In a recent National Post column entitled “Why politics here is stupid,” Andrew Coyne asks: “Is there any politics on Earth that is shallower, more boorish, less worthy of the attention of serious people than Canadian politics?”
I feel for him. We can try to ignore the political wrangles, but it’s his living. No wonder he sounds so dyspeptic.
Partly Coyne just regrets the lack of full-throated conservative ideology. But his frustration transcends partisanship. When he writes, “It isn’t that our politicians are especially stupid, as people… they just behave like idiots,” I’m right there with him. All his descriptors for Canadian politics – vacuity, vapidity, morons, infantile, mindless partisanship – sound right to me.
But look at his explanations, and you might think columnists are catching the disease themselves. British political debate is better, he says… because in Parliament their opposing front benches are closer.
Coyne knows the problem in Canada is the rigidity of party structures and the insane levels of party discipline. But he seems unable to ask why Canadian parties are like that: why MPs are thrown from caucus and blocked from re-election for the most innocuous displays of original thought.
In Britain a few years ago, Prime Minister Blair, leading a huge Labour majority, took his country into the Iraq invasion. But he needed Conservative votes to do it, because so many of his own Labour MPs were opposed. And voted against it. And remained in caucus. Soon after, an education bill that was a cornerstone of Blair's domestic policy passed with five votes to spare when his majority was counted in hundreds. That’s pretty standard in parliamentary democracies around the world: Parties are strong, but MPs are strong too – except in Canada. Pity -- that Andrew Coyne cannot consider why.
There’s one structural difference that separates Canada’s parliamentary democracy from the others in the world. In the rest, the parliamentary caucus is a sovereign power. The prime minister is a member of caucus like the rest, subject to the discipline of caucus like the rest. As a result, members of caucus are part of a powerful unit. They have influence. They have responsibilities. And often they can acquit themselves with the seriousness befitting their situation. They have the authority to think. And when they think, they can speak and act on their thoughts.
Only in Canada are party leaders hired by $10-a-vote mobs in hockey arenas (“leadership conventions,” we call them). Only in Canada are party leaders independent of the caucuses they lead. A Canadian caucus doesn’t hire its leaders, cannot fire its leaders – and therefore has no influence. MPs can do routine constituency maintenance but they play no role in policy matters at all. What can they do but bray partisan insults to cover up their impotence?
There are 305 Members of Parliament (later: sorry, that's 308) in the Canadian parliament. But only the handful who lead parties need to bring their brains with them when they go up the Hill. It ain’t like that anywhere else. And that, Andrew Coyne, is why our politics is so partisan, so devoid of policy discussion, and so stupid.
Meanwhile, Coyne is pondering the distances between the desks in the chamber. Maybe it’s just as well our columnists don’t have intelligent politics to cover. How could they cope?
