If I post occasionally about Garth Turner, MP, it's not because I respect or admire him. He continues to be a canary in the poisonous mineshaft that is parliamentary politics in Canada, that's all.
Having left/been thrown from the Conservative party, Turner was pretty much compelled to join another party, because the situation of an independent is almost untenable. By and large, "independent" is not a category that functions in our parliaments or our elections -- no organization, no money, no label, no future. John Nunziata got re-elected once as an independent, but mostly independence is a waystation to oblivion. Garth Turner, Liberal, looks pretty silly, but no doubt he prefers it to the alternative: Garth Turner, out of public life.
The rapid movements we have been seeing of MPs out of their parties or from one party to another is powerfully indicative of the state of our political parties. Chuck Cadman. Carolyn Parrish. Wajid Khan. Belinda Stronach. David Emerson. Chuck Strahl and the rest from Stock Day's Reform Alliance. John Nunziata. Way back to Jack Horner, if you remember paleolithic times.
What they all indicate is the brittleness of our political parties. They are so rigid. They tolerate no autonomy among MPs, no sign of independent ambition, no sign of free or original thinking, no freedom to advocate personal belief or local interest. And that is simply too rigid. A political party is always a coalition: of regional blocs, of ideological shadings, of gender and ethnicity and various historical accidents. When you impose on top of any party an autocrat whose views must command absolute loyalty upon pain of excommunication, you do violence to the nature of political parties. And today all the parties do impose exactly that kind of leadership
True, it's still mostly non-conformist and crackpot MPs who transgress and get pitched out. So far it is the flakes and egomaniacs (see list above!) who most often blow themselves out of harness, and then get mocked by the media for their desperate survival struggles.Indeed, their unhappy experiences help keep the more calculating sullenly in line. The frustration and resentment every competent and reasonably ambitious backbench MP feels has not yet found a practical outlet.
But the brittle rigidity of Canadian party politics does violence to what parties really are, and it undermines the effective working of parliamentary politics here.
We cannot fix this by forcing by-elections on party-changers. Or by any form of electoral reform. Or by any of the structural changes pundits keep baying about. It has to be fixed inside the parliamentary caucuses (and inside our sense of them): the leader has to become once more the servant of caucus, not its master. The leader has to earn the support of his caucus, not presume it.
That's what the frustrated and competent backbenchers have to work toward. I wonder when we will see them start their move.
