We get mail. Jared Milne writes from Alberta:
I really liked your article on the Reform Act and your praise of Michael Chong. I may have the answer in my archives somewhere, but what are your thoughts on proportional representation? [emphasis added] I know that the likes of Dale Smith hate it and the idea of what he calls the "(garbage)" Reform Act (he literally phrases it like that in his blog), but I've always felt that FPTP makes too many parts of Canada look like politically homogenous blobs when they're really not. That only reinforces stereotypes and corrodes national unity, with the feeling that conservatives can hardly win east of Manitoba and progressive parties can't win on the Prairies.
Brief version: I think proportional representation is the dumbest idea since the Triple-E Senate. And the rest of this is just the longer version.
I'm not really against proportional representation in principle. There are parliamentary countries where it seems to work well enough. But as Chairman Mao (and every other astute political observer in history) has said, you have to study the concrete situation. In the Canadian political context, PR must tend to reinforce the worst things about our politics.
I'm hostile to proportional representation for the same reason I approve of Michael Chong's work, so let me come to PR from that direction.
Chong is a conservative and a Conservative, and I'm neither. But he is pretty much the only MP (or provincial MPP, MLA, MNP) in Canada who thinks legislatures are important and who actually works to make them work. I think that makes him uniquely significant. Chong left a cabinet position to go back to the backbench, and it did not put an end to his influence in parliament. What other Canadian politician of the last century can you say that about?
As Wednesday's events showed, the Reform Act driven by Chong does encourage accountability of leaders to caucuses, though only to the extent of getting rid of failed leaders efficiently. Chong grasped a long time ago the significance of having party leaders (and hence prime ministers and premiers). chosen by extra-parliamentary processes, as is customary here in Canada. Bluntly, parliamentary accountability vanishes and MP and legislatures become essentially ceremonial ("dignified" rather than "efficient," in Bagehot's nineteenth-century terms). That's why Canadian MPs, mostly unable to exert any leverage over their own leaders, are generally just claques cheering for what the boss says. When the two, three, four party leaders in a legislature are the only ones there allowed to have opinions, what's the point of a legislature?
I resist proportional representation because in Canada it too would reinforce the accountability of MPs to leaders and legislatures to governments -- rather than the other way around, as it must be in a real parliament.
PR assumes the democratic problem in Canada lies with elections and proposes to tinker with the electoral machinery as a fix. Broadly speaking, and greatly to oversimplify (nothing about PR is simple), it does that by ensuring that we no longer vote directly for our representatives. Instead we would give our vote (a substantial share of it, at least) to one or other of the parties, and they would appoint their representatives to the legislatures. We have an appointed Senate; is an appointed House of Commons really something to advocate for?*
The deep question is one of political culture. In Canada any lack of support by MPs for their party leadership is routinely categorized by leaders, political scientists, observers, and the public as "mutiny," "revolt," and "coup d'etat." Canadians actually encourage and demand authoritarian party leadership. Canadian MPs absorb that political culture , and as a result they routinely act as if PR has already been enacted; that is, they act as delegates appointed by their parties rather than representatives of those who elected them. At the moment, that is a cultural failure in Canadian political life. PR would entrench it in law, so I would not welcome PR.
The real crisis is parliamentary, not elective. I don't really give a toss about the disjunctures between popular vote percentages and party seat counts in the legislature. The crucial democratic deficit in Canada is the inability or unwillingness of our elected representatives to hold power to account. That will endure as long as leaders are not accountable to caucuses and governments are not accountable to legislatures. As far as I can see, Michael Chong has been the only active politician in Canada trying to change that. PR would make that situation worse. I admire Chong but not PR; QED.
You would have to ask Dale Smith about his phrase "the (garbage) Reform Act." But I think he says that because he is a bit of a parliamentary purist. He insists, I think, that MPs should control (and hire and fire) their leaders simply because they are MPs, the legitimately elected representatives of the Canadian people, not because of some recently passed and flawed law. He complains that the Reform Act places limits on the freedom of MPs (e.g., how many it takes to trigger a leadership review). As well, the law does not require MPs to choose new leaders after they fire the failed ones. The Tories are now about to re-enact the same long, tedious, costly, corrupt orgy of vote-buying that made Erin O'Toole leader, probably with similar results.
I'd say Dale Smith is not wrong in these complaints. But I'll take the good until the perfect comes along. The Reform Act has led to a Canadian political party caucus formally replacing a national leader against his will for the first time in much more than a century. (Happened all the time in the nineteenth century, without a Reform Act, but that's another story.) Let that happen a time or two more, and I think the appetite will grow with the eating, as they say, and not only in that one party. (I see Andrew Coyne thinks so too.)
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*Okay, I simplify PR workings. There are myriad forms of proportional representation, and some do seek to address this issue. But the form called MMP, with a substantial proportion of party representatives in caucus, is far-and-away the likeliest if Canada ever adopts PR. Ultimately PR has to be proportional for the parties, not for us.
