Monday, July 11, 2022

Coyne on leadership

 What Andrew Coyne said in the column entitled "The very nature of a leadership race based on selling membership as fast as you can is corrupting":

Illegal fundraising, faked memberships, or bulk purchases of memberships on others’ behalf (sometimes with illegally raised funds!) – happens in virtually every Canadian party leadership race. And it will go on happening, so long as the parties persist in using leadership elections as membership drives.

The very nature of such a race, in which the prize goes not to the candidate who can win the support of the party’s existing members but the one who can sell the most memberships, is to invite such shenanigans.

I know: you who follow this blog have been reading this sort of argument as long as you have been here. But I appreciate this, because the level of incomprehension and denial among politicians and punditti remains stratospheric. 

People "who buy memberships during leadership races are not party members at all, really, but leadership tourists," Coyne observes. "The leader who surfs in on this wave is, from that day forward, accountable to exactly no one."

See also Coyne's reply to a critic who observes that MPs have lost their entitlement to choose their leaders because of their sacrifice of their own "credibility, dignity, and ability to lead:"

He's not wrong about this. As long as we tell MPs we want them to be like sheep and that our system requires them to be like sheep, and that it's democratic for them to be like sheep, well, baaaa. 

 
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