It’s far from the craziest thing about the current state of federal politics, or of the Liberal Party of Canada specifically, but it was still amazing to see someone from the party asserting that Liberals intend to head into their woefully ill-timed leadership campaign under the same rules, if they can be so called, that they adopted in 2016.
Not all Liberals agree with this approach, which is at least a sign of life. But they have mere days under the party constitution to alter the rules, and that’s not nearly long enough if they want to get it right. Almost anything might be better, though, from the party’s perspective than the status quo, in which joiners don’t have to pay any money, needn’t be citizens, and can be as young as 14 years old.
With foreign interference in elections top of mind among Canadians, and U.S. president-elect Donald Trump successfully trolling the bejesus out of us with talk of economic ruin and annexation, the very notion of Liberals sticking with gratis memberships for anyone 14 or older who “ordinarily resides in Canada” just seems like yet more wilful self-sabotage. (The party’s requirement to produce two pieces of ID can be met by as little as a student-identification card and public-transit pass, CBC noted this week.)
The good news, perhaps, is that it’s difficult to imagine foreign agents wasting much time and effort trying to influence the result of a leadership race of a doomed party. But then, effective foreign agents will know how to play the long game. Every future prediction of The End of the Federal Liberals has proven false, and so I suspect will the current ones. Who’s going to don the mantle of second party, the NDP? The Greens? I think not.
The gradual but inexorable movement in Westminster parliaments from caucus electing its leader, to caucus sharing the decision with membership (as is the case in the British Labour and Conservative parties) to pure one-member-one-vote (weighted by riding) has never made much sense to me. But removing just about any barriers to membership is a whole other level of nuts — and it’s almost purely an artifact of Trudeaumania II.
“Thousands and thousands of Canadians chose the Liberal party as the political movement they wanted to help shape,” then Treasury Board secretary Scott Brison told reporters in May 2016. “This is the next logical step.”
(That didn’t make any sense at the time, and it makes less sense now).
“The Liberal party is becoming a modern political movement focused on the future and I’m very excited about that,” then party president Anna Gainey, now a Montreal MP, told the Toronto Star.
And what did loyal Liberals get? Not a “movement,” that’s for sure. Movements tend to survive leadership changes without collapsing in a heap. Effectively, Liberals got rule by one man and a very few unelected PMO staffers, insult after insult to members who actually believed in “movements” — electoral reform, reconciliation, even climate change — and now this unholy mess Justin Trudeau has stuck them with.
Trudeau was elected party leader in 2013 under somewhat less freewheeling rules than the current ones, of course, and he would have won under any rules at all — yes, even had he not bloodied Patrick Brazeau in a boxing match. He got 80 per cent of the votes, weighted by riding. Marc Garneau’s PhD, 29 days in space and legitimately sunny ways weren’t even enough to keep the astronaut in the race until voting day.
But the ludicrously open rules championed by Trudeau in 2016 are almost entirely a byproduct of the giddy “we’ll-never-lose-again” mania that followed the 2015 election. Having satisfied all but a few dozen Canadians that this “movement” of Trudeau’s, and he personally, were putrid frauds, the Liberals should want to take a long, hard look at the membership process he ushered in.
Except they can’t take a long hard look, because MPs left it far too late to jettison Trudeau, and now, thanks to Trump, the leadership vacuum is — or at least is perceived by many Canadians as — a national crisis. They could at least take a quick hard look, though. It’s not as though they charged anyone for joining their “movement.” And most of them have clearly jumped ship already.
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