How Canadian political parties select leaders is bad for democracy, and now we know it's bad for constitutional practice too

Near the turn of the century, Canada’s major political parties cemented a turn away from delegated conventions to ‘one member one vote’ systems of leadership selection. In political science, this came to be viewed as a key feature of the new party system established in 1993, one that featured ‘direct democracy’ or ‘plebiscitary’ approaches to internal party democracy.

Despite labels that arguably frame the change as more democratic, the empowerment of grassroots party members came at the significant expense of further disempowering members of the party caucus, those elected MPs whose primary job in Parliament is to hold governments to account. The move to party conventions and away from caucus leadership selection earlier in the 20th century began the slide away from caucus authority over the leader, but the move to ‘one member one vote’ leadership selection basically eradicated it (under the delegated convention model, elected representatives still had a strong voice as ex officio delegates and in their influence over their riding associations - under the current model they’re reduced to the same vote all party members get).

By establishing a direct link between the leader and party members, Canadian party leaders assume an effective mandate not from their caucus - people elected by millions of Canadians - but from a relatively tiny proportion of the Canadian population. For example, Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership in 2013 with 81,389 member votes. By contrast, 5,556,629 Canadian voters selected Liberal candidates to represent them in Parliament in 2021. The democratic legitimacy of the Liberal caucus as a whole far outweighs the democratic legitimacy of the party leader.

We don’t want to be too simplistic about this. It is important to note that in a lot of ways, MPs often ride the popularity of their leaders during elections, and for most voters the party leader is often one of the key factors in deciding how to vote. That a party leader carries more representational authority than the average MP is in this sense uncontroversial. But when we give too much credence to these sort of voter behavioural considerations and ignore the how our democratic institutions are designed and how our representative democracy is intended to operate, we see why problems like excessive concentration of power in the hands of the Prime Minister prevail, and why aspects of it have gotten worse in the contemporary period.

The effect of party caucuses losing power over time has damaged political accountability. We should not pretend there was a golden age of democracy - I’ve traced academic critiques of excessive prime ministerial power in Canada as far back as 1902. But nor should we put blinders on to the way executive control has further increased over time. In his 1999 book, Donald Savoie argued that cabinet itself had essentially become a mere focus group for the prime minister. But even then it would have been surprising for observers to discover that a mere two decades later there would be multiple accounts, from multiple former cabinet ministers, that cabinet itself was effectively sidelined, or that cabinet members rarely ever met with the prime minister, even by phone, outside of formal cabinet meetings, or were effectively being directed by unelected political staffers in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

This stems from multiple factors, including the continued explosive growth in the size of the PMO and its political staff, who play the role of both political gatekeeper (often against the caucus and even cabinet ministers) and core policymaker (in some ways supplanting a role that should be played by the public service, in other ways co-opting it via the modern relationship between the PMO and PCO).

So while my claim is not that party leadership selection is the only or even a major factor, it is clear that the powerlessness of our party caucuses is exacerbated by their lack of authority over the leader. The best they can do, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, is put vocal pressure on the leader to resign, something that only happens when their electoral fortunes have tanked beyond repair.

Recent events show, however, that this is not just a problem for democracy and accountability but also one for Canadian constitutionalism. The Prime Minister has announced he will be stepping down as Liberal leader, and has prorogued Parliament for over two months so that a new leader (and thus, a new Prime Minister) can be chosen. I have defended the prorogation as legally and constitutionally valid.

But ‘legal’ and ‘constitutional’ are not the same as ideal, or even unproblematic (indeed, the announced legal challenge to the prorogation has nothing to do with any coherent vision of the law or constitutional convention and much more to do with the fact that it feels unfair. It is the epitome of a constitutional challenge based on vibes.)

Thoughtful critics have made the valid complaint that all of this comes at a pretty inopportune time: the opposition is threatening to defeat the government and now Parliament has been sidelined for over two months, and the US President-elect is an authoritarian dunce actively making threats about annexing our country while our sitting PM remains in a state of planned obsolescence.

To that extent, the delay is a problem, not from the perspective of the law or constitutional convention but for broader democratic norms and certainly as a matter of good and honourable constitutional practice.

And I think the problem is not that the capital-C Constitution of Canada doesn’t provide direct solutions or rules for this rather unprecedented political moment, but that we bizarrely find ourselves suddenly beholden to the Constitution of the Liberal Party. Outside of electoral regulation (and especially campaign finance rules) we have steadfastly refused to impose rules on political parties, or ensure protections for party caucuses, treating parties as ‘private organizations’ when they are simultaneously among the most important institutions in our system of governance.

The result is that a tiny percentage of the population has, in a literal sense, more of a direct say about who will be Prime Minister on March 24 than Canadian voters or the representatives they have sent to Ottawa. And there’s no reason our system has to operate like this. In Australia, a new PM would already be in place, selected by his or her party’s caucus. There would be no (false) cries of ‘Canada is leaderless’, no waiting, and our representatives would be in Ottawa, ideally working together on how to respond to the lunatic who is about to retake the Oval Office.

I’d normally end here with a statement that it is time to enact rules to re-empower party caucuses, but we’ve already seen our MPs shy away from the responsibility that should properly be thrust upon them, watering down an already relatively weak ‘Reform Act’ proposal from MP Michael Chong back in 2015, which at least tried to move things in a better direction.

Perhaps this current situation will at least awaken us to the nature of the problem, and the potential for unexpected events to expose just how bad it really is.