often prefer to stay out of parliament entirely, unless they can enter as leaders. And of course defeated leaders, from Jean Chrétien to Ernie Eves, shun opposition and leave politics altogether if they cannot have leadership power. Being a mere MP - that's for losers.

It was a bit different in John A. Macdonald's world. Macdonald's renown depends partly on his political longevity. But he had such a long career because he was there in opposition as well as in government, out of power as well as wielding it. He was first elected in 1844, still there in 1891 -- forty-seven of his seventy-six years, and not always in power. He knew an MP could have influence power from the backbench, even from opposition.
So Macdonald's first parliamentary skill is simply experience. He had been in elective politics more than 20 years before confederation, as well as the quarter-century after it. He had the toughness to keep going to gain the experience. Despite his drinking habits, his family woes, the frequent needs of his law practice, and all the burdens of his private life, he stuck it out. He could have had a lucrative law and business career, he could have been a judge, he could have had all manner of Canadian and imperial appointments, but he stuck to his parliamentary career.

With the experience came the expertise. Macdonald was a small town lawyer in his private career, but as an MP he soon mastered the legislative process and the rules of procedure, and as Attorney General he became an expert in constitutional drafting, government administration, and even constitutional law.

But above all, it seems to me, his parliamentary skills, his leadership skills, were personal ones. In a committee, in a legislature, in a smoke-filled backroom, or a public meeting, wherever decisions were actually being hammered out, Macdonald was in his element. I don't find myself thinking of John A. Macdonald when I ponder what this country needs or should be today. But whenever I find myself at a boardroom table, or a meeting of my kids' school parents' council, or any conference session where rival views and positions and ambitions need to be worked out, I do find myself wondering how John A would finesse this situation and get all kinds of disparate people to think that what he wanted was actually what they had wanted all along.

More than anything else, Macdonald had the mind of the master parliamentarian. He once listed his occupation as "cabinet-maker," and he was good at finding the right ministers, but what he was really good at was putting together and preserving majorities - consensus-maker rather than cabinet-maker, you might say.

When David Thompson, an unrepentant old clear grit farmer-politician, returned to the Commons from a long illness in the 1880s, he got brief, distracted greetings from his party leaders, Edward Blake, a fastidious Toronto barrister, and Richard Cartwright, a dour and rigid Kingston financier. "Davey, old man," cried John A. Macdonald a moment later, "I'm glad to see you back." Thompson had never in his life voted with Macdonald, but he admitted it went increasingly against the grain that his enemy was better company than his friends.

Dozens of similar stories testify to Macdonald's persuasive charm. Joseph Rymal, another grit rival, marvelled over Macdonald's ability to cajole his supporters in the house. "Good or bad, able or unable, weak or strong, he wraps them around his finger as you would a thread. I have seen some of them ... denounce the measures of government and say "Well, I can't go that!" and still I have known these gentlemen long enough to believe that they would go it, and after there was a caucus they did go it every time."

A colleague put it more admiringly. "Often when council was perplexed and you had made things smooth and plain, I have thought, 'There are wheels in that man that have never been moved yet,'" said Archibald McLelan, the one-time anti-confederate from Nova Scotia who sat in Macdonald's cabinets for years. For his part, Macdonald once joked that his ideal cabinet would be "all highly respectable parties whom I could sent to the penitentiary if I wished." Years later, beset by ministerial scandals, Macdonald was not amused by an opposition member who pointed out that his cabinet now met all his requirements - except the respectability!

Macdonald was good on the floor of the house too. He was not notably an orator. His great strength was a kind of casually wielded authority. During the confederation debates, an opposition member tried to score a point by tying Macdonald to some procedure in a long-ago debate over a temperance bill. "I don't remember," confessed Macdonald. "I don't generally go for temperance bills," and in the laughter that followed, the house acknowledged his authority to ignore the challenge.

It was the same out on the hustings. He wielded the kind of casual authority that built confidence, even when his other habits should have undermined it. I'm sure you have heard this story but I cannot resist it. Campaigning once, weeks into a ongoing drunk, Macdonald once horrified an election crowd by vomiting on the stage when he got up to answer his opponent -- and then won back them by saying "I don't know how it is, but every time I hear my opponent speak it turns my stomach."

It was not all laughter, however. Macdonald with a majority at his back used it without compunction. Joseph Rymal had been a popular and respected member of parliament for decades when Macdonald gerrymandered his seat out of existence in 1885. "Mr. Speaker, I am not made of such material that I can beg for justice," declared Rymal. " I can ask you in a plain and manly way to do what is right, but I cannot fawn and be a sycophant." Macdonald was unmoved, and his majority voted Rymal's seat into oblivion. When he had that majority behind him, he was tough tough tough.

But note that crucial phrase - "when he had that majority behind him." Macdonald was a great leader, and a great prime minister, because he was also a weak one. What drove him to greatness in parliament was always having to worry about getting, and particularly about keeping, that majority.

It's not like that today. Holding majorities together is an unknown concept in our politics. In an election today, someone wins 50% plus one of the seats in the legislature (generally with much less of the popular vote), and he or she can do anything for the next four or five years. Prime Minister Martin, Premier McGuinty, these people do not need to worry about holding together their majorities. They have one guaranteed until their term is up, and they never need to look over their shoulder.

Macdonald, by contrast, worked in a truly parliamentary context. In a functioning parliament, the unit of power is the caucus, not the leader. In a parliamentary system, it is the majority of the elected representatives of the people who put a government into power and who can put it out, not once every four or five years, but at any moment.

Consider the very nadir of John A. Macdonald's parliamentary career. In 1873 he was forced from office in the Pacific Scandal when the House of Commons rose up to repudiate him and his government. But Macdonald had fought and won a general election just the year before. His conservatives had a majority of 50 seats. Today, in such a scandal, we would need some unelected ethic commissioner to wring his hands over it all. In 1873, however, governments answered to the House. A big bloc of Conservative backbenchers decided they could not stomach Macdonald's behaviour, and they brought his government down rather than accept responsibility for keeping crooks in office.

That kind of repudiation, or the risk of that, was the constant context of Macdonald's parliamentary life. 1885 was the first great crisis of confederation: the CPR was on the brink of collapse; the second NorthWest uprising was about to start, and the whole National Policy was at stake. Macdonald had a majority, but no certainty at all that he could get his program through the Commons. The backbenchers were restless, and Macdonald had to fight every day to keep his majority intact and behind him. It was touch and go - which is why Berton's railroad books, and the film made of them, made such great drama out of the parliamentary battles. The fate of the government and the country really hung on the outcome of those parliamentary maneuvres and confidence votes. In Macdonald's parliaments, putting together a majority was a skill to be reckoned with, because in parliament a leader had to do it every day. His political life depended on being able to do it again and again, issue by issue. Macdonald did it for forty years and more.

Canadian political history provides scores of examples of this kind of testing of parliamentary and public leadership. Alexander Mackenzie, our second prime minister, ceased to be Liberal party leader when his caucus grew tired of him and decided they preferred Edward Blake. Mackenzie Bowell, third short-live prime minister after Macdonald's death in 1891, was removed when cabinet and caucus decided he was going to lose the looming election to Laurier. They dumped him out of the prime minister's office and put in Tupper - not that it staved off Laurier, who swept the country a few weeks later!

You may say I am talking of ancient times, that all this is a relic of a different era. I want to assure you it is not. Consider the situation of Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Great Britain, with a huge majority. His Labor Party has 165 more seats than the combined opposition. Yet over 100 Labour backbenchers voted against Britain's participation in the war in Iraq. And if Tony Blair continues to look wounded and unpopular as the next election grows near, that 100 will swell into a caucus majority, and someone else will be leading the Labor Party. Tony Blair is a powerful force in his party - as powerful as Margaret Thatcher was in hers, and remember what became of her, when her leadership put the backbenchers' re-election prospects into doubt.

It is the same in parliamentary democracies as different and as far-flung as Japan, Ireland, Australia, Israel, and Poland. If the party leader, even the prime minister, loses the confidence of the party caucus, he is gone. This is not merely the parliamentary context that John A Macdonald excelled in. It is the context of all functioning parliamentary democracies.

Which raises the question: can we call Canada a functioning parliamentary democracy?

I think this could be a hopeful time for the revival of parliamentary processes in Canada. There is a great deal of truth in the lament that we have a democratic deficit in Canada today. On the other hand, there is a great fervour for change, a great desire among Canadians for improvement in the ways we govern ourselves. Canadians have the will for better government, though we seem to be struggling for the way.

I must say I don't think much of most of the solutions proposed. I put it to you that the problem is parliamentary; it is in the Commons and the legislature. And that is where the solutions must lie. I don't have much faith in solutions that look elsewhere: that propose rejigging the Senate, of fiddling with the voting system, or rigging the dates of elections, or dreaming up constituent assemblies, or having endless referenda and recall initiatives. The problem is parliamentary. The problem is in the legislature, and can be fixed there

Prime Minister Martin has made much of the democratic deficit. But the only concrete solution he has suggested is what he calls "free votes" That only means, however, that the prime minister will allow free votes when he judges it convenient, and only on issues that are not important to him. What's free about a vote if you have to ask permission from the boss to exercise your freedom? The essence of democracy is accountability, and you can't build accountability from the top down.

I don't look for much change from the new people around the prime minister. Indeed I think there is a more hopeful prospect in the people he has recently demoted. The only criterion for political advancement, under Martin as under Chrétien, is loyalty to the leader. But look at the list of talented, experienced, ambitious, powerful people Martin has stocked the backbenches with. Stephane Dion, Sheila Copps, Martin Cauchon, Don Boudria, John Manley, and on and on. Personally I hope they stay on in parliament. I hope they become independent voices whispering rebellious thoughts in the back of the caucus room. They should be saying, okay, we as the majority caucus support Prime Minister Martin and his policies today. But if we as the majority caucus start to change our mind, Prime Minister Martin will have to go with us. Or get out of the way.

Remember; the majority caucus in any parliament constitutes the majority of the elected representatives of the people. If they cannot have political opinions, and if they cannot act on them, then bluntly, what is a parliament for? In our role as citizens, as constituents, as voters, as commentators, we need to be telling the MPs who represent us that we do expect them to represent us, and not to represent the Prime Minister back to us.
There is other side to that. We need to take a close and skeptical look at the extra-parliamentary process by which party leaders are chosen in Canada today. Canadian leaders treat their caucuses of elected MPs as nobodies because, they say, they are accountable to a different group, to a larger mandate; they represent the party at large. But what mandate is that? Today leadership selection in our political parties is nothing but massive competitive vote buying. We are told that Paul Martin has the support of much of the Liberal caucus even when Jean Chrétien was prime minister, but the caucus never had the courage to say so. Martin is prime minister because he and several hundred thousand of his friends bought party memberships or had bought for them. But now the convention is over, and it will not gather again for years. Who is Mr. Martin (or any of our political leaders) accountable to?

These races go on forever, they cost millions, and they have little or nothing to do with the actual leadership capacities of individual candidates (remember Kim Campbell? Remember Stockwell Day?) Increasingly, the corruption in the process is obvious. The recent RCMP raids at the British Columbia legislature seem to involve mass purchases of Liberal party memberships - possible paid for with laundered drug money. And the process is smelly even when it is not illegal. Packing membership lists just before a leadership vote, with ethnic club members or evangelical congregations or the occupants of Gaspé graveyards, has a long sordid history in Canadian leadership politics. Consider the Ernie Eves example. When Ernie Eves became Ontario Conservative leader and Premier of Ontario, 35, 000 delegates voted. Months later, his campaign made the obligatory financial disclosure. Among its expenses: paying for 16,000 memberships. Why do we listen when politicians tell us that just because lots of votes are cast, leadership races are a triumph of grassroots democracy? We have to recall that just because lots of people vote does not make a process democratic. Democracy is representation and democracy is accountability.

I think Canadians who care about democracy need to consider repudiating the leadership processes that are standard today in all our parties federal and provincial. We should not support party leadership drives. We should not buy memberships or contribute funds whenever a leadership race is underway. If we value parliamentary democracy, we must question the legitimacy of the whole process. At the same time, we should resolve tell our MP that he or she was elected to represent us, not to be a passive tally stick for the party leader to toss in whenever a vote is taken.

John A. Macdonald loved power. He did everything he could to concentrate power in the prime minister's office. He once confronted a backer who wanted a favour but who had previously spoken against a project that was dear to Macdonald. Why should I give you this favour, Macdonald asked? Are you really a loyal supporter and worthy of this reward?

Robert Dickey, the member in question, assured the leader he was indeed a loyal party man. "I shall support you whenever I think you are right," he said.

"Anyone will support me when they think I am right," Macdonald retorted. "What I want is a man that will support me when I am wrong!"

Today of course, party leaders do not need to be John A Macdonald to know that their backbenchers will support them, even when they are wrong. John A. Macdonald might well have enjoyed such unfettered power. But he was a great prime minister, and a great parliamentarian, and someone who deserves to be saluted on his 189th birthday, precisely because he never did have that power. We get great prime ministers when we have great parliaments. I'd like to see one come again.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2004

THE LIBERAL LEADERSHIP "RACE": Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
(I wrote this opinion piece for The Hill Times, the newspaper of Parliament Hill, It was published on March 13, 2006 - but on their website www.thehilltimes.ca it's behind a paywall, for subscribers only. Here's the text.)

Frank McKenna won't run. John Manley won't run. Brian Tobin says no. Allan Rock doesn't want it.

As the Liberal Party prepares to decide on March 18 how its new leader will be chosen, here's an idea for some would-be party leader languishing in obscurity and eager to be distinguished from the rest of the pack. Issue a call to call the whole thing off.

Can the party afford a traditional leadership fight? With a tight minority situation in Parliament, the opposition will have crucial choices to make every day for the next year. But even if the Liberal Party rushes the leadership "race," it will have no leader until November. Otherwise, maybe March 2007.

The Liberal plan will leave the party leaderless for up to a year, so that Liberals can fight each other. They will spend $50 million or more on that fight, while the party is broke and the election clock ticking.

Isn't this whole leadership race thing worth a second thought?

Okay, serious reflection is extremely unlikely. It's not just Liberals who act as if long and insanely expensive mass leadership contests were a constitutional requirement. We are all deeply in thrall to the fantasy that such a contest is inherently democratic and will launch a restorative clash of innovative policy ideas. Who could be against that?

But leadership campaigns are never about a clash of ideas. Leadership campaigns are about picking a winner, so the issue is always who looks like a leader. Controversial policy pronouncements can only alienate potential supporters, so policy discussion is always for the also-rans.

Leadership contests are not about democratic accountability, either. Modern leadership campaigns in Canada are about buying votes, and vote buying is not a democratic process. As former Chrétien aide Peter Donolo noted recently, "A traditional leadership process, with its bare-knuckle tactics, rules-gerrymandering, and virtual vote-buying will only further sully the Liberal brand and reopen dangerous divisions within the party."

Donolo imagines all that can be avoided if the candidates just promise to play nicely. But in every recent leadership campaign, the winning strategy has been to buy up party memberships, often by the tens of thousands. Whoever has the deepest pockets takes the lead. Once a lead is established, the fundraising of rival candidates dries up. Not only is there no clash of ideas, there is rarely a race, just a purchased coronation.

Is there an alternative to a traditional campaign based on the selling of tens of thousands of party memberships? Actually, the political parties of nearly every parliamentary democracy in the world already have a better way.

In the rest of the parliamentary world, MPs choose their leaders - and fire them too, when it comes time for that. A leadership change takes a few days. It costs nothing. Leaders are chosen by a group with expert knowledge of the candidates' skills and policy stances. Even better, the winner is going to be accountable to the elected representatives of the people.

In recent years, Canadians have undertaken a long and passionate discussion about our democratic deficit and how to fix it. We have debated senate reform, electoral reform, recall petitions, citizen initiatives, Citizens' Forums…. Everything, in fact, except how to make our legislatures actually work for the Canadians who elect them.

In the end, legislatures and those who sit in them are the heart and soul of parliamentary democracy. Nothing undermines parliamentary democracy more than leadership that is determined by extra-parliamentary vote-buying contests which produce leaders empowered to ignore the will of the elected MPs. Nothing could redress Canada's democratic deficit more swiftly than restoring the accountability of party leaders to MPs accountable to the voters of Canada.

The 102 Liberals now in the House of Commons earned their seats in legitimate elections open to all Canadian citizens, not by buying and selling "memberships" at ten dollars each. If the democratically-elected MPs are not fit to choose their own leaders, what are they doing in Parliament, and what is Parliament doing?

Canadians rage against the spineless toadying of backbench MPs, particularly those on the government side. We think it is a natural flaw of parliamentary democracy. But other parliamentary democracies don't have this problem. In functioning parliamentary democracies, a leader is just a special kind of caucus member, answerable to the caucus every day. In that situation, every MP is a potential giant-killer and potential kingmaker. Leaders work with the caucus and every MP in it -- because those who don't are likely to become ex-leaders. When MPs have that kind of clout and leaders have that kind of accountability, parliaments can actually play a role in the politics of the nation.

The press loves mass leadership campaigns, because the press loves horserace journalism. Special-interest lobbies love them because nowhere else can money buy power so efficiently. Candidates and party bosses love them. Despite the costs, the delays, and the damage they cause, the prize is just so sweet: absolute authority combined with zero accountability.

There is a choice here. We can have leaders chosen by an extra-parliamentary process and freed of accountability to the representatives the Canadian people have actually elected. Or we can have legislatures that work.

The leader Liberals should be looking for is one with the courage to say that a leadership campaign based on vote-buying is a disaster for parliamentary democracy. The MPs Canada needs are ones who will say the legitimate party leader is whoever the parliamentary party names as leader, not whoever expends the most effort buying memberships.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2006

OUR CANADIAN REPUBLIC
(This essay was first published in The Literary Review of Canada, October 2008.)
The People’s House of Commons: Theories of Democracy in Contention by David E. Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. xii, 217 pp. paperback. ISBN 978-0-8020-9465-0
Our Republican Constitution by Adam Tomkins. Oxford, U.K. and Portland, USA: Hart Publishing, 2005. xii, 156 pp. paperback. ISBN 1-84113-522-4

When I met a group of Australian visitors to Canada recently, they observed that Canada has long flown its own distinctive national flag. Why then, they asked, has Canada not had a national debate on becoming a republic? Australia still uses one of those variants on the Union Jack, but it held a referendum on the monarchy almost a decade ago. True, referenda being what they are, an abolitionist consensus managed to sustain the monarchy in every single Australian state, but still….

I ventured the idea that Canada has been too preoccupied with substantial constitutional wrangles ­ separation, federalism, an entrenched bill of rights ­ to become very much engaged with the fate of Elizabeth II and her progeny. But I might instead have recommended to them a recent essay on the British constitution by the young British scholar Adam Tomkins, professor of public law at the University of Glasgow. Tomkins proudly declares himself a republican, but he advises British constitutional reformers not to pay much attention to the queen. “The narrow question of who should be the head of state” is just not that important.

The good health of our constitutional order, Tomkins insists, hardly depends on “the head of state issue.” He thinks we should all be republicans by now, but he dismisses obsession with the monarchy as “a depressingly thin, diluted account of what the republican alternative has to offer.” The task he recommends, the subject of his essay Our Republican Constitution, is for Britons to pursue the real and serious issues posed by a republican analysis of parliamentary democracy. Monarchy may be the least of the problems.

Britons are republicans? Not, Tomkins hastens to say, George Bush Republicans. Nor IRA republicans. Nor even division-of-powers written-constitution republicans, or even anti-monarchists, necessarily. Tomkins takes us back to the Latin root. Britain’s constitutional order, he declares, is a res publica, a public thing. Republicanism requires popular sovereignty, and popular sovereignty is achieved when the government is constantly accountable to a parliament representing the people, through which the people are able “to contest the doings of government” as Philip Petit puts it. This is not just republican, according to Tomkins. “This is beautiful,” and for two reasons: “because it is democratic” and “because it can actually work.”

Tomkins celebrates the republican principle as expressed in British-style parliamentary democracy as “more suitable and more effective” at defending and implementing popular sovereignty than either the American or European versions of republicanism, and he attacks the fashionable view that we can rely on to courts to restrain governments. He is, in other words, that rare species: a passionate advocate for the parliamentary system. He admits from the start that support for British-style parliamentary democracy is a minority view, now generally associated with complacent Victorian superiority. “We just do not seem to like our constitution very much any more,” Tomkins writes. “In the past thirty years, the British constitution has taken a real beating.”

The Canadian constitution has been taking a beating too. “There was a time when the Parliament at Westminster and its Dominion progeny were celebrated…. Today, Parliamentary government, in Canada and Great Britain, is scorned,” is how David E. Smith, the distinguished Saskatchewan political scientist, begins The People’s House of Commons, his Donner Prize winning essay on the state of parliamentary government in Canada. Since Adam Tomkins has almost nothing to say about the Canadian parliamentary situation and David Smith has a great deal, let’s look at Smith on parliamentary institutions in Canada before taking up Tomkins’s case that we already have in principle the best constitution in the world and need only to apply properly republican values in order to make it fulfill its promise.

Parliament is “scorned” in Canada, David Smith argues, because it has failed “to accommodate in existing constitutional structures attitudes that no longer presume Parliament’s predominance.” Anti-parliamentary attitudes come in two forms, he says. He calls them “constitutional democracy,” which means judicial review of political decision-making, and “electoral democracy,” meaning initiatives, referenda, recall, and all the other techniques of direct rather than representative democracy ­ the full Manning, in effect.

On constitutional democracy, Smith counsels calm. He concludes that we have already accommodated the courts within Canadian democracy. We have always had judicial review, he notes: the British North America Act was litigated from the start, though mostly on federal-provincial issues. The addition of the charter in 1982 greatly extended judicial power to review and revise parliamentary acts, but Smith is not persuaded by the extensive literature that decries the pernicious influence of unelected judges. Mostly Smith is confident that the courts’ new role, given by parliament in the first place, accommodates itself easily into traditional parliamentary democracy. Constitutional democracy “revalues rather than devalues” parliamentary democracy and “intensifies rather than depreciates parliamentary democratic government, ”Smith writes. “It is the role of the court to reinforce values already alive that are central to parliamentary democratic government.”

Smith is more alarmed about the impact of “electoral” or direct democracy. He acknowledges in his title the need for a “People’s” House of Commons, and he agrees that Canadians no longer accept a traditional understanding of parliamentary democracy, which he believes to have been rooted in deference and hierarchy. But he criticizes proposals for electoral democracy as impractical and negative. Changes on the lines of Preston Manning’s Reform Party proposals of the 1990s -- which Smith argues were intended to “unite” the people and parliament and also to separate parliament from the government -- would add uncertainty, make the House weaker, undermine the primacy of the Commons, and “enervate the people’s house.”

Smith wants active representation from an empowered parliament. But at the same time he asserts that parliamentary democracy requires a deferential, hierarchical population. Canada has always had a populist tradition, but the current assault on deference and hierarchy, he says, is “qualitatively different from past experience.” For Smith, representative democracy cannot survive without deference. Canadians’ new rejection of deference, he argues, is part of a “hostility to Parliament that goes beyond mere anti-partisanship.”

The Canadian parliament imagined by David Smith turns out to be radically different from Adam Tomkins’s British parliament. Tomkins evokes parliament as a republican forum rooted in the sovereignty of the people. Smith recognizes that Canadians today insist on the primacy of the people, but he tells us popular sovereignty is a non-starter. In The People’s House of Commons, he repeats over and over that Canadian government is not the people’s government. In Canada in the twenty-first century, he tells us, “authority comes from the crown… not from the people.” He declares that “sovereignty in Canada rests in the crown and not the people,” that “the heart of the constitution… is monarchy,” that we live under a “monarchical constitution that makes no provision for the people,” and that “there is no basis for popular constituent power.” In The People’s House of Commons, we the Canadian people seem not to exist, constitutionally speaking. Smith declares popular sovereignty incompatible with parliamentary government.

After this, what a relief for a Canadian and a democrat to return to Adam Tomkins’s republican vision. Frankly, David Smith undermines not just our motive for defending parliamentary democracy, but our reasons for being Canadian citizens at all. Subjects of the Queen? Seriously? Hell, if that’s the case, Preston Manning wasn’t half radical enough. Canadians will not, do not, and should not accept a constitutional order in which subjection to the Crown is anything more than a ritual formula devoid of significance. Canadians’ “scorn” for the kind of constitution David Smith describes is no failure of “deference,” but robust healthy citizenship, the natural reaction of any politically-aware Canadian.

For anyone who values both parliamentary democracy and popular sovereignty, Adam Tomkins offers reassurance. Tomkins’s assertion that all the “rules of the British constitution are reflective of, indeed based upon, the republican principle of popular sovereignty” applies as much to Canada as to Britain. Clearly we badly need an account of Canadian political practice rooted in this kind of understanding of popular sovereignty, but in the meantime, Tomkins’s examination of British constitutional practice offers clues to where Canadian democrats need to go.

What is Tomkins’s evidence that Britain’s parliamentary constitution, far from being some medieval holdover based on monarchical authority and deferential subjects, is a robust form of democracy? In a provocative survey of British constitutional history and philosophy, he reviews how it became established that a British monarch who subverts the will of the people as expressed by parliament commits treason and will be held accountable, not by the courts but by parliament. Of the last two kings to attempt such a thing, he shows, parliament tried, convicted, and executed Charles I and deposed James II. It is deeply engrained in British constitutional history that the crown should be bound as much as any other citizen by the will of parliament.

Canadians should have the same confidence about our own constitution. Canadians have not put a crowned head on a spike, but as long ago as 1849 a thoroughly undeferential Canadian parliament told a governor general that no matter how much he might dislike the Rebellion Losses Bill (which provided property-loss compensation to rebels as well as to loyalists), it was too damned bad, he had to sign it. Loyalists rioted in the streets and burned the legislative building in Montreal, but the governor general acknowledged legislative sovereignty and signed. Since well before Confederation, in other words, the Canadian head of state has been accountable to the Canadian parliament. The right of the Canadian people to determine their own constitution was then and remains now the basis of our constitutional order. Monarchical formulas survive in both countries, but what Tomkins identifies as the republican order is as secure here as in Britain.

Adam Tomkins is not out merely to defend the constitutional status quo by the ancient orthodoxies of Whig history. A constitution can simultaneously hold republican and monarchical elements, he says, and most of the anti-democratic failings he finds in British government today come from the lingering influence of monarchical principles. The urgent republican agenda, Tomkins argues, is to remove those lingering monarchical and anti-democratic elements that have survived to the detriment of full parliamentary accountability. Tomkins recommends several steps to reform parliamentary democracy in Britain. One is, yes, abolition of the monarchy. Others include the abolition of all forms of crown prerogative and a radical commitment to open government and freedom of information. None involves rights charters or judicial review. (“To move away from a political constitution and toward a legal one is a mistake.”) But from the Canadian perspective, Tomkins’s most interesting target for “republican” scrutiny is party discipline, or what he calls “the problem of party.”

David Smith too is vividly aware that the impotence of backbenchers and the four-year dictatorships of majority prime ministers have undermined Canadians’ faith in the parliamentary system. But Smith defends party discipline as “the essence of parliamentary democracy,” indispensable to the functioning of parliament. Smith implies Canadian proposals to reduce party discipline are rooted in our inability to understand how parliamentary democracy really works. MPs with independent authority are “unimaginable.”

Tomkins can imagine them. Parliamentarians, he declares, must not “allow loyalty to party to obscure or even to obstruct loyalty to Parliament’s constitutional function of holding the government to account.” He therefore proposes, not some mealy-mouthed nostrums about party leaders allowing more “free” votes on insignificant matters, but “the removal of party and of party loyalty from the workings of Parliament.”

Tomkins employs both principles and examples to build his bold case for the pernicious impact of political parties. The principles of parliamentary democracy, he argues, require members of parliament to be able to wield independent authority. When MPs allow parliament to be reduced to monolithic blocs, it is parliamentary accountability itself that they destroy, because a real parliament has two historic functions. One is to put together a government sustained by a coherent majority -- and for that party solidarity is useful and important. But the other vital obligation upon Parliament is that it hold government to account. The familiar confrontation between government and opposition, Tomkins urges, cannot be allowed to obscure the other essential dynamic, the one “between Crown and Parliament, between front bench and back, or between minister and parliamentarian.”

For observers steeped in Canadian parliamentary practice, where party leaders summarily eject from influence and probably from the House itself any MPs who show any hint of disloyalty by either voice or vote, Adam Tomkins’s image of a dynamic relationship between ministers and backbenchers must be almost incomprehensible. Yet Tomkins is at pains to demonstrate that dynamic at work in contemporary Britain. This law professor, scathingly sarcastic about the repeated and almost inevitable failures of British courts and British laws to restrain unconstitutional actions by British governments, offers vivid accounts of British MPs who regularly put their parliamentary authority ahead of their party loyalties to negotiate important changes to laws proposed by headstrong governments.

Tomkins cites the British anti-terrorism law passed in the wake of September 11, 2001. He thinks it is terrible legislation, brutal and nasty and rushed through by a majority government in a climate of panic. But he notes that, even under those circumstances, parliament sought independent testimony on the matter, formed independent judgments, and imposed significant changes on the bill the government wanted. He then describes how Prime Minister Blair’s decision to involve Britain into the Iraq war in 2003 was opposed in parliament by scores of his own backbenchers, who forced a parliamentary vote on the decision and voted against it. Labour backbenchers also secured changes to fundamental aspects of Blair’s health and education policies by threatening to withdraw their support. (Even after that, the bills got barely enough Labour votes to scrape through the house, despite a Labour majority of over 160 seats.) Tomkins argues that such displays of parliamentary independence show that even though Britain’s parliament is hardly what he would want it to be, it can still provide the “political accountability and contestatory democracy” that republican democracy requires.

If British backbenchers and parliamentary committees can negotiate with governments, why can’t it happen here? Tomkins, who would like the independence of British MPs to increase radically, has nothing to say about their ineffectual Canadian counterparts. Smith acknowledges the difference in British practice, but explains it away by noting that the British house is larger and its MPs have safer seats and longer careers. These hardly seem like compelling explanations for the frequent mass defections of British MPs, not on trivial matters but on crucial issues of policy.

In fact, there is one profound structural difference in the situations of British and Canadian MPs. In Britain, as in almost every parliamentary democracy in the world except Canada, MPs hire and fire their party leaders. Party leaders are caucus members, subject to caucus pressures rather like any other member and constantly under threat of removal if substantial factions of MPs lose faith in their leadership or reject their policies. In recent years British parties have begun to drift toward the Canadian example, but it is that underlying power over the survival of the leader (and the naming of a new one) that has given British MPs, and particularly blocs of MPs, the authority to negotiate the terms of their support for their own party’s actions and to maintain the dynamic tension between government and backbench.

In Canada, party leaders have no such accountability. Stephen Harper and Stéphane Dion are party leaders not because any MP or bloc of MPs supports them, but because their supporters across the country purchased more votes (“memberships”) than those of rival candidates in extra-parliamentary leadership contests. In Canada we take it as given that a leadership process based on the buying and selling of thousands of party memberships is “democratic.” But as long as our party leaders are selected by extra-parliamentary processes, they are not accountable to their own caucuses, and it will be impossible for MPs to hold them to account ­ or for government backbenchers to bargain with ministers over legislation and policy. A key mechanism underlying the accountability of government to parliament is lost.

The constitutional implications of leadership processes and their role in undermining parliament never come up in David Smith’s synthesis of current Canadian thought about parliamentary government, and it seems safe to say they simply are not on the agenda of political thought in Canada. But if Adam Tomkins is right that political accountability is vital and parliament is the forum that must provide it, a process that allows parliament to be held hostage to extra-parliamentary forces is not just undemocratic but anti-democratic. If elected representatives cannot influence their own leaders, the whole edifice of popular sovereignty crumbles.

Adam Tomkins declares that political control of government, achieved through parliamentary democracy on the republican, popular-sovereignty model, is beautiful. How urgently do we need such a republican re-imagining of Canadian constitutional practice? When the October 2008 federal election was called, sober, sensible commentators argued that Governor General Michaelle Jean should, on her own initiative, refuse to grant the dissolution Prime Minister Harper sought. (Adam Tomkins would not be surprised that a law intended to put a bridle on government once again proved ineffectual.) One can sympathize with their desperate wish for something to thwart a prime minister’s manipulation of crown prerogative for partisan advantage. But four hundred years of experience should have established that the crown cannot be permitted to take independent measures, ever. A republican understanding of the Canadian constitution would suggest that the decision rested squarely with parliament. If parliament did not want an election, all it needed to do was withdraw confidence from the government and indicate there was an alternate government which it was prepared to support. But Canadian MPs are unlikely to act unless Canadians tell them we expect them to. David Smith’s study does not give much hope that that day is coming soon.

c Christopher Moore Editorial 2008