Jeremy Geddert: Conservative leadership elections aren’t conservative enough

Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s impossible tightrope act is over, but the chorus of cheers and jeers now moves from the circus ring of caucus to the raucous stage of stunned party members. The Conservative division of labour, where the party membership hires leaders but the caucus fires them, violates the old conservative maxim that you cannot serve two masters. There is nothing conservative about encouraging two-faced leaders, nor about entrusting the “hiring” part to members in the first place.

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Canada’s chief conservative institution is its Westminster system of Responsible Government, the oft-forgottenCanadian triumph of the 1840s. Responsible government rests on two principles that unite the tasks of hiring and firing.

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First, Cabinet alone is responsible for governing, because it both introduces spending bills and executes them. Unlike a presidential cabinet, Canadian ministers cannot deflect responsibility for bad laws to Congress.

Second, Parliament alone  — typically the majority party caucus — is responsible for hiring and firing that governing Cabinet, as Justin Trudeau eventually learned. Unlike the American House majority, Liberal MPs could not deflect responsibility for a bad executive to voters.

Constitutions do not regulate parties outside government. But the Westminster ethos still led opposition parties to adopt the same structure: party caucuses hired and fired their leaders.

If responsibility doesn’t seem distinctively conservative, just ask progressives, who generally bristle at the “smoke-filled rooms” of “party insider” caucuses. The original Progressive party rode a populist western wave of democratization that may have undermined its own leaders, but impelled both major parties to introduce delegated conventions.

Later, the populist Canadian Alliance used a one-member-one-vote method to hire the unready Stockwell Day, which produced a short and stormy tenure for both leader and party. Yet its democratizing wave effectively pressured all Canadian parties to let members hire and fire party leaders.

In practice, of course, caucuses could always find ways to fire their leaders. But nobody seemed to mind having torn up responsible government. The Cold War was over, democracy had won, and the end of history was nigh. Even British parties democratized their leadership contests.

Yet elsewhere, Westminster history continued unabated. For instance, the conservative Australian Liberal Party maintained its closed-door policy, even if no longer smoke-filled. In both 2015 and 2018, its governing majority caucus quickly and smoothly replaced its prime ministers, turning upcoming electoral disasters into renewed majorities.

Each change put the egg on the face of the leader, not the party. Needless to say, B.C. Conservatives can only dream.

New Zealand’s National Party preserved the same exemplary method. Even its Labour rival, keener to indigenize than even the BC NDP, returned in 2021 to the old caucus selection method. Why are B.C. Conservatives less faithful to their Westminster inheritance than Jacinda Ardern, decolonizer of Aotearoa?

Even British Conservatives have recently pioneered a clever way to satisfy the demands of 21st-century democracy while re-empowering Tory MPs. Their caucus uses multi-round voting to whittle down the slate of leadership hopefuls to a first- and second-place finisher, then presents the two finalists to party members for their ultimate decision.

But caucus has pressured two of the last four prime ministerial runners-up to stand down before any such membership vote: after all, they whisper, who wants to lead a caucus that prefers their rival? A third runner-up, Liz Truss, lasted 49 days as the members’ choice before caucus got its preferred candidate, Rishi Sunak. If the B.C. Conservative caucus could have ended Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s tenure after 49 days without having to betray the membership, they might have been the ones pushing for an early election.

When caucuses hire their own leaders, they can select for governing skill rather than twittering volume. If their preferred choice goes rogue as leader, caucus can threaten to fire them without inflicting on the party a public race at once uncertain, protracted, and divisive. Caucus squabbles thus remain in-house and drama-free: no private investigators, few Findlay Files, little time for the embattled leader to purge competent party strategists. If (say) Peter Milobar or Caroline Elliott were an obvious caucus-approved leader-in-waiting, the B.C. right might still be united —maybe even under a disciplined Findlay.

Canadian Conservatives even have an opening to follow their British counterparts. In the name of democratization, the Conservative 2014 Reform Act empowers caucus with several prerogatives over the leader: candidate selection, MP expulsion, choice of chair. Why not further boost caucus by re-entrusting them with the ultimate prerogative over their leaders — that of firing and hiring them?

In spite of democratic pressure, most Anglo conservative parties have maintained their responsible conservative approach to leader selection: caucus fires, caucus hires. Oddly enough, their electorates have not discarded them as reactionary proto-fascists, but have instead elevated them to government. Why do Canadian conservatives sabotage both their principles and prospects by forcing their leaders to serve two masters?

Jeremy Geddert is a Professor of Political Science at Assumption University, and co-editor of the forthcoming book What is Canadian Philosophy?

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