The veteran MP from Wellington-Halton Hills is touting a trio of reforms that he claims will take power away from the prime minister and give it to members of Parliament.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on August 29, 2022.

OTTAWA—Member of Parliament Michael Chong is back on the reform bandwagon.

The veteran Conservative MP from Wellington-Halton Hills is touting a trio of reforms that he claims will take power away from the prime minister and give it to members of Parliament.

But before we jump on the Chong train-wreck, let’s review the result of his last round of reforms.

Chong came up with the idea that every caucus should be able to turf its leader if one-fifth of the caucus signs an expulsion petition, which is then followed by a secret ballot majority caucus vote.

The original reforms, introduced in a private member’s bill by Chong, were passed by a huge majority vote in the House of Commons.

There was one proviso that made the legislation palatable for everyone. Its implementation was subject to a vote by each caucus at the beginning of every Parliament.

So far, the only caucus that has actually embraced Chong’s reforms has been his own.

And we have seen what a disastrous result that has been for his party.

Since the introduction of Chong’s legislation, the Conservative Party has dumped two leaders within months of a national election, amid open crossfire by party dissidents looking for someone to blame for their loss.

The party has been in shambles with so much infighting that it is difficult to see how ongoing leadership rifts will be healed after the leadership change Sept. 10.

Chong claims reform was introduced to give power to members of Parliament.

But what about members of the party, who are not elected to Parliament?

Take the case of Erin O’Toole. He lasted 18 months as leader of the Conservatives until he was expelled, courtesy of the Chong bill.

In reality, O’Toole was chosen by a majority of almost 175,000 voters and rejected by 73 voters.

How democratic is that?

And how can members of Parliament give themselves the right to remove a leader when they do not have the right to elect a leader?

In Canada, leader selection still rests with the party members. Chong’s first reform bill was a slap in the face to all those who do not sit in Parliament but who devote thousands of hours of their volunteer time to promote a political vision they share with other party members.

There is a reason why no other party has yet adopted these measures.

One of the tenets of membership in a caucus is that you rise and fall together. After an election failure, there needs to be a period of calm reflection, after which all members of the party should have a say in the leader’s status.

It should not be the right of select few members of Parliament to pull the trigger.

Chong’s new triad of reforms are just as illogical. He is claiming that the elected Speaker should determine which members of Parliament have the right to speak in the House of Commons.

That right is currently delegated to parties, based on their standing in the last election.

In elections, people mark their ballot in favour of individuals, yes, but they also vote keeping in mind the party values those individuals represent.

It is not up to the Speaker to run a popularity contest for speaking privileges.

Chong claims that by giving the Speaker these powers, members of Parliament will have to work with other parties, thus promoting more collegiality.

At the end of the day, the parliamentary system works because people represent parties. Those parties include leaders, values, policies, and members who share a vision for the direction of the country.

It is also absurd to say the prime minister controls the House of Commons.

Anyone who knows the system will understand that it is the House leaders and party whips who control the House.

That duo exists in every party, and both meet regularly amongst all parties to negotiate fair House participation.

A single Speaker deciding who gets time in Parliament is much less democratic than a committee of all parties that negotiates times, bill placement, etc.

If Chong’s first reform is any example, it has inflicted more damage than democratization upon his party. After reflection, giving the power of expulsion to a couple dozen members of Parliament may not be such a good idea after all.

Ask Erin O’Toole. He secured the most votes of any leader in the country, and came close to his goal of forming the government.

Another try might have been the charm.

Thanks to Chong’s reform, we will never know.

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

If the Conservatives would ever like to see another PM among their ranks, they need to understand the road to victory involves reaching out to 37 million people, not 73 caucus members.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on February 7, 2022.

OTTAWA—Seventy-three people were able to vote out a leader who was chosen by 100,000 Conservatives. This is democracy?

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s departure was as hasty as it was dramatic. And in a touch of irony, the author of the private member’s bill that prompted O’Toole’s demise was one of the few people fighting for the leader to stay.

Michael Chong introduced his private member’s bill, designed to give more power to individual parliamentarians, in 2013. Everyone lined up in favour of the legislation in the belief that empowering members would lead to better leadership.

But in a bizarre twist for this strange law, each party is allowed to opt in to the system, or not, at the beginning of each Parliament.

Not surprisingly, the Conservative party was the only one dumb enough to sign on to a piece of legislation which is guaranteed to create chaos for any opposition leader.

The Conservatives have cycled through six leaders in six years, and O’Toole took them closest to power. His popular vote victory didn’t help much because so much of the weight in numbers came from provinces that could never yield a majority.

And O’Toole failed to make a breakthrough in two key provinces that are crucial for election victory, Ontario and Quebec.

O’Toole, an Ontario member, understood that the failure to make sufficient gains in that province was based on the extreme viewpoints taken by many of his team on social issues like abortion.

After the election, he moved quickly to reposition the party by supporting legislation banning gender therapy conversion in the first session of Parliament.

As for the Quebec vote, his Conservative caucus in that province was verbally supporting the legislation on Broadcasting Act amendments at the same time that Tory fundraisers were out trashing the legislation to buck up their coffers.

The bifurcation in the party was not caused by O’Toole. It was prompted by a party schism that has only been exacerbated because of his departure.

Deputy leader Candice Bergen, who enjoyed coffee with the truckers while the occupation of Ottawa’s downtown core was underway, is a well-known opponent of a woman’s right to control her own body.

It was no accident that she was the only leader to neglect to thank O’Toole in the House of Commons for his work as a four-term parliamentarian, until reminded by the prime minister.

Bergen is part of the right wing of O’Toole’s party who will guarantee that they lose the next election because of their refusal to embrace political moderation.

In the hours following O’Toole’s departure, most blame was aimed at the leader’s inability to manage the caucus and to keep people happy.

Negative comparisons were made with previous leaders like prime minister Brian Mulroney who managed to keep his troops onside even when his own popularity numbers were dipping into the teens.

But that comparison is not a valid one. Mulroney was operating from the prime minister’s chair, first among equals. And with that job comes many opportunities to reward and punish internally.

Mulroney also did not face the crazy Chong legislation that could hit any leader on a bad day. The ousters were working for weeks to collect the requisite number of 35 signatures to trigger a caucus vote.

One of them, Pierre Poilievre, is already being touted as a front-runner to replace O’Toole. He is squarely in the camp of the “stinking albatrosses” that former leadership candidate Peter MacKay characterized as the reason for the party’s failure to launch.

Unlike O’Toole, who embraced diversity in supporting the LGBTQ community, Poilievre actually once introduced a private member’s bill to ban health-care funding for transgender individuals, even though the issue is not federal jurisdiction. Other putative candidates include another social conservative, Leslyn Lewis.

But both of them will push the party further to the right.

Those 73 members who booted O’Toole out may not like his message. But upon his departure, he gave a speech which was a potential road map to victory.

The party could win by embracing diversity. The secret of success for leaders like Brian Mulroney was to embrace the Progressives in his party as well as the Conservatives.

As long as there is no place for progressive politics within the party, the Conservatives have zero chance of forming the government.

Instead of dumping O’Toole, the caucus should have heeded his message. Because the road to victory involves reaching out to 37 million people, not 73 caucus members.

Conservatives who are not progressive just won’t cut it.

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

That means responding quickly and forcefully to false opposition claims and moving aggressively on a progressive policy agenda.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on April 15, 2019.

OTTAWA—Justin Trudeau has obviously decided that his Kumbayah method of leadership needs a switch.

He came out swinging in the caucus speech, announcing his decision to turf Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott.

And then he moved swiftly by warning the leader of the opposition that Andrew Scheer faces a defamation lawsuit if allegations about Trudeau committing a crime were to continue.

This attack mode runs counter to his normal, sunny disposition and desire to work things out.

Even when he does go out on the attack, he appears reluctant to carry through with it.

Consider the recent case of the legal letter from Trudeau lawyer Julian Porter to Scheer.

Scheer received the letter almost a week before he revealed the contents.

One of the basic rules on communication is that he who leads with the story controls the narrative. So why didn’t PMO get a head start?

Even though Trudeau launched a legal salvo, the public spin on what it could mean was completely in the control of Andrew Scheer.

Trudeau’s seeming unwillingness to get ahead of many stories is one of the reasons that his personal popularity has taken a major hit, following the two-month Jane and Jody show.

Wilson-Raybould’s story was leaked to The Globe and Mail, and the substance was not immediately dealt with in an open and forthright fashion by the prime minister.

She was bitter at being removed from her dream job of attorney general and justice minister. But her treatment of a number of files during her time in justice were sufficient cause for the prime minister to make a change.

No one is a minister for life and it is up to the prime minister to choose his team. Her attempt to promote an anti-Charter justice in the top job of the Supreme Court was itself sufficient to warrant a job change.

But instead of defending his decision with a fulsome explanation of the whole story, Trudeau kept insisting the mess was a simple matter of miscommunication.

It was not.

Wilson-Raybould was blocking documents requested by the Privy Council Office, and criticizing colleagues who dared to ask her whether there were other options in the consideration of a deferred prosecution agreement for SNC-Lavalin.

After weeks of leaks, which painted the prime minister into a corner, Trudeau finally came out to reinforce his commitment to exhaust all options given the jobs that could have been at risk in the SNC-Lavalin case.

Once again, too little, too late.

Even when the Prime Minister’s Office or surrogates went on the attack with their own discrediting leaks, no one seemed able to put a name to a single one of the criticisms.

The final straw occurred when the PMO revealed the reason the firings took so long was because the prime minister was trying to negotiate a way back with the two former ministers.

Public Services and Procurement Minister Carla Qualtrough was mandated to speak to the media about the negotiations.

She prefaced her remarks by saying she could not speak about the substance of the negotiations.

If not, what was the point of scrumming when you refuse to speak about the message you want to reinforce?

Once again, the former attorney general fired back with a denial of the most damning allegation, that she demanded the prime minister tie the hands of the new minister with the same level of direction that she had decried in her own case.

Wilson-Raybould issued a very carefully worded denial, which was not a direct no.

But since no one on the other side countered it, it muddied the waters and countered the prime minister’s claim that his office had worked diligently to get the two recalcitrant members back on board.

The whole business of who is allowed to fire a member from caucus was confusing because the Liberals took so long to respond to Michael Chong’s claim that the firing was questionable because of new amendments to the Parliament of Canada Act.

Trudeau and his team had three years of sunny stories and positive domestic and international media. Two of his own colleagues have managed to derail that momentum, and now the Liberals are going to have to fight to get back on their agenda.

That means responding quickly and forcefully to false opposition claims and moving aggressively on a progressive policy agenda.

Climate change and gun control are two items that clearly differentiate the Grits and the Tories.

The prime minister better start getting ahead of those stories instead of fighting a continuous rear-guard action.

Editor’s note: This column originally reported that Michael Chong claimed the authority to fire an MP was illegal, but this has been corrected. Mr. Chong did not claim it was illegal, but did question the prime minister’s authority to fire an MP without a caucus vote. At that first caucus meeting, a recorded vote of Liberals MPs was required because of new amendments to the Parliament of Canada Act. Liberal MPs were required to adopt or reject the rule concerning the expulsion of a member by caucus through a secret-ballot vote. That recorded vote never took place, as confirmed by Liberal MP John McKay. That the recorded vote never took place contravened of Sec. 49.8 of the act.

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