Is it ethical to join a political party?

How many memberships would you like to buy, sir?

On Sunday The Good Wife  episode was "Dark Money": how American politics is corrupted by shadowy billionaires who buy up political campaigns on the crudest motives. The rich old guy played by Ed Asner likes Alicia's legs, thinks the other guy acts too gay. ("Mr Grant!" you expect Juliana Margulies to exclaim).

Meanwhile in Ontario, the Conservative Party is holding a leadership "race." The media have been treating Christine Elliott, lawyer, political veteran, widow of Jim Flaherty -- someone they have actually met and seen in action -- as the dominant candidate. Then an obscure Ottawa MP of tea-partyish opinions announces -- after the sale of memberships has closed -- that he has 40,000 memberships committed to him. Elliott, after years of work, is thought to have 25,000 or so.

One anonymous Conservative observes, "In the past four PC leadership contests — in 1990, 2002, 2004 and 2009 — the winning candidate sold the most memberships."  Um, yes.  Another says  “It’s definitely an insurgency.”  

That's one word for it, I guess. We have elaborate statutory regulations on how much parties can spend on elections, who they can take money from, how much anyone can give, how much of a tax subsidy is involved, and so on.  But within the political parties themselves? The press has no information on who holds these memberships, or who paid for them. Dark money.

Parliamentary democracy in Alberta?

Ramblin' (Wild) rose  -- go for it.

No one should be starry-eyed about the political experimentation that goes on in Alberta.  I mean, who can take seriously a polity that doesn't even have a sales tax and has lived for generations on pissing away the oil royalties? Albertans live the same boom-bust cycle as the global petroleum market -- and blame the east in the bust phases, usually.

But they do experiment politically, and that has to be an inspiration when you contemplate the constipated state of political process in much of the rest of the country. Two recent Alberta political stories have appealed to me.

First the current one: the mass removal of much of the Wildrose Party legislative caucus, including the leader of the opposition, Danielle Smith, to the government party and the government benches.  Colby Cosh of Maclean's describes what's going on. What I like about it, natch, is that we see a group of MPs asserting that they are responsible actors, they have powers, they can act. This is not a merger of two parties negotiated by two leaders and their teams of apparatchiks, later to be ratified in some rigged-out mass party vote, and blindly obeyed by the cattle in caucus. This is a caucus of members strategizing about where they can have the most impact -- for their constituencies, for the province's interests as they see them, for their own political prospering too, no doubt.

The second, equally interesting experiment has been the backbench muscle-flexing that started a bit earlier within the (pre-Wildrose) Conservative party caucus. Apparently the government brought in a foolish bit of authoritarian, anti-gay, and generally impractical legislation, Bill 10. And it was stopped in its tracks, initially by opposition pressure, but then by the refusal of significant parts of the government caucus to stand loyally behind the goof-ups in the premier's office.

Now, it's complicated, because the Wildrose MLAs joining the government are apparently those who attacked it the hardest on Bill 10.  But that's the charm too. It seems plausible that part of the appeal of joining the government caucus right now is the lesson that you don't have to support the government to be in the government caucus.  The ex-Wildrose gang now in the PC ranks may be joining the government benches partly to flex their muscles more effectively when the government does dumb things. When you are on the government benches, you can change the government.

In other words, a little touch of parliamentary democracy may be coming to the Alberta legislature, courtesy of a growing number of members who don't see why, just because they got elected, they should hand over their brains and their influence to the hacks in the leader's office.

Meanwhile in Japan: there was an recent, very fast, very suddenly-called general election. The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, won a majority.  This was odd, in the Canadian perspective, (if anyone here ever paid attention to how parliaments work outside Canada) because Abe already held a majority. Indeed, he leads the LDP, which has governed Japan most of the time since the Second World War.

Abe called the election, not to fight the opposition, mostly, but to fight well-entrenched dissidents in his own party. In Japan the LDP is mostly always in power, like the Cons in Alberta, but Abe faced so much opposition from within his own Finance department and its supporters in his caucus that he could not implement the economic reforms he is convinced Japan needs desperately. The general election was held to strengthen his hand against the rivals in his own party. It seems to have worked.

Imagine Stephen Harper calling an election in an effort to prevent, I don't know, Tony Clement, from keep doing whatever Tony Clement was doing. Okay, don't, it's impossible. But you would know that cabinet ministers and MPs were NOT just a gang of cheerleaders for the boss.

Alberta may be becoming different. The Alberta Conservatives are going to win, anyway, maybe forever, so the best place for dissident ideas to position themselves... is inside the government caucus, where dissidents, it now seems, can actually accomplish things.

Here's what central Canada thinks of the Wildrose move. Yup, politicians failing to kiss ass to the party structures and the party bosses cannot be tolerated, writes Tim Harper in the Toronto Star.

Do you know that barbed line in the poem by Sylvia Plath: "Every woman loves a fascist." In Canada it seems to be every journalist and commentator who does. The only thing we hate more than the democratic deficit and the friendly dictator is anyone trying to do anything about it. But I'd say if Alberta starts to break out of that ice age, good on 'em.

Maybe the inevitable outburst of parliamentary affirmation in Ottawa won't come from Michael Chong's Reform Bill, but on the wildrose-scented breeze coming from Alberta. MPs don't actually need a Reform Bill to authorize them to act.

[slightly revised December 18]

Michael Chong... crazy like fox, or just....

Aaron Wherry has a column at Maclean's about Michael Chong's latest compromises with his Reform Bill, the private member's bill that was supposed to empower backbenchers, freeing them from the leader's arbitrary powers and authorizing them to, gasp, hold leaders to account.

After years preparing it, Chong has changed his Reform Bill's proposals a few times since formally introducing it. Most of the changes have been interpreted as compromises, weakening the bill's import. The new changes seem like more of the same, as if the whole thing were being meddled into insignificance.

I'm not sure. Chong faces a challenge almost unknown in Canadian parliamentary politics in, oh, say the last century or so.  He has a bill in play, but he's a backbencher, not a leader.  He can't just say, here's my bill,  and know -- as a party leader does -- that all his flunkies will vote for it and all the others guys' flunkies will vote against it. As a backbencher proposing a motion in a house where backbenchers of all parties say they may or may not support it, irrespective of what their leaders want, he actually needs to put together enough votes to get his bill through. Doing a little trading in the lobby may be an essential aspect.  This is how parliamentary politics is done when the whip is restrained.

In the fuhrerprinzep (definition here) politics we live with in Canada, this is unheard of. Leaders are expected to dictate and to win; negotiating anything is a sign of weakness or capitulation. Chong, however, may be calculating it is better to get his bill through than not to. Tweaking his bill to provide what the largest number of MPs will support may be what he has to do.

Is there anything of value left in his Reform Bill?  Wherry's summary of the changes suggests Chong is putting less and less into the legislated rules on leadership powers, leaving more and more to the will of parties and party caucuses. That looks like compromise. Since Canadians assume caucuses always bend, indeed must and should bend, to their leaders' will, we assume only legally binding blackletter rules will change parliament.

Chong may be calculating that if the attitudes and behaviours of MPs and caucuses change, then everything changes. If a majority of MPs pass a bill that says they have the right to do whatever they want to in caucus, maybe some of them will actually believe it -- and start to act on it.  If they don't, all the legislated rules won't make any difference anyway. If caucuses did start asserting that leaders are members of caucus and subject to caucus discipline like other members, legislated curbs on out-of-control leaders (the kind the original Reform Bill draft provided) would hardly be necessary.

If MPs are just looking for a face saving way to surrender to the bosses, these changes will provide for that. That's not unlikely. But if they are accepting that if MPs want to take control of their caucuses and legislatures, they just have the powers already, Chong could yet have a stealth victory.

Reform Act: fun while it lasted

Judging by Aaron Wherry's report, Michael Chong's effort to put some parliamentary democracy back into Canada's "parliamentary" "democracy" seem to have pretty much run its course.

The act's high thresholds, onerous conditions, and low payoffs -- dismiss the failed leader, you still don't have any say in the next one -- have already sucked most of the life out of the Reform Act.   But if the first hour of debate on it, with talks of coups and mutinies, seems to suggest it's hardly worth the trouble. When Wherry finds it "inconceivable" that MPs could have any meaningful role in leadership selection, he demonstrates again how narrow is the range of things the Canadian political class can conceive of.  But no doubt he's attuned to the parliament he covers.

Chong's Act is scheduled to get another hour's discussion, probably in the fall.