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rfmcdonaldAnna Mehler Paperny, writing in yesterday's Globe and Mail, picks up on a noteworthy point: the Canadian political party system is centralized, more so than in other Westminister-style parliamentary systems, with party whips bringing their MPs into strict conformity with the party line.
If you ask the people elected to represent you, they will say the biggest obstacles to political engagement are the organisms created to engage the average Canadian in the democratic process – political parties themselves.
“Exit interviews” with 65 former members of Parliament found astonishing accord on what’s wrong with Canada’s government: Almost to a person, they felt stymied by their parties’ machinations – from partisan gamesmanship to opaque candidate nomination processes to the seemingly arbitrary allocation of plum seats in the House of Commons, office space on Parliament Hill and positions on key committees.
“A lot of what we complain about in politics – from the way debates are structured to citizens being engaged to who gets to run and who’s selected as the leader … these are all things in the control of political parties,” said Alison Loat, executive director of Samara Canada, the research body that conducted the interviews.
“It might well be time to ask if we want to revitalize them.”
A report released last week based on the interviews found MPs from across the country and the political spectrum – government and opposition, cabinet members and backbenchers – are dissatisfied and, frankly, as embarrassed as the general public, by a political system hobbled by their own parties. Samara chair Michael Macmillan compared them to “hockey fans who go to watch the Maple Leafs with paper bags over their heads.”
Randy White remembers that feeling. As House leader for the Tories under a Liberal majority, “I saw it first-hand.
“I constantly had to try to find ways to get our people to believe that they were taken seriously … that the system worked.”
