Posts Tagged ‘political parties’

BC 2013 Political Party Platform Comparisons

Many people are now looking for a site comparing the platforms of the political parties contesting the upcoming British Columbia election to be held on 14 May 2013.

This blog cannot engage in a discussion of the policies of political parties, either at the provincial or federal level. However, as it has done in the past, in the case of both federal and other provincial and territorial elections, it can refer you to other sites that can do that. The list will be updated as needed.

BC political party platform comparisons:

Other useful election-related links:

Elections BC

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The real problem is MP irrelevancy

Recently, Canada’s federal Official Opposition proposed measures for improving decorum in the House of Commons. These measures would require changes to the Standing Orders in order to increase the Speaker’s authority to discipline unruly MPs:

who use harassment, threats, personal attacks, or extreme misrepresentation of facts or position in the House, particularly regarding Statements by Members and Oral Questions, including:

i.  Revoking questions during Oral Questions from parties whose Members have been disruptive
ii. Issuing a warning to Members for a first offense
iii. Suspending Members from the service of the House for one sitting day for a second offense; five days for a third offense; and twenty days for a fourth offense
iv. Suspending Members’ sessional allowance for the duration of their suspension from the service of the House

Reaction has been varied. Sun Media’s David Akin pointed out that new rules aren’t required – if MPs want to stop this sort of behaviour, they can simply stop it. He also suggests that if the rules governing broadcasting of House proceedings were relaxed to allow reaction shots, that too might lead MPs to think twice about behaving boorishly:

The rules require that whenever the Speaker stands, the cameras may only show him. When he is not standing, the cameras may only show the MP who is speaking.

If TV networks – Sun News Network, CPAC, CTV, CBC, etc. – were able to control the cameras, we would certainly zoom in on sleeping MPs, on MPs giving others the finger, and so on.

Knowing that their hijinks would be beamed into the nation’s living rooms would surely be the best corrective.

I am not convinced that reaction shots would change much. The cameras in UK House of Commons do not stay focused on the Member who has the floor, and this does not stop other MPs from gesturing, making faces at, or heckling their counterparts on the opposite side. Akin is closer to the mark when he ends his column with:

But more unworkable and impossible-to-enforce rules?

Newsflash: They won’t work.

The problem isn’t really not enough rules, but that over the years (decades) the rules have been changed in ways that increasingly weaken the opposition and empower the government side – essentially rendering backbenchers – and the legislature – largely irrelevant. And I refer not only to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, but also Canada’s Elections Act, as Aaron Wherry of Macleans explains in this post. The real problem in the Canadian House of Commons is that backbenchers are not free to ask questions of interest to them, they are given scripted questions by their party Whips. Ditto for most of the highly partisan Members’ Statements – I am certain most MPs would prefer to use their Member’s Statement as intended – to speak of something of interest to them and their constituents. Instead, they are given prepared, highly partisan statements by their party leadership.

What would be needed, more than new penalties the Speaker could impose on disruptive Members, would be rule changes to strengthen the Opposition, and to ease the control party leaders have over their MPs. A lot, maybe most, of the heckling and boorishness occurs because MPs other than those on the front bench are frustrated.

While the clip from the UK’s Prime Minister’s Questions in the above link might not show it, overall, the UK House of Commons is far more respectful and decorous than its Canadian counterpart. And the  main reason for that, I believe, is because backbenchers in the UK have far more freedom than do their Canadian counterparts. Part of that is due to sheer numbers – there are 650 MPs in the UK House of Commons – the Conservative party alone has almost as many MPs as does the entire Canadian House of Commons – and so it is simply impossible for the whips to exert the same level of control over backbenchers that Canadian party whips do. As well, MPs have more control over their party leader. For example, in the UK Conservative Party, a vote of confidence in the party leader can be triggered by 15% of the party’s MPs. This means that if 46 sitting Conservative MPs write letters indicating they are unhappy with Prime Minister David Cameron as their party leader, a confidence vote is held. If Cameron were to lose that vote, he would have to resign as party leader. He would not be permitted to run again for the post of party leader either. The Liberal Democrats require that a majority of sitting MPs pass a motion of no confidence in the leader to trigger a leadership contest, but the defeated leader is allowed to stand again. Labour has no such non-confidence provisions.

The UK House of Commons has also embarked on a series of reforms in recent years which have served to strengthen the House vis à vis the executive. I have blogged extensively about many of these (see, for example, my “Fixing Ottawa” series, first post here). Governing parties in the UK do not expect that bills that they put forward will go through un-amended – or that they will even pass, which is not the case here in Canada. Because the opposition parties in the UK know that they will most likely be able to amend any government bill, there is less need to resort to tactics to try to stymie Government business in the House.

I know some will argue that if a party “wins” an election, then it has a mandate to govern and to get its legislation through the House. This argument would have more weight if our electoral system actually reflected how people voted. I don’t know how anyone can argue that a party elected to majority government with less than 40% of the popular vote (and often dismal voter turnout) has a real “mandate” to push through any piece of legislation virtually unopposed. And no piece of legislation is ever perfect – amendments should be welcomed, not defeated at every turn.

The problems in the Canadian House of Commons are mostly due to the excessive control parties have over their Members, and to years of changes to the Standing Orders which have only served to strengthen the Executive at the expense of the legislature. Fining an MP for being disruptive during Question Period won’t change anything. The problems go much deeper than that.

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The Politics of Coalition: the video

In support of their book, The Politics of Coalition: How the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government Works, which was published in June 2012, Dr. Robert Hazell and Dr. Ben Yong of UCL’s Constitution Unit delivered a talk in October highlighting some of their main findings. That talk was recorded, and is now available for general viewing online.

I strongly encourage anyone interested in coalition government and minority parliaments to watch the video (and buy the book). Drs. Hazell and Yong were given wide access to everyone who mattered – including Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, as well as ministers, MPs, Lords, civil servants and others. While they focus primarily on the coalition’s first 15 months in office, the authors also look down the road, raising important lessons political parties in the UK would do well to consider since hung parliaments are likely to be increasingly regular occurrences.

From a Canadian perspective, despite the more recent difficulties the coalition parties have encountered, it’s still very refreshing to know that elsewhere in the world, political parties are both capable of and willing to work together and that the very idea of coalition government isn’t considered something evil or unconstitutional. Canadian political parties, both federal and provincial, would do well to take note.

Where to buy The Politics of Coalition: in the UK, from Amazon.co.uk, in Canada, from Amazon.ca, in the US, from Amazon.com.

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The length of two swords

Recently, the brilliant UK actor Philip Glenister (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, State of Play, Mad Dogs, Hidden, etc.) was interviewed on the Andrew Marr show in connection with his latest role, that of Chief Government Whip in the play “This House“, which is set in 1974, when Labour had a shaky minority government.The discussion turned to the innately adversarial nature of politics in the UK House of Commons, with Marr noting that the play was in some ways an attack on the British parliamentary tradition, that of two sides against each other, and that underneath, there was a dream of a better way of doing things, a call for politics to be more consensual. Glenister noted that UK was “one of the few democracies, just by the layout of our parliament… it’s in a rectangular shape as opposed to in the round. It’s only one of two in the world.”

If Glenister is correct, and there are only two democracies in the world with rectangular Chambers which force government and opposition to face off against each other on opposing sides, then the Canada is the other one. The Canadian House of Commons, the Senate and most of the Canadian provincial and territorial legislatures are also rectangular, the exceptions being the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut and the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories.

What is being implied here is that layout of the Chamber, government on one side, opposition parties on the other, makes our politics more adversarial because it imposes an “Us vs Them” feel from the outset. This is the same argument put forward by architects in this very interesting article, “The Shape of Debate to Come“.

However, it is debatable to what extent the shape of the chamber might influence how adversarial or consensual debate will be. As Professor White notes in the above article, countries which end up with a more consensual approach to politics also tend to use some form of proportional representation rather than First-Past-the-Post:

But, in an email, he said there was “pretty much zero” chance of more co-operative behaviour in Canadian legislatures. And he put the differences in approach in legislatures such as Wales and Scotland more down to mixed electoral systems, not just first-past-the-post.

He said: ”Unquestionably the opposing rows of benches in standard Westminster parliaments reinforces the adversarial nature of the place; for my students I liken it to opposing armies or sports teams squaring off. At the same time, I see seating arrangements as very much secondary to underlying political culture and prevailing political norms.

“The Manitoba [legislature], which is semi-circular, has exceedingly nasty, adversarial partisan politics, and the US Congress these days is hardly a paragon of non-partisanship.”

Because PR makes it very difficult for any one party to form a majority government on its own, this means that coalition government tends to be the norm in countries which use some form of PR, and that reality alone will require parties to work harder to find some sort of consensus. As Prof. White points out, despite sitting in the round, politics in both Manitoba and the US Congress are very partisan and adversarial, and both jurisdictions use FPTP. The Australian House of Representatives is horseshoe-shaped, and politics Down Under is every bit as partisan as it is up here, particularly in the current minority parliament. Australia uses the Alternative Vote to elect its MPs, a voting system which requires voters to rank the candidates on the ballot in order of preference, and to win the seat, a candidate must gain over 50% of the vote, either outright, or through transferred preferences. AV, like FPTP, is not at all proportional, which may explain why political debate in the House of Representatives is partisan and adversarial.

This summer, it was reported that the UK Parliament could be closed for five years for extensive refurbishment, with MPs and Lords “convened in a replica chamber or a conference centre for the duration of the repair work, which could start in 2015.” This immediately alarmed some. The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson raised the threat of some advocating that a new, refurbished chamber would be “a chance to move the MPs to a lifeless, European style semi-circular chamber that supposedly encourages them to co-operate.” Fraser comments on how deathly boring debate is in the Scottish Parliament, which is circular. He does not mention that Scottish Members of Parliament (MSPs) are elected using Mixed-Member Proportional representation (MMP).

But is the electoral system alone enough to determine how consensual or adversarial politics will be in a given jurisdiction? Thomas Carl Lundberg, in his paper “Politics is Still an Adversarial Business: Minority Government and Mixed-Member Proportional Representation in Scotland and New Zealand“, concluded that while both nations introduced MMP in part to bring about a “new politics”, in the end, “the impact of institutional engineering upon the behaviour of politicians has been limited.” New Zealand adopted MMP in 1996, Scotland in 1999. New Zealand has seen the formation of mostly minority governments under MMP (albeit minority coalition government rather than single-party minority government) supported by other smaller parties through confidence and supply agreements, while Scotland has experienced two terms of majority coalition government, one term of single-party  minority government, and most recently, to the surprise of most, a single-party majority government.

The reasons why MMP has had limited success in curbing adversarial politics in Scotland and New Zealand, according to Lundberg are varied. Long before New Zealand adopted MMP, it had a very strong two-party system (Labour on the left and the National Party on the right) and a long history of single-party majority government. With the introduction of MMP in 1996, that didn’t really change. Politics remained quite adversarial between Labour and the National Party, but both of the main parties learned to work with the much smaller parties in order to form governments.

Scotland on the surface may appear more consensual, but there are other tensions at work. Scotland has a true multiparty system, that is one in which “there are three to five relevant parties which are not separated (polarised) by a large or intense ideological distance” (which isn’t the case in New Zealand). Rather, Scotland’s party system “is characterised by two significant cleavages” – class divisions and “the process of building the UK (with England at the centre dominating the periphery composed of Scotland, Wales and Ireland) in the latter.” The two largest parties in Scotland are Labour and the Scottish National Party – both are centre-left, and they have a long, adversarial relationship dating back before devolution, or to quote the former leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats: “there is a level of visceral hatred between the Nationalists and Labour to this day. So, it just transferred from London to Edinburgh … we just so massively underestimated how important it is for people to have good, personal relationships across all parties.”

Simply put, how adversarial or consensual politics might be in a given democracy will depend on many factors. While the shape of the debating chamber and the voting system used to elect members undoubtedly play a part, changing one or both will not necessarily bring about more polite politics.

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Quebec 2012 Political Party Platform Comparisons

As was the case during last year’s federal election in Canada, and the many provincial elections held since, many people are now looking for a site comparing the platforms of the political parties contesting the upcoming Quebec provincial election (4 September 2012).

This blog cannot engage in a discussion of the policies of political parties, either at the provincial or federal level. However, as was the case this spring, it can refer you to other sites that can do that. I will update this list as needed.

Quebec Political Party Platform comparisons/Comparaisons des plateformes électorales des partis politiques du Québec:

Vote Compass – Quebec votes 2012: Vote Compass is an educational tool developed by political scientists. Answer a short series of questions to discover how you fit in the Quebec political landscape.

Boussole électorale Québec 2012: Vote Compass en français.

Other resources/autres ressources:

Petit guide de l’électeur (Voters’ guide – in French only)

Quebec parties and social media (en anglais)

20 affirmations vérifiées (French only)

Twitter hashtags (these appear to be the most common hashtags currently being used): #qc2012, #polqc, #PQ, #PLQ, #QS, #CAQ, #ON,#PV

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Artificial preferences

There continues to be interest among many Canadians in the Alternative Vote (AV). Most recently the Liberal Party of Canada adopted a resolution calling for the implementation of a preferential ballot for national elections. This blog attempted to redo the May 2011 election using AV, and other bloggers have produced similar posts. This blog continues to get queries from individuals about that AV projection post.

It is fair enough to say that AV is not the preferred option of most who favour electoral reform for one very important reason: it is not at all proportional and will do little to rectify the main failing of First-Past-the-Post (FPTP), namely, the election of a legislature where the number of seats won by the various parties in no way reflects how people actually voted. In some instances, AV can actually lead to even more disproportionate results than FPTP.  Please read this post for a more detailed look at the many problems associated with preferential voting and why it really isn’t an ideal reform. The only issue AV would address is that of MPs being elected with minority support in their ridings. Under AV, it would not be possible to win a seat with less than 50% of the vote cast in a giving riding. Votes would be redistributed based on indicated preferences until one candidate emerged with at least 50% support.

Despite AV’s many glaring shortcomings, the above does redeem it in the eyes of many. However, they may be overlooking a very real issue with AV – and that is the practice known as “plumping”.

Under AV, voters are supposed to rank the candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference. Australia, for federal elections to the House of Representatives, uses compulsory preferences: voters are required to rank each and every candidate on the ballot. Failure to do so results in a spoiled ballot. The Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales use optional preferential voting, meaning voters can rank as few or as many candidates on the ballot as they like. This is where plumping comes into play.

Plumping is the practice of voters indicating support for one and only one candidate. In other words, the voter treats their ballot the same as they would under FPTP – they select one candidate only and refuse to indicate any preferences for any of the others.

The ramifications of this are clear. If a significant percentage of voters refuse to take advantage of an AV ballot and rank candidates in order of preference, this impacts the number of ballots available for vote transfer on subsequent counts. A candidate may well eventually win with 50% of the vote, but the number of votes in play by the final count may be far fewer than the total number cast.

As discussed in this post, AV was used in three provinces in Canada many decades ago (and only briefly in one province).  Professor Harold J. Jansen has studied the use of AV in those provinces and one of his findings is that plumping was very prevalent as the following table shows:

Incidence of “Plumping”: Proportion of Voters Indicating only a First Preference

Manitoba

Alberta

British Columbia

Year

% Plumped

Year

% Plumped

Year

% Plumped

1927

40.7

1926

42.8

1952

33.5

1932

53.9

1930

43.5

1953

27.9

1936

57.6

1935

47.0

1941

Data n/a

1940

38.0

1945

68.1

1944

63.7

1949

65.9

1948

63.7

1953

51.4

1952

52.3

1955

29.8

(Source: Harold J. Jansen, The Political Consequences of the Alternative Vote: Lessons from Western Canada, Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 37:3 (September/septembre 2004) 647-669)

The above numbers are rather disturbing. If well over half of voters refuse to indicate any preferences, that rather undermines the one main advantage of the Alternative Vote. Proponents of AV tend to ignore the fact that a significant percentage of voters really don’t have any second choices. They support one party and one party only, and any “choice” they would make to indicate a preference for other parties would simply be false.

This was an argument against AV that I regularly encountered during the lead-up to to the AV referendum held in May 2011 in the UK. It was especially prevalent on Conservative blogs and forums. Take for example, this piece by Robert Halfon written for ConservativeHome in September 2010. In it, Halfon writes (emphasis mine):

Similarly, the Alternative Vote places an artificial construct on voter’s intentions, forcing them to make second preference choices – before they actually know the result, which inevitably would disproportionately favour the Liberal Democrats as being the ‘centre’ party.

(…)

The beauty of TSB (The Second Ballot system) is both its fairness, and simplicity.  Instead of having an ‘Alternative Vote’ and artificial second preferences, a ballot is held a week or two later in which the top two candidates slug it out for pole position.  Not only does this give electors a few extra days to consider their options based on the first result, it ensures that they are not forced into making a ‘saccharine’ second choice (which AV would force them to do), before they know whether or not their first preference candidate will get over 50% of the vote.

You may well disagree with Mr. Halfon that any preferences indicated on an AV ballot would be “artificial”, but that is indeed the reality for a great number of voters. They don’t want any party but the party they support to win, and so would most likely opt to plump their ballot. If past experience in Western Canada is anything to go by, the only real advantage of AV over FPTP would be undermined by voters refusing to rank more than one candidate and instead treating the election as FPTP election. If only a minority of voters are ranking candidates, a candidate may still end up with over 50% of the votes still in play, but that might result in a “false” majority.

The obvious way to avoid plumping is to adopt compulsory preferences as used in federal elections in Australia, in other words, forcing voters to rank every single candidate on the ballot paper. This would certainly give more credence to Mr. Halfon’s claims of artificial choices. People might grudgingly force themselves to seriously rank 2-3 candidates, but some ridings in Canada have 8-10 candidates on the ballot. Most of these individuals represent fringe parties, or are running as independents. I doubt very much that most voters would be putting serious thought into how they rank the majority of the candidates on their ballot paper. Being forced to vote that way might actually lead to a decrease in voter turnout.

Beyond the issue of plumping, which rarely gets discussed by proponents of AV, Jansen’s paper explores many other aspects of AV based on Alberta’s, Saskatchwan’s and British Columbia’s experience with that voting system. His conclusions include the following points:

  • AV differed little from FPTP in most aspects of its operations;
  • none of the three Western provinces experienced any increase or decrease in turnout that could be attributed to AV;
  • AV contributed to higher rates of ballot rejection in all three provinces;
  • it was associated with an increase in the number of parties seeking office (electoral parties), but not with an increased number of parties represented in the legislature (legislative parties);
  • AV did little  to encourage less adversarial politics or to encourage coalitions to form between the parties (hence the propensity of voters to plump their ballots);
  • there is little evidence that election outcomes under AV would have been any different under FPTP – only a minority of contests required multiple counts and of those, only a tiny fraction of candidates who were not leading after the first count managed to attract enough second and subsequent preferences to win.

Related Posts:

Alberta 2012 Political Party Platform Comparisons

As was the case during last year’s federal election in Canada, many people are now looking for a site comparing the platforms of the political parties contesting the upcoming Alberta provincial election (23 April 2012).

This blog cannot engage in a discussion of the policies of political parties, either at the provincial or federal level. However, as was the case this spring, it can refer you to other sites that can do that. I will update this list as needed.

Alberta Political Party Platform comparisons:

Vote Compass – Alberta Votes 2012: Vote Compass is an educational tool developed by political scientists. Answer a short series of questions to discover how you fit in the Alberta political landscape.

Edmonton Journal: Party Platforms Comparison Chart

Note: to fully compare the party platforms, your best option is still to read each party’s manifesto, available on their website:

Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta
Wildrose Party
Alberta Liberal Party
NDP Alberta
Alberta Party

Edmonton Journal – The Alberta Election in 360 degrees

Other Resources:

Elections Alberta – your first stop for everything related to voting and elections in Alberta.

Calgary Herald: Voter’s guide – answers to questions about voting in the 2012 election.

Twitter hashtags (these appear to be the most common hashtags currently being used): #abelxn, #abvote, #abpoli, #wrp, #abpc, #abparty, #ablibs, #abndp, #ableg

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Australia’s Labor Party’s revolving door leadership

In June 2010, Australian Labor Party leader and Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was ousted by his caucus in a leadership challenge won by Rudd’s Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who then became both party leader and Prime Minister. Less than two years later, history appears to be repeating itself, with Rudd now challenging Gillard’s leadership of the party. Gillard announced a ballot for the party’s leadership would take place Monday, February 27. Mr. Rudd’s challenge failed, and Ms. Gillard successfully held off the challenge, winning by 71 votes to 31 votes for Rudd.

If Rudd’s challenge had been successful, he would have replaced Gillard as party leader, but not necessarily as Prime Minister of Australia.

The Australian Labor Party leader is elected by the party caucus in Parliament, that is, the elected members of that party in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In contrast, Canadian political party leaders are chosen by party members. The rules are different for each party, but essentially, whenever there is a leadership race, anyone who is a member of that party can run as a candidate for the leadership, even if they aren’t a sitting MP, and anyone who is a member of the party has the opportunity to vote for the party leader at a leadership convention. This is more or less the same process used by the main political parties in the UK. In some instances, certain groups may also have voting rights, for example, the trade unions can vote to elect the leader of the UK Labour Party. While slightly more democratic, even in these instances, the party leaders are not directly elected by the general population.

There are pros and cons to each approach. In the case of party leadership decided by the party caucus, this strengthens the role of individual MPs and makes the party leader more responsive to his or her MPs. A party leader elected in a more democratic way, by party members, may be able to more easily exert pressure on his or her MPs, rendering MPs more docile and submissive to the party leader, since they can claim support that extends beyond the caucus and to the party as a whole.

Some parties seek to balance both approaches. For example, in 1998, the UK Conservative Party changed its rules for electing a new leader by opening up the process to party members. Prior to 1998, the party leader was chosen by caucus. However, while the actual selection of the party leader is more open, the party caucus still plays an important role. For example, the party caucus can potentially force a leadership review by calling for a vote of confidence in the party leader. To secure a confidence vote, 15% of Conservative Members of Parliament must submit a request for such a vote, in writing, to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee.

If the incumbent Leader wins the support of a simple majority in any such vote, they would remain Leader and no further vote could be called for a period of twelve months from the date of the ballot.  If the Leader were to lose such a vote (again, on a simple majority basis) they must resign, and they may not stand in the leadership election which is then triggered.  As well, it is the party caucus which decides on who the candidates for the leadership will be from among the current sitting MPs. If only one name is put forward, that person becomes the new leader, without party members having any say in the matter. If two names are put forward, then those names are put to the general party membership. However, if three or more names are put forward, a ballot is held within the Parliamentary Party. An exhaustive ballot system is used to select two candidates to go forward to the general membership of the Party.

Getting back to the situation in Australia, these internal Labor Party machinations have prompted some backlash in Australia, with calls for party leaders to be directly elected by the people. Indeed, even this blog has received hits from people based on those search terms. What is not clear is if people are calling for the Prime Minister to be directly elected, or simply for political parties to democratize the way they choose their leader by opening up the process to party members.

I stated at the outset that if Rudd’s leadership challenge was successful, he would replace Julia Gillard as Labor Party leader. One would assume that he would also automatically become Prime Minister, however, this was less immediately clear because of the current hung parliament situation in the Australian House of Representatives.

The Prime Minister is appointed by the Governor-General. This can only happen if there is a vacancy to fill, meaning Julia Gillard would have to resign. If she loses the party leadership, one would assume that she would then resign as Prime Minister as well. As Australian constitutional law expert Anne Twomey explains:

“A lot of people don’t realise that it’s actually a reserve power of the Governor-General; she has some discretion in making this decision, but it’s a discretion confined by some convention.

“The convention says she has to appoint the person who either holds the support of the majority of the Lower House or is most likely to hold that support.”

Professor Twomey says that is where independent MPs will play a key role.

“Can she feel certain that the independents will support Kevin Rudd and that he is the one who holds the support of the majority of the Lower House?” she asked.

“It might be quite difficult for the Governor-General. There’s two ways she could approach it.

“The first would be to ask the independents to come in or give a letter telling her which way they intend to vote – you saw that sort of experience more recently in Tasmania with the hung parliament there.

“Alternatively she could … wait for parliament to sit, and let there be a vote of confidence or no confidence on the floor of the parliament and whatever the House of Representatives chooses then that person [will be appointed] as prime minister.”

“And that would make sure she wasn’t seen to be in any way biased or influencing results – she could leave it to the House to decide.”

Labor currently governs as a minority government with the support of a Green and a few independent MPs. If these independents indicated to the Governor-General that they can’t support Labor with Mr. Rudd as party leader, but would support Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s party, the Governor-General could then ask Mr. Abbott to form the government. Or, if the independents indicate that they can’t support either Rudd or Abbott, they could indicate their preference for an election to be called:

“The independents can’t themselves advise the Governor-General and say ‘hey, call an election’, but what they can do is say ‘we will not give support to the new Labor leader, we will support Tony Abbott to the extent that when he comes into power, the first thing he’s going to do is advise the Governor-General to call an election’.

“So that would be the way of causing an election if the independents thought that was the way to resolve the matter.”

The Governor-General’s third option would be to dissolve parliament, which she can only do on the advise of the Prime Minister, meaning she would have to appoint someone Prime Minister first:

“So if the Governor-General is inclined to think this whole issue that should be resolved by an election, she would be able to appoint Tony Abbott who presumably would not want to be stuck dealing with independents and therefore would advise her to call an election – that would be the way to achieve it.”

The Rudd-Gillard contest presented a special dilemma for the Labor Party:

Gillard is well liked by the majority of her colleagues but disliked by the majority of the voters. Rudd is loathed, indeed hated, by the majority of his colleagues, but is vastly more popular than Gillard among the public.

Because of this, Rudd tried to by-pass caucus support for his leadership by appealing directly to the general public. As Geoff Robinson, a lecturer in politics at Deakin University explains:

“There’s a difference between Julia Gillard’s appeal, very much to the parliamentary party, perhaps the traditions of the Westminster system, whereas Kevin Rudd is mounting a populist, almost an American-style campaign to the mass of the electorate, potentially to Labor supporters.”

Recent polls showed Rudd to be more popular than Gillard, and also more popular than Opposition leader Tony Abbott, but while this may be the case, it is the Labor party caucus which will decide who the party leader will be, and by all accounts, there was great animosity towards Rudd among those he would have to work with day in and day out.

While there is certainly a case to be made for parties such as the Australian Labor Party to democratize how it chooses its leader (and indeed, some are making that case), in a Westminster parliamentary system, party leaders couldn’t be elected directly by the people.  It is not a presidential system. As I have repeatedly stressed in many other posts, voters in Westminster parliamentary systems do not elect governments, much less the Prime Minister, they elect parliaments. It is the party (or group of parties) which can command the confidence of the House which forms the government, and the leader of said party then becomes Prime Minister. A government may, in theory, be removed at any time, if it loses the confidence of the House. If the party in power wishes to change leaders at some point during its mandate, that is the party’s prerogative.

In most instances, e.g., when there is a single-party majority government in place, a change in the party leadership will not affect the governing party’s ability to command the confidence of the House. However, as discussed above, in a minority situation, where the government depends on the support of other parties to stay in power, or in again, perhaps in the case of a majority coalition government such as the one in the UK, a change of party leader might make it more difficult for the government to retain the confidence of the House. The Australian independent MPs might not have supported Labor with Kevin Rudd as leader – they had agreed to support the party led by Julia Gillard. Similarly, if the UK Conservatives ousted David Cameron for another leader, the Liberal Democrats might rethink their position in the coalition.

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On candidate selection

Recently, a Canadian Member of Parliament elected as a member of the New Democratic Party (NDP) from the province of Quebec announced that she was crossing the floor to join the Liberal Party. The MP, Ms. St-Denis, explained that she found herself increasingly disagreeing with the positions the NDP were espousing in the House of Commons, and more in agreement with the positions taken by the Liberals.

In this instance, no one can accuse Ms. St-Denis of political opportunism. The NDP is currently the Official Opposition in Ottawa, while the Liberals, historically Canada’s most successful political party, were reduced to third party status in the last federal election. Ms. St-Denis joining their caucus increases the party’s seat total to 35.

More interesting, perhaps, was the reaction on various blogs, Twitter and other online forums. NDP bloggers immediately dismissed her as a “nobody” joining a dying party – good riddance. Many also decried her actions as “undemocratic”, a betrayal of what her constituents wanted and had voted for, and challenged her to resign her seat and seek re-election as a Liberal. Others called for a ban on floor-crossing.

However, as Graham Fox, the President of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, noted on Twitter:

“The logic behind banning floor-crossing would also mean that leaders should not have the power to throw MPs out of caucus.

If we don’t want MPs to have the ability to “violate the voters’ decisions”, why would we allo party leaders to have that power?”

He added in French (translation mine):

“Bien que chocantes, les defections politiques ne sont pas necessairement anti-demo, et rappellent que les partis ne comptent pas pour tout.” (While upsetting, political defections aren’t always undemocratic and remind us that political parties don’t count for everything.)

In response to that, @jesse_helmer replied:

“I have trouble squaring calls for reform that would weaken part [sic] discipline with opposition to switching parties.”

These are important points. If you support the idea that MPs should have more independence – for example, if you would prefer to see fewer whipped votes in the Canadian House of Commons (almost all votes are whipped), if you would like to see an end to scripted questions during Question Period, and MPs, especially backbenchers, free to ask whatever questions they want, even if it embarrasses their party, if you would like to see an end to party whips controlling who sits on committees, etc., then it makes little sense to support banning floor-crossing, which is probably the ultimate freedom an MP has to voice his or her disagreement with the direction in which their party is moving.

Similarly, if you argue that it is “undemocratic” for an MP to cross the floor because he or she was elected as a member of that particular party, then it is equally undemocratic for a party leader to kick an MP out of caucus and force them to sit as an independent, since that would also be going against what voters had voted for.

I have previously written about some of the main arguments for and against floor crossing, and so I won’t repeat myself in detail here. The question you have to ask yourself is what is the role of an MP? Is it simply someone who toes the party line no matter what and votes as they are told to vote on every given issue, or do we want MPs to use their own judgement, analyze each issue and vote as they see best, even if that includes deciding that they no longer agree with their party, or that their party’s positions aren’t in the best interest of their constituents?

There is another issue at play here, however, one that has been largely overlooked. The last election, the one which saw Ms. St-Denis elected, happened only recently, in May 2011. In a column from La Presse, Vincent Marissal writes that Ms. St-Denis is apparently one of four new NDP MPs from Quebec who aren’t entirely happy being NDP MPs, but whether the other three will quit the party may depend on the outcome of the current NDP Leadership contest:

Pourrait-il y avoir d’autres défections? C’est douteux pour le moment mais, à Ottawa, des néo-démocrates ont laissé entendre que Mme St-Denis «était l’une des quatre députés» susceptibles de quitter le bateau. À suivre, surtout si Thomas Mulcair mord la poussière dans la course à la direction. (translation: “Could there be more defections? It’s doubtful at the moment, but in Ottawa, the New Democrats hinted that Ms. St-Denis “was one of four MPs” susceptible of jumping ship. This is to follow, especially if Thomas Mulcair bites the dust in the leadership race.”)

Many people have been asking why she ran for the NDP in the first place, when she clearly seems to be more of a Liberal in terms of policy positions. Ms. St-Denis admits that she ran not expecting to be elected, which was a safe-enough assumption on her part. Historically, the NDP has never won more than a few seats at any one time in the province of Quebec, and the party didn’t have much of an organization (or many members) in that province. However, the May 2011 election saw some seismic changes in Canada’s political landscape, most notably the demise of the pro-independence Bloc Québécois (reduced from 47 seats to 4 seats). The BQ’s support largely went to the NDP, which had gone into that election with one MP from Quebec and emerged after the election with 59 of the province’s 75 seats.

Because, historically, the NDP never expected to win many seats in Quebec, they often ran placeholder candidates in many of the ridings. These candidates are often chosen at the last minute, and may not be very well vetted since the party is mostly focused on being able to say they are running a full slate of candidates. The NDP isn’t the only party to do this, of course, and most of the time, there’s no chance that these candidates will win. But sometimes they do win, and the party finds itself with new MPs who may not be fully committed to the party and its policies.

Another factor is that there is strong evidence that a lot of the former BQ voters in Quebec who turned to the NDP weren’t really voting for the party per se, but for its leader, Jack Layton, who passed away this summer. Mr. Layton was extremely popular and quite well known in Quebec – more popular and better known than his party and its policies, it’s probably fair to say. Ms. St-Denis acknowledged that, saying people in her riding had voted not for the NDP but for Jack Layton, and Layton was dead, implying that her move from the NDP to the Liberals didn’t really matter because voters hadn’t really voted for the NDP and its policies.

And it’s also fair to say that the NDP’s policies never really received much media attention. Since 1993, the NDP has been the 4th party in the House of Commons, which meant that media attention was largely focused on the parties (and policies of the parties) which had a real chance of forming the government: the Liberals and Reform/Canadian Alliance/Conservatives. That they finished second in the May 2011 election, becoming the Official Opposition for the first time in the party’s history, caught almost everyone off-guard. Late in the election campaign, when it became increasingly clear that something was going on, both the media and the other parties were left scrambling – the media trying to figure what the NDP stood for, and the other parties what to attack them on. Therefore it really shouldn’t come as a surprise if some of the people who ran for the NDP in Quebec, never expecting to win, weren’t that familiar with what the party actually stood for – some of them didn’t even campaign at all in the ridings in which they were candidates.

As I have written repeatedly, in various posts, the Canadian House of Commons is already extremely whipped, with MPs already quite subservient to their party leadership (particularly in contrast with MPs from the UK). Party discipline does not need to be strengthened in the Canadian House of Commons, if anything, anyone interested in political reform should be looking at ways of weakening the power of party whips and party leadership, and giving MPs more freedom to carry out their roles and obligations as individual Members. Banning floor crossing runs counter to increasing MP independence. More attention should also be given to candidate selection. Parties should focus less on trying to run full slates and more on the quality of their candidates. Perhaps the phasing out of the vote subsidy will force some parties at least to do just this because they won’t have the financial resources to run a full slate, and there won’t be any financial incentive to have a warm body on every ballot. In the end, perhaps that will be a good thing.

 

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No backbench rebellions, please, we’re Canadians

There has been much media focus in the United Kingdom over the numerous government backbench rebellions among both Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs since May 2010. This is regularly monitored on the Revolts.co.uk website. By September 2011, the number of Coalition Commons rebellions so far this Parliament stood at 150, a rebellion rate of a rebellion in 44% of votes. Sixty-six of those rebellions involved Liberal Democrat MPs, a rate of a rebellion in 19% of votes. More recently, Mark Pack took a closer look at the Liberal Democrat rebellions, and provided quite a few interesting statistics which you can read here.

I have previously written that such large scale rebellions are practically unheard of in the Canadian House of Commons. After reading Mr. Pack’s piece, I decided to try to cobble together some statistics from Canada, using information provided by the How’d They Vote website as my starting place.

Because the focus of How’d They Vote is not MP rebellions, trying to collate figures comparable to those from the UK isn’t easy. The current Parliament began in June 2011 and, to date, there have been only two MPs who have voted against their party – neither of them Government MPs. I decided to focus on the previous Parliament, which ran from 18 November 2008 to 26 March 2011 and was a hung Parliament with a Conservative minority government. There were a total of three sessions during the 40th Parliament: the first lasted only 13 sitting days (18 November 2008 to 4 December 2008) and had no recorded divisions. The second session ran from 26 January 2009 to 30 December 2009, while the third session met from 3 March 2010 to 26 March 2011.

How’d They Vote does provide information on the number of times MPs “dissent” from their parties on votes. For example, during the 2nd session of the 40th Parliament, 116 MPs1 (out of 308) dissented at least once. Of those 116, 59 dissented only once, and 36 dissented twice, leaving 21 MPs having dissented more than twice. Two dissented 5 times, five dissented 4 times, and 14 three times. The 3rd session was even more “rebellious” with 169 MPs dissenting at least once. Of those, 85 dissented once, 38 dissented twice, 18 three times, 9 four times, one MP five times, another 6 times, two MPs dissented 11 times each, nine dissented 12 times, two 13 times, another two 14 times, one 15 times and one 16 times.

But upon closer examination of these votes, these “rebellions” occurred only on votes on Private Members’ bills. I have a bit of a problem considering these votes “dissensions” since (in theory at least), votes on private Members’ bills and motions are not supposed to be whipped votes, so there isn’t (in theory at least) a party position to vote for or against. Members are supposed to cast their vote based on the merits of the individual bill. Private Members’ bills rarely get more than second reading, therefore there is little danger (at least in theory) of MPs voting in favour of them at second reading or report stage. If the Government doesn’t like the bill, it will simply ensure that it dies on the Order Paper. Votes on Private Members’ bills are supposed to be free votes, thus making “dissent” (or rebellion) impossible since there is nothing to rebel against. The fact that such votes are considered “dissent” only serves to illustrate how pervasive the use of the whip is in the Canadian House of Commons.

If we focus only on the votes on Government bills, since what we are trying to assess here is how rebellious are Government backbench MPs, the picture is very different. There were 63 Government bills introduced in the 2nd session, and 60 in the 3rd. Of the 63 Government bills introduced in 40-2, only 22 had recorded divisions at at least one stage of their progress through the House (several had several divisions). That number falls to 15 for Government bills in the 3rd session.

Looking at the data for every single recorded division on Government bills in both the second and third sessions, there was not a single Government backbench MP who voted against his or her party.

Nor did any opposition MP break ranks with their party during divisions on Government bills and motions.

Granted, on some votes, there were a fair number of MPs who were absent for the vote, but it isn’t possible to know if this was because they disagreed with their party’s position or for some other reason.

Simply put, party discipline reigns supreme, and Canadian MPs toe the party line.

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1How’d They Vote lists 117 MPs as having dissented during the 2nd session of the 40th Parliament because they include Peter Milliken in the list of MPs. Milliken was Speaker of the House of Commons in the 40th Parliament, and of course, the Speaker does not vote except in the event of a tie, and then exercises the casting vote. There are parliamentary conventions in place which govern how a Speaker should vote in such instances, and thus Milliken’s vote cannot be considered a “dissenting” vote since he was not voting for or against any party position, but rather as per parliamentary convention concerning the casting vote. Consequently, I have not included Speaker Milliken in the above discussion.

 

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