Tragedy in the Commons (22 page)

Democracy relies on citizen engagement to thrive—at the very least, it needs citizens to vote. If they don’t, political leaders lack the legitimacy required to rule. Which leads us to the following question: If MPs are disenchanted with their own parties, then how can we expect regular citizens to engage with those same parties at all? MPs probably benefit more than anyone from party membership. And if they claim the party leadership pushes them away from constructive politics, is it any wonder that so many Canadians can’t even be bothered to cast a vote?

“Canadians believe they need political parties, but they do not like or trust them,” says Kenneth Carty. He believes that Canadian federal politics is populated by “leader-centred, leader-dominated parties” that allow little room for “individual partisans to do much more than show up at the polls on election day.” Nor does the system provide much satisfaction for many MPs, he observes. Once the MPs head off to Ottawa, “they come under the sway of the leadership and take their voting instructions from the parliamentary top of the party, not the grassroots bottom.” This leads to one of the system’s defining tensions: “This separation between the opportunities for citizen participation and the practices of institutional representation proves, ultimately, to be an unsatisfactory way to engage in democratic politics.” Carty points to the unfortunate results: “Some MPs simply leave … and some voters abandon the parties.”

Carty corroborates the implications of the situation the MPs described to us: the parties are at least partially responsible for creating a disenfranchised electorate. Canadian political parties, he says, are “the underdeveloped institutions of a political elite playing a highly personalized game of electoral politics: they are not the instruments of an engaged or even interested citizenry.” And that, Carty says, “shrinks the prospect that the party system might be seen as an effective agency through which citizens might hope to make a contribution to the public life of their society.… The stark reality is that most Canadians no longer like, trust or join national political parties; they do not believe the party system offers them a tool for choosing or influencing their national government.” Add this to the composite picture that our MPs painted of a feckless, even negligent, attitude on the part of the party leadership
toward the party’s most important human resources, the MPs themselves, and you have a recipe for undermining the democratic process in the House of Commons and in Canada as a whole today.

NOW LET
’
S FINISH
the story of Joe Comuzzi. Once he had voted against his party on gay marriage, Comuzzi found it difficult to return to his previous role as a good soldier. Coming off a narrow 2006 federal election win by only 403 votes against a strong NDP competitor, and after a transition from government to opposition for the Liberal Party as well as a transition in Liberal leadership from Comuzzi’s long-time friend Paul Martin to Stéphane Dion, Comuzzi again voted against his party in September 2006, this time on softwood lumber legislation. Then in March 2007 Comuzzi did something that was anathema to a member of the Liberal Party caucus: he indicated to Liberal leader Stéphane Dion that he intended to support the Conservative government’s budget bill. The bill included millions of dollars in research funding that Comuzzi believed would allow a molecular medicine research centre to be built in his Thunder Bay riding, creating three hundred new jobs. “To vote against it, every citizen in Thunder Bay would be tremendously upset with me,” Comuzzi said on
Mike Duffy Live
.

Dion subsequently forced Comuzzi, by then a nineteen-year party veteran, out of the Liberal caucus. “This is not a happy day,” Comuzzi told the
Globe and Mail
, saying that he expected his seat in the House of Commons to move to “someplace where you get a nosebleed.” He joined Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party that June. “This is not an easy decision,”
Comuzzi said before a crowd of Thunder Bay supporters. “You can’t be a member of one group and all of a sudden change.… [But] I found myself increasingly at odds with some of the Liberal Party on a variety of issues.” Later, Comuzzi indicated that he would not seek re-election after the conclusion of the 39th Parliament, which ended its session on September 7, 2008. He had been the MP for Thunder Bay–Superior North for twenty years.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Colluding in Their Servitude

W
e have heard examples of what can happen when an individual MP disagrees with the party line. But what about challenges posed by MPs’ relationship to the party leader? And, more to the point, what are the mechanisms of the leader’s relationship to the party as a whole? What happens when the leader loses the support of many MPs?

That’s what occurred in the spring of 2001, when a group of Canadian Alliance MPs stood in a line before the assembled Ottawa media, cameras flashing. There were eight of them that day: Art Hanger, Chuck Strahl, Gary Lunn, Val Meredith, Jim Gouk, Jim Pankiw, Grant McNally and Jay Hill. They were doing something highly unusual in Canadian politics. The MPs were in the process of proclaiming publicly that they wanted their party leader to step down.

Their leader was Stockwell Day, heading into the final months of his first year at the head of the newly formed Canadian Alliance party. He’d won the leadership in July 2000 with 63 percent of the vote, defeating the founder of the Alliance’s precursor Reform Party, Preston Manning. But Day’s missteps had begun with his first press conference after being elected to
the House of Commons in a by-election for the B.C. riding of Okanagan–Coquihalla. The setting was a beach on the shores of Okanagan Lake, and Day arrived from the water, zooming toward the lectern on a Jet Ski. He stood before the microphones in a wetsuit. As an entrance orchestrated to create a first impression, it was seen as contrived, perhaps a little flashy, and would come to be perceived as Day’s first error of judgment in a list that would soon grow long.

But what
really
triggered the erosion of Day’s support was his performance in his first federal election as leader, in November 2000. The strategy behind Reform’s rebranding into the Canadian Alliance involved a play for electoral relevance east of the Ontario-Manitoba border. It was an attempt to transform the party’s brand from a populist Western protest party into one driven by broad-based national conservatism. Day’s election took place because his comparative youth and athleticism were expected to better appeal to voters in Ontario and Eastern Canada. But support for the former Alberta MLA wavered in caucus after the public revelation that settling a defamation lawsuit against Day had cost the Alberta provincial government almost $800,000. Then came the news that two of his supporter MPs had hired an undercover investigator to look into the affairs of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. The Alliance’s first federal election took place on November 27, 2000. Up against Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, Day’s Alliance won only 66 seats compared to the Liberals’ majority win of 172; the nation’s other candidate to become the national conservative party, Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives, won 12. The 66 seats were enough to make the Alliance the Official Opposition, but the result under Day was far short of what many Alliance members had hoped.

Once the dust settled, rumblings of insurrection escaped Day’s caucus. To calm the dissent, Day called a caucus meeting on May 2, 2001. It ended up lasting four hours, and it didn’t work. “I think for the good of the party, Mr. Day should step down,” said MP Art Hanger, then a Canadian Alliance MP representing the Alberta riding of Calgary Northeast, who had first been elected for Reform in 1993. “My views as I’ve expressed are not just
my
views. They go far beyond me.”

It soon became apparent that some, and perhaps many, of the Alliance MPs agreed with Hanger. “What was not known publicly was that it was a very large number of us behind closed doors in the caucus—in fact, I would say 90 percent of the caucus—wanted our leader to resign,” Jay Hill said in his exit interview. “Finally it got untenable and those of us who were very close to the epicentre of the problems came to the realization we could no longer look [at] ourselves in the mirror. And it’s very difficult to shave in the morning if you can’t stand to look at yourself.”

As May progressed, more MPs went public with their doubts about Day. “I am not prepared to pretend that I have confidence in the leadership,” said Alliance MP Val Meredith. She criticized Stockwell Day for his “lack of judgment and a certain degree of dishonesty coming out of the leadership office.” And then came Jim Gouk: “I cannot in good conscience continue to support Stockwell Day.”

On May 15, 2001 the dissenting MPs held a news conference to publicize their insurrection. Acting as the contingent’s spokesperson was former Alliance Government House Leader Chuck Strahl. “We realize that by speaking out there are implications, including the fact that we will be suspended from
caucus,” Strahl said. “But we are convinced that over the past few months the current leadership has exercised consistently bad judgment, dishonest communications and lack of fidelity to our party’s policies. Since we do not wish to be associated with such practices, we have chosen to speak out today in an effort to bring about change.

“Some will argue that we should just be quiet,” Strahl said. “But it is simply not acceptable for women and men of principle to stand by while the hopes and dreams of our own members and the strong desire of our voters for a positive conservative alternative to the Liberals [are] put at risk.” And: “When loyalty to the leader comes up against loyalty to the principles and policies upon which we were elected, then the decision we make is neither difficult nor optional. You do what is right. You speak out. And you ask others to consider doing the same.”

The dissidents triggered a nationwide conversation on the nature of political loyalty. Such a public revolt against party leadership by a block of sitting MPs was nearly unprecedented in contemporary Canadian politics. Should the MPs have kept their rebellion private, as an in-caucus affair?

So, what does happen when the party leader loses the confidence of the MPs he or she leads? The answer, in Canadian politics, is that in most cases MPs do nothing—or at least, nothing that we, the public, can see. Which begs a question: Why is insurrection so rare in the modern era of Canadian politics? Other parliamentary democracies feature a much more delicate balance of power between caucus and leaders. There are revolts; there are mutinies. In November 1990, in the wake of an unpopular poll tax in the UK, for instance, one
such insurrection concluded the leadership of no less a figure than Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a veteran of eleven years running her country and three election wins. Similarly, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd resigned in 2010 when his deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, executed a coup within Labour Party ranks. Rudd returned the favour, toppling Gillard in June 2013, only to find his party defeated in a general election a few months later.

Why doesn’t this sort of thing happen in Canada? Part of it is structural: unlike the case in Britain or Australia, Canadian party leaders are chosen by the wider party membership, not by MPs directly. But it’s also a reflection of a parliamentary culture that prizes stability. Even with the extreme levels of dissent in the Alliance case, some—and perhaps most—MPs perceived that it was best to do nothing. To keep quiet.

What came through in our interviews with Strahl, Solberg, Hill and Hanger was how painful it was for them to come out publicly with their disagreement with their party leader. Hanger, a former crime scenes investigator on the homicide beat of the Calgary Police Service, a tough guy not averse to conflict, called it the most difficult day of his political career. “I found no satisfaction in that,” Hanger said. “That was a tough time.”

“I will always defend what we did,” said Jay Hill. “I believe it was done with the strongest of principles and integrity. It was extremely difficult. I don’t know whether I would do it again, what we went through and we put our party through and our colleagues and our supporters back home—all that angst and stress and pressure—and our families. I think probably if I had to do it over again I would just quit.”

It’s a remarkable statement. Jay Hill and his fellow MPs displayed courage. Their actions helped trigger a situation that led to the uniting of the country’s conservative movement, which in turn led to the electoral successes of the Conservative Party of Canada. So why the regret?

CANADIAN PARTY LEADERS
today enjoy a remarkable amount of power when measured against their peers in Canadian history, or against leaders in similar parliamentary systems around the world. Consider the prime minister. In 2007 the Irish political scientist Eoin O’Malley evaluated twenty-two of the world’s parliamentary democracies in the context of “prime ministerial influence on policy” through the lens of an expert survey. In such countries as the UK, New Zealand, Israel, Australia and Canada, the survey asked between fifteen and twenty political scientists per country to rate, on a scale from one to nine, the extent to which prime ministers who held the office in the previous twenty years were able to influence policy output. The result? Canadian prime ministers ranked as the most powerful.

The Canadian prime minister did not always exercise such authority. Sir John A. Macdonald behaved more like a first among equals. The responsibilities of his office were such that he didn’t require an office secretary, never mind a hired team of political advisors. In addition, Canada’s first prime minister had to struggle with “loose fish” MPs who wished to stay independent of any political party. During Macdonald’s five-year first term, fellow Tory MPs voted against the Macdonald government’s wishes eighteen times. Macdonald survived and, Canada survived, arguably because the
restrictions of party discipline weren’t so tight 150 years ago. (Historians might note that Macdonald’s superior use of patronage certainly helped him too.)