If members choose the leader in the first place, why don’t they do the firing?

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on October 24, 2022.

OTTAWA—What do British Tories and British Columbian New Democrats have in common?

They both moved with dispatch last week to get rid of leaders or potential leaders of their respective parties.

In the case of the British prime minister, Liz Truss’s resignation—after just six weeks in office—marks the end of a tumultuous term during which a massively unpopular mini-budget saw the party’s numbers plummet.

The party elected the leader but, in the end, it was a loss of caucus confidence that cost her the job.

Even after sacking the finance minister and rescinding the millions of pounds in tax cuts, Truss was unable to right her sinking ship. One vitriolic British newspaper headline characterized the Tory governance as a clown car.

Truss will suffer the fate of having the shortest prime ministerial tenure in British history. The next leader will be chosen by the party, but given the capacity to dump a leader after six weeks, it must be hard for members to believe their participation really counts.

Another leadership will not be facing the New Democrats in British Columbia because, as a result of an internal report, the party has chosen a coronation.

In either case, the leader is much less dependent on party support and much more dependent on caucus support.

Is that necessarily a good thing?

In the British system there is absolutely no room for error. If an unpopular move is made by the prime minister, he or she has no time to rebuild support and confidence.

To use a Canadian example, when the Liberals came to power in 1993, the country was deemed a financial basket case by certain financial institutions.

There was no choice but to cut, and cut deeply. The government laid off thousands of employees, and cut budgets across the board by between 15 and 25 per cent.

The only budget that then-prime minister Jean Chrétien refused to cut was spending for Indigenous services. But that financing normally increases with a hike in population, so even a standstill amounts to the equivalent of a cut.

The reduction process took a year as every minister had to present their budget cut proposals to a cabinet committee. I sat on one that was nicknamed “the Star Chamber.”

Some ministers could not agree on what the cuts should be. For example, when the department of foreign affairs recommended meeting its target by ending its funding of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the minister of finance vetoed that move. The foreign minister was sent back to the drawing board.

During this period, there was a fair bit of internal grumbling about the shape of the cuts, and it was particularly difficult for Ottawa-area members of Parliament to explain the job reductions to their constituents.

How easy it could have been to organize a group within caucus to dump the leader, and end the cost-cutting exercise before it even began.

The Brits are facing a fifth Conservative leadership in six years.

In British Columbia’s case, current Premier John Horgan enjoyed longevity.

But what would have been a party election for leader has been replaced by a coronation, since the elections committee has disallowed the candidacy of the only other opponent.

The decision to refuse the candidacy of Anjali Appadurai was based on an internal report which found that, “Ms. Appadurai engaged in serious improper conduct by co-ordinating with third parties” to recruit new members.
Anjali Appadurai was disqualified from the NDP leadership race on Oct. 20—the same day that Liz Truss stepped down as British prime minister. Photograph courtesy of Twitter

The candidate vigorously denied the claims, suggesting instead that the party introduced a mid-campaign interpretation of the membership rules which was applied retroactively.

Appadurai, an environmentalist, had little caucus support, but was said to have sold many more memberships than her leadership rival and former Attorney General David Eby.

Eby automatically becomes the premier as a result of the coronation. When Eby announced his candidacy last summer, he had the support of 48 colleagues.

That support was likely what caused several other caucus colleagues to stay out of the race.

A coronation may be the simplest route forward for the party, but it may not enhance New Democrat chances with the general public.

Leadership campaigns provide an opportunity to recruit new members. Many stay, even after the race is over. Appadurai supporters, who joined the party for the race, are already leaving in despair.

The British decision to dump a leader after six weeks, or the B.C. NDP move to dump a candidate, may both cause members of each respective party to quit.

If members choose the leader in the first place, why don’t they do the firing?

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

First published on January 29, 2018 in The Hill Times.

OTTAWA—Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne must have been born under a lucky star.

Against all odds, she beat a Liberal establishment choice to win the party’s provincial leadership.

Then she parlayed her reputation as a straight-talking minister and a proud lesbian into the premier’s chair.

She confounded the pundits, sidestepping certain defeat after the departure of former leader Dalton McGuinty.

With a savvy, targeted campaign, Wynne snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

No one was predicting another Liberal victory lap in the election scheduled in June.

But that was before last week. Before Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown threw his party into turmoil following a late-night resignation stemming from allegations of sexual misconduct from two separate women.

Brown was the second provincial Conservative leader to step down last week.

Nova Scotia chartered accountant Jamie Baillie resigned early Wednesday morning following completion of a report into alleged sexual improprieties that surfaced last December.

In Baillie’s case, he resigned his leadership and seat immediately, claiming personal reasons for accelerating an already-announced departure.

Federal Liberals were facing accusations of their own, with a claim of inappropriate elevator comments by Alberta federal cabinet minister Kent Hehr who later resigned from cabinet.

As for Brown, he tearfully proclaimed his innocence and vowed to remain on as a member of provincial parliament to clear his name.

Until last week, Brown’s political future looked bright. His party was facing competitive nomination races across the province, usually a precursor to a strong election showing.

Brown was working effectively behind the scenes, improving his French and building alliances with key multicultural communities. It was Brown’s deep organization links into the Indo-Canadian community that prompted his surprise leadership win in the first place.

Brown was the primary beneficiary of a desire for political change. That electoral force is sometimes unstoppable.

But who could have foreseen the chaos that the Progressive Conservatives would plunge themselves into, with the daunting task of securing a new leader before an election looming in four months.

Even though most of Brown’s loyalists deserted him, the party’s decision to hastily dump him will not be supported by all.

The press conference suggestion by deputy leader Sylvia Jones that Brown’s departure was just a “hiccup” prompted an apology on Twitter. Some may even wonder whether the allegations, which date back five to 10 years, were a thinly-disguised leadership coup.

The Ontario Tory process was quite different from that facing the Nova Scotia Conservative leader. In Baillie’s case, allegations were revealed to party officials last December and they sought an independent review of the facts. Receipt of that report is what precipitated last week’s resignation.

The answers to numerous questions may never be revealed, as the party is trying to keep the names of the alleged victims out of the media.

That cone of silence comes with its own set of challenges. Two former Liberal Members of Parliament were effectively removed from their posts after engaging in what they claimed were consensual relations with two New Democratic Members of Parliament.

One accuser, whose identity was shielded, stated on camera that she had brought condoms on a hotel room visit to her aggressor after the couple had been drinking together.

Nobody condones stepping out on your spouse, and both Liberals were married. But surely an extra-marital dalliance is not a firing offence.

Nor does it make sense to put the harassment of employees in the same category as after-hockey member to member (literally) socializing.

Whatever the circumstance behind the Brown resignation, the fulminations that flow from his leave-taking will do serious damage.

Like it or not, we live in a leader-driven political world, and a party cannot possibly go into the election with only an interim leader.

That means the Tories have two short months to establish a new leadership process that has everyone’s support.

Even when they pick a winner, the in-fighting that goes on in a leadership race takes time to heal.

Add to that, the potential dynamic of a leader being done in by his own back room rivals on the eve of an election, and that could be a poison cocktail.

Hours after Brown’s exit, potential leadership candidates were out in the media making all the right noises.

At least four women are being touted as replacements, including Lisa Raitt, Christine Flaherty, Lisa MacLeod and deputy leader Jones.

In the end, Ontario may go to the polls next June with a woman leader in every party.

In a curious twist, last week’s harassment allegation may put a woman in the premier’s chair.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

Published first on Monday, January 23, 2017 in The Hill Times.

OTTAWA—The politics of language and the language of politics are as Canadian as hockey.

Last week, the Liberals and Conservatives were both facing heat on Quebec’s hot-button language issue.  

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in trouble for speaking too much French, and Conservative candidate Kevin O’Leary for not speaking enough.

Both were defending their language choices for different reasons. Both faced the wrath that can only be unleashed by the politics of language in Canada.
 
Trudeau, in Sherbrooke, Que., on his cross-country tour, waded into the language issue, by answering all questions during the town hall debate in French, even those that were asked in English.

He prefaced his language switch with a comment in English that “since we’re in Quebec, I’ll respond in French.” Trudeau had obviously decided in advance to stick to the preferred language in every province.  

He spoke mostly English in provinces that are designated as unilingual English, and vice versa in Quebec. The only Canadian province designated bilingual is New Brunswick.

But federal language policy guarantees every Canadian the right to receive federal services in the language of their choice, regardless of where they live.

In pursuit of that right, at least two people have taken the prime minister to task by filing complaints with the official languages commissioner. Those complaints guarantee that this issue is not going to go away any time soon.

It also puts the prime minister in the enviable position of defending his use of the French language in Quebec. This politics of language may actually reinforce support amongst francophones who criticize Trudeau for not being French enough. With a francophone father and an anglophone mother, Trudeau is truly comfortable in both languages but has been denigrated publicly for thinking in English and being less  fluent in his father’s mother tongue.

Holding any political event in Quebec always puts the language issue under the spotlight. Had Trudeau simply responded in the language of the questioner, he might actually have spent more time speaking English, which could have caused a different kind of political flak.

His team obviously calculated that, in the long term, risking the ire of Quebec anglophones was less dangerous than appearing too English in Quebec. He does, however, run the risk of falling short on his avowed support for bilingualism.

If that ever-present language dilemma is all too complicated for politics, Trudeau has a less intractable problem than that of Conservative leadership candidate Kevin O’Leary.

The television host announced his candidacy the day after after the party’s only French-language debate so he could avoid exposing his ineptitude in Canada’s official Gallic tongue. Montreal-born O’Leary professes his love for Quebecers but doesn’t believe fluency in French is a sine quae non for political leadership.

His answer when questioned about the importance of French is that he speaks the language of jobs, and that is what Quebecers want to hear. But fellow Tory candidate and fluent French speaker Maxime Bernier challenged that contention during another recent debate. “Sure, Quebecers are happy to speak English to tourists. But that doesn’t mean you can govern Italy without speaking Italian.”

With one-quarter of the delegates to the Conservative leadership coming from Quebec ridings, mastery of French is a must. Seventeen years older than Trudeau, O’Leary grew up in a different time. But O’Leary attended school in Quebec, and even credits McGill University with curing his dyslexia. The fact that a native son cannot even speak the majority language is puzzling.

And to assume that his inability to speak French is a non-issue reflects a deep  misunderstanding of Quebec and Canadian politics. O’Leary’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of fluency is a political mistake of gargantuan proportions. Perhaps the reality that the candidate has spent most of his adult life living outside the country has distorted his political judgment.

Even before O’Leary entered the race, fellow candidate and former minister Chris Alexander put the issue bluntly. “One cannot understand Canada and one cannot prepare to govern Canada without understanding Quebec,” said Alexander, a former Immigration minister.

Now that O’Leary is officially in the race, language will loom large in Conservative conversations over the next few months.

Trudeau made a mistake in not responding to a question in the town hall participant’s language of choice. But his language problem pales in comparison with that of O’Leary.  

For a native-born Quebecer to speak too much French in his home province is explicable. To speak no French at all is not.
 
Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era Cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

Published first on Monday, January 9, 2017 in The Hill Times.

OTTAWA—Lisa Raitt’s campaign to stop Kevin O’Leary was brilliant.

It vaulted her to the front of the news cycle during a January political lull. It also set her up as a foil to the Trump-like tendencies of some of the Blue Tories who are already in the race or thinking of joining.

It would be folly to assume that Raitt does not want O’Leary in the race.

A good part of her message last week targeted Kellie Leitch, and the controversial proposed citizenship test of Canadian values.

Raitt needs O’Leary in the race to split the Blue Tory vote.

If that sounds complicated, two voting rules guarantee a campaign roller coaster ride in the months leading up to the May vote.

First, the Tories have adopted preferential balloting, which means that voters will actually rank their preferred candidates.

Ironically, that same system was one of the options proposed to replace the first-past-the-post general election vote, without much support from the Conservative Party.

The new system means the winner may not be the first choice of the greatest number of voters, but rather the second choice of the majority.

If this sounds complicated, it is one of the reasons that most people exit the conversation when the subject of electoral reform is broached.

But the peregrinations are compelling for political animals who follow leadership conventions with the same passion the rest of us reserve for hockey championships.

The greater the number of leadership candidates, the more Raitt needs to divide the vote in order to come up the middle. 

In other words, she needs the blunt force trauma that O’Leary’s candidacy would ignite to limit the potential migration of Blue Con votes to Leitch.

During multiple press appearances, Raitt spent more time railing on Leitch than on O’Leary, reinforcing her real intent in launching the Stop O’Leary website.

The site will also permit her supporters to get immediate access to email data of potential Conservative voters who don’t align with the values of O’Leary, and coincidentally, Leitch.

Raitt’s team followed up her press appearances with the purchase of a pop-up ad on social media flagging the Stop O’Leary website on all national news apps.

That data mining will be golden in recruiting more members and mobilizing an anti-O’Leary movement with the hopes of converting it to a pro-Raitt force.

The second element that makes the Raitt strategy so smart is the party’s decision to give equal electoral weight to every riding in the country, regardless of the number of registered Tories entitled to vote.

Raitt is one of only two Conservative candidates with ties to Atlantic Canada. She was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia to a family which shared a passion for business and unions. That could explain her visceral reaction to an O’Leary vow that, if in government, he would outlaw unions.

The other Conservative with Atlantic roots is fellow Ontario contender Erin O’Toole. He served in Shearwater and attended law school in Halifax during his career in the armed forces as a regular and reservist.

Even though the Tories were wiped out in Atlantic Canada in the last election, they have deep roots and strong provincial organizations in every province.

East coast ridings have as much weight as vote-rich Alberta, so anyone who can sweep Atlantic Canada has a good chance of being toward the front of the pack on voting day May 27.

Raitt’s bold move will allow her to recruit Red Tories who have a deep connection to the party and do not want to see it go down the same path as the Republican extremism south of the border.

Many Atlantic Conservatives yearn for the time when they used to be progressive, and there are plenty of Tory icons, from Flora MacDonald to John Crosbie, who never supported the Conservatives’ shift to the right under Stephen Harper.

Raitt is banking on social media technology and new recruitment techniques, to swell Red Tory, anti-O’Leary ranks within the party with online recruitment. In so doing, she is well-positioned to become everyone’s second choice.

That is where the likeability factor can have an influence

The risk in launching such a public attack on O’Leary and Leitch is that Raitt may bruise her reputation for likeability.

It requires a delicate balance to trash colleagues with a smile.

If she succeeds in establishing herself as the most viable progressive Conservative choice, she may be able to eclipse the neo-cons in the race.

Raitt’s move is a political game changer.

 
Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era Cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

Published in The Hill Times on Monday, November 28, 2016.

OTTAWA—Charlie Angus is being heralded as the Canadian Bernie Sanders.

His decision to resign as chair of the New Democratic Party caucus to explore his leadership ambitions was wise and welcome.

Angus is a solid parliamentary performer who is well-respected for his understanding of rural, northern and aboriginal issues. He stands up for the marginalized, which puts him in sync with Sanders’ Democratic primary campaign message, but the comparison stops there.

There are two key reasons why the political gulf between Sanders and Angus is so wide.

First, the urban-rural split in the United States is quite different, and the bizarre electoral college system proffers disproportionate influence to certain states, which happen to have more small town voters.

Canada is a more urban country. In the most recent Statistics Canada data, more than 80 per cent lived in urban centres. Similar American statistics put the number of their urban dwellers at 70 per cent. Ten per cent doesn’t seem like a lot but a comparison of the two systems of voting will yield more clues as to why the Sanders-Angus comparison will not fly.

In Senator Sanders home state of Vermont, the capital city boasts a population of 7,855 which swells to 21000 during the day because of an influx of government workers from neighbouring bedroom communities.

Angus lives in Cobalt, Ontario’s most historic town, with a population of 1,133.

His Timmins-James Bay riding includes 83,104 people. The riding represents one seat in a House of Commons with 338 members.

Sanders’ state of Vermont has a population of 626,042, the second smallest in the union, and get three electoral college votes. With only 278 electoral college votes determining the presidency, the relative importance of Vermont voting patterns looms much larger in the race for the presidency.

The United States has more rural and small town voters, but most important, the electoral college system skews the influence of votes disproportionately toward those voters.

The second major difference between Angus and Sanders is that Sanders voting base exists within a party that has formed government. During the primary, Sanders’ message appealed directly to disaffected Democrats who felt they were being left behind by globalization and international trade deals.

From the rust belt through to the Midwest, Sanders attracted a swathe of voters similar to those who ultimately switched to Donald Trump. They included disaffected union members, the less educated and the kind of Flint, Michigan working-class voter documentarized by filmmaker Michael Moore.

For the most part, Angus’ New Democratic Party is already the home of that demographic. The leadership of the majority of Canadian public and private sector unions is formally, constitutionally tied to the NDP, with specific voting privileges at national and regional conventions.

Unlike American unions, Canadian labour leaders have sacrificed leverage by supporting only the NDP at a national level.

Some provincial trade unions have broken from that tradition.

The Working Families coalition in Ontario was formed to fight anti-union policies from any party. In the lead up to the provincial election that elected Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne, they waged a vocal anti-Conservative campaign. The group including teachers, nurses, and construction workers, campaigned to vote strategically in ridings to defeat anti-union candidates.

The result had the effect of driving New Democrat voters over to the Liberals to stop Tim Hudak.

In the United States, labour unions can decide elections. In a few Canadian provinces, Quebec and British Columbia to be precise, labour plays a similar role. But those examples are rare, and generally flourish in two-party provinces.

Angus has a formidable challenge. He was quoted last week as saying he wants to build a bridge between the dreamers and the doers in his party. That will be no mean feat because the hard-core NDP membership is bound together by the ideology of socialism.

An ideologically based party is much harder to shift than a party shaped by the art of the possible. The historical strength of the Canadian Liberal Party has been based on a guiding set of principles tempered by political realism.

Governing has an abrupt way of snuffing out ideology. That doesn’t mean cabinets don’t care, but rather they are influenced more by what is done than what is dreamed. If the possibility of defeat looms, it has a way of focusing your attention. If a party has never actually formed government, it is much easier to promote idealistically unachievable goals.

Angus’ potential candidacy is good news for the NDP. But he is no Bernie Sanders.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

OTTAWA—New Democratic Leader Tom Mulcair may have difficulty staying out of the numbers game. He is doing his best to avoid the trap, saying he will work to secure the support of all party members.

But Mulcair may not have a choice, with NDP Party President Rebecca Blaikie tossing around a challenge even more onerous than the one that sunk former Conservative leader, ousted prime minister Joe Clark.

When the party president cites a number, the die is cast. No one can blame Mulcair for staying away from the numbers game. Many before him have suffered from that fatal mistake.

But it also begs the question on the silent killer of sitting New Democrats in the last election. Why does it take 70 per cent of a party to affirm a leader and only fifty per cent to break up a country?

Mulcair’s orchestration of the Sherbrooke Declaration and the killing of the Clarity Act was a deadly electoral mistake in most of the country, except Quebec. It was the one error he did not even mention in recent interviews providing an autopsy of his own mistakes.

Mulcair’s biggest challenge will be to re-establish socialist credentials. The voting public may prefer the moderate middle. But the New Democratic Party base tilts definitely leftward.

Party insiders are not very happy about an election where their leader deliberately positioned the platform to the right of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Mulcair acknowledges that mistake, saying it was his decision to play it safe, an electoral choice that turned out to be fatal.

He also says he has cleaned house. Some of his longest-serving allies have headed West to work for Premier Rachel Notley. That is hardly a demotion, but a recognition that those who have tasted the potential sweetness of power actually want to work in government.

Languishing for four more years in a rebuilding mode on the federal scene is certainly not as attractive as actually delivering policy today.

Mulcair has his own nemesis out in Alberta with former rival Brian Topp running the operation for Premier Notley and recruiting the castoffs from the good ship Mulcair.

They have a good three years to hone their governing skills in Alberta with the hope of coming back to be part of a winning national team in the next election.

Meanwhile, if Mulcair really wants to dig deep, he has to acknowledge a couple of flaws in his own post-election post mortem.

The leader put a tremendous amount of emphasis on his principled stand in favour of the niqab, pointing to insider polling that saw his party drop 20 points overnight. For sure the decision hurt, but the winning party also had the same position.

So reading too much into that call is not borne out by overall election results. Mulcair’s statements on the niqab were more pointed than those of Justin Trudeau. But his speaking style in general was more aggressive.

Trudeau ran a very positive campaign, while Mulcair admitted his lawyerly rational approach was not appreciated.

It goes deeper than that. And that is why the referendum question cannot be overlooked when New Democrats reflect on their choice for future leader. Mulcair was the architect of the Sherbrooke Declaration, which became his way of demonstrating to nationalist Quebecers that he was one of them. That is probably why they were so shocked to witness his support for multiculturalism by way of the niqab. They knew the Liberals were strong supporters of multiculturalism, so the Grit head-covering stance was expected.

But not so for Mulcair, who was supposed to be “one of them.” Nowhere was the nationalist streak more visible than when Mulcair attacked Trudeau’s father for his position on the War Measures Act.

The timing couldn’t have been worse, as it was the anniversary of Pierre Trudeau’s death, and Justin hit him right between the eyes on that, and on the number that Trudeau considered definitive for referendum purposes. Nine Supreme Court judges validated the Clarity Act and contradicted Mulcair.

Most anglophone Canadians who could remember supported Trudeau’s 1970 actions. By attacking him and by vowing to repeal the Clarity Act, Mulcair lost seats in Atlantic Canada and Ontario that otherwise might have survived the purge.

By refusing to reflect on the problem that he created with the Sherbrooke Declaration, Mulcair ignores a big factor in his defeat.

If it takes more than two-thirds of a party to affirm a leader, how can you not ask the same for a country?

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.