Parliamentary accountability: more than "You're fired"

Jared Milne writes:

Your discussion of the reluctance of caucuses these days to push back against their leaders is well-put. That said, over the last couple of decades I've seen a phenomenon I call 'Pop Goes The Premier'. Multiple Alberta premiers, from Ralph Klein to Ed Stelmach to Allison Redford to Jason Kenney, have all been 'convinced' to leave by their caucuses when the MLAs started to think the public were souring on them. The funny thing is that Stelmach, Redford and Kenney had all scored decisive election wins, but they decided to resign rather than face the voters a second time. They didn't resign due to formal caucus revolts, but they all saw the writing on the wall.

Indeed, Alberta conservative MLAs have been notably active in undermining their leaders, as part of longstanding ideological rivalries within their party. As you say, none of these premiers was formally removed by caucus. Neither, in the formal sense, was Mackenzie Bowell.

But the really vital question in a parliamentary system is not how a leader is removed but who can choose the next premier. 

Charles Tupper, Bowell's successor as Conservative leader and prime minister, was chosen by the same parliamentary caucus (cabinet, MPs, senators) that had withdrawn its support from Bowell. The process of 1896 (both in removing and replacing Bowell) preserved the fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy: a premier's right to hold office is conditional on having and holding the ongoing support of the parliamentary majority. 

All the Alberta premiers, by contrast, came to power in their party by winning mass-membership vote-buying contests. Some of them, Alison Redford most notably, had little or no caucus support from the start. And all of them were replaced by new leaders chosen by the same kind of extra-parliamentary contests, and therefore came to power under the widely-held assumption that they had no real accountability to the majority of the people's elected representatives in the legislature.

Alberta might one day be the place to revive parliamentary government in Canada. But the disputatious backbenchers would have to take the essential next step and assert their authority to chose a new leader clearly accountable to them, to replace the one from whom they had withdrawn their confidence.  

No sign of that, however.

History, culture, numbers games

 Russ Chamberlayne writes:

This Mastodon page for reducing congressional districts in size made me wonder if your long advocacy for the power of caucuses in Parliament would favour smaller ridings in Canada. Could a house of MPs each representing fewer people, and more closely influenced by them, in turn expect and demand greater influence on party leaders? And would the greater number of MPs, conversely, more readily make their wishes felt?

Short answer: sorry, but I doubt it.

The story Mastodon refers to is this post by Thirty-Thousand.org (an American lobby group), quoting a New York Times editorial in favour of a larger House of Representatives, which has been fixed in numbers since the 1920s.

There's a political science observation that sizes of legislature around the world tend to group around the cube root of the populations they represent. Sometimes this transmutes into a judgment: the number of legislators should match the cube root of the population they represent.  By that rule the US House of Representatives (435 seats) should have 695 seats. By the same rule, the Canadian House of Parliament (338 seats) should have ... 335.  That is, Canada obeys the cube root "law" very precisely. The Thirty Thousand group thinks the US House should far exceed the cube root number.

So there is that. 

On the other hand, there is a longstanding maxim among Canadian political scientists that does seek to explain backbencher docility by the "smallness" of the Canadian House and its caucuses. It proposes that because so many caucus members are either in cabinet, or are parliamentary secretaries, or are aspiring to be one or the other, the remaining backbenchers toe the line out of personal ambition, in hope of future advancement. Political science texts back at least to C.E.S Franks's Parliament of Canada in the 1980s find a causal relationship in the observation that in Britain, where caucuses are larger, deference to leaders is less common. Note that the British House has many more MPs than the cube root law would suggest. I.e., it has the reverse of the American situation, which somehow also produces rather independent members quite often.)  

With regard to the question about backbench power, there is really not much evidence to suggest the correlation "larger caucus = more independence" has an empirical basis. And British cabinet ministers, so loyal in theory, are normally as deeply implicated as backbenchers in British caucuses' reviews of the party leadership.  

The rule that British caucuses mostly hire and fire their own leaders, while Canadian caucus mostly do not, seems to me much more causative of backbencher independence than some theoretical ratio of MPs to constituents. That system presumes accountability. Our Canadian political culture constantly reminds our elected representatives that they have no authority to disagree with a leader who has been chosen by a self-appointed mob from outside the caucus. That still seems to me much more consequential. Surely it's an issue of political culture in Canada, not a numbers game. 

So it's mostly my feeling that as long as backbench MPs are basically useless (from an accountability perspective), there's probably little point in further proliferation of them.   

I note that the cube root rule would give Ontario 246 MPPs instead of 124 -- does that seem like a good idea?

Update, December 9: There's now a substantial addition to this conversation here.

History of grip, losing of

 

Recent news from The Guardian on how parliamentary politics works in Britain.

Conservative MPs are increasingly worried about Boris Johnson’s competence and drive ... and [he] was accused of losing his grip over a series of key policies.

...

Nervousness among Tory MPs about No 10 intensified after one Downing Street source told the BBC there was “a lot of concern inside the building about the PM … it’s just not working”, adding that the “cabinet needs to wake up and demand serious changes otherwise it’ll keep getting worse.”

...

Another Tory MP referenced the process by which MPs can submit letters of no confidence to the chair of the 1922 Committee, Graham Brady, saying: “It might not only be Father Christmas’ postbag filling up towards the end of the year – Sir Graham Brady could find he needs a bigger one too.”

Today's headline: "Boris Johnson is not unwell and has not lost his grip, says No 10." Ouch!

These parliamentary reckonings, driven by the governing caucus, make a startling comparison with Canadian politics. It's fair to say that Jason Kenney, Justin Trudeau, Erin O'Toole and other Canadian leaders have all been suspected of "losing their grip" in recent weeks or days. But the most that happens in Canada is that there is talk about having a mass party conference some time in the far future, so that anyone who buys a vote can have a say in the leader's future and in the choice of a successor.

There is a great gathering of MPs in Ottawa today for a Speech from the Throne. But when Canadian MPs are generally accepted as having no part to play in making policy, holding leadership to account, or chosing better leaders, it's really hard to see what they are there for beyond the dignified rituals.

What's even more odd is how oblivious are Canadian MPs, journalists, and political scientists to this sort of backbencher stirring, although it's the parliamentary norm around the world. When anything remotely like this happens in Canada, they don't encourage accountability, but start mewling about revolts and coups, and demand that the leader apply a strong hand to put down disobedience.  

A dissenter from that chorus: Andrew Coyne. As he put it in a recent column, "There’s a word for a system that demands unanimous support for the leader, and it isn’t democracy."

(It's true that the rare and unsuccessful caucus revolts here seem most often to be the work of cranky, egomaniacal anti-vaxers, flat-earthers, and conspiracists, who mostly give backbenchers a bad name. But still...)