Okay, so I had long assumed Belinda Stronach was just the latest whacko with high self-esteem, a big bank account, and zero qualifications who thought she could buy the leadership of a political party.
But Stronach seems to be accepting her place as just another opposition backbencher rather better than most of her colleagues and rivals. First came her decision to skip this boring, semi-corrupt, and seemingly endless "race" to become the next leader of the opposition.
Now she has a position paper on how to run a political party in the 21st century, and, you know, it's not without interest. You can download it from her site, belindastronach.ca.
Not all her ideas are good ones. Taking her party toward those one-member, one-vote mass telephone/internet extravaganzas for picking leaders is just more travelling in the same wrong direction as everyone else. She proposes to let more people participate by reducing party membership fees to just a dollar. But given the vote-buying that defines most leadership contests, surely this can only make the corruption even more widespread. In today's political parties, a "membership" is a euphemism for "a vote." Vote-buying is vote-buying, even when it is cheap.
But then Ms Stronach launches a curiously subversive idea. She would empower the backbench by letting it, not the leader, nominate which caucus members will become cabinet ministers (or when in opposition, critics). This strikes me as brilliant -- restoring the accountability link between elected members and the executive that parliamentary democracy thrives on.
She supports the proposal by noting how well that system works in the Northwest Territories and in Australia and New Zealand. And she is right. Except: she does not mention that in all those jurisdictions, the caucus also selects (and when necessary, removes) the party leader.
Stronach is not able to be that clear-thinking about parliamentary democracy yet. She still feels compelled to advocate yoking the democratically elected and representative parliamentary caucus to an extra-parliamentary leader chosen mostly by vote-buying.
But at least she floats the idea that the problem is in caucus, the solution is in Parliament. Belinda Stronach would at least have the Liberal Party groping in that direction. And that's a good thing (as another talented women never hobbled by lack of self-esteem liked to say).
