History of leadership

Elections wonk Eric Grenier has a longish piece at CBC News sorting out how the Conservative Party and the New Democrats are organizing their leadership contests.  Shorter version (that he won't give you): the "rules" are notably different but always byzantine and ever-changing. Both parties are using the race to finance themselves. The "races" are still essentially vote-buying contests.

I recall, by way of contrast, the New Zealand process last month that picked a new party leader (for the governing party, hence a prime minister) in about three days, with perfect accountability, and a budget of zero.

Michael Chong, who used to work to make leaders accountable to MPs, is in the thick of the Torypalooza, and he is proposing all kinds of new rules to compel Parliament to do this and to do that.  Dale Smith is right to take him down on all of them. All these problems would be solved by MPs taking control of the party caucuses. All they need in order to do that is to hire and fire their own leaders, without regard to the extraparliamentary party's love of long, slow, expensive, incomprehensible, corrupt leadership "races."