Tragedy in the Commons (6 page)

“There’s too much power in the hands of the central campaign committee,” said former Oakville-area Liberal MP
Bonnie Brown. “They don’t recognize the need for the local associations to have their own way. In other words, what they do is, they try to interfere and get the person they think can get elected nominated.… Then they wonder why all the other Liberals in town aren’t working very hard. Instead of having a proper process and letting the best person in the eyes of the local Liberals win, and then everybody gets on board and you have a great team.”

Such criticisms of the nomination process are of concern because political nomination is the point of entry into politics, the crucial first step in our electoral process. That moment is a key moment of engagement for regular citizens, and often their first contact with the political system. A nomination may give a first impression of what politics is like from the inside—and the way this first impression goes can either encourage or discourage people from further participation. Judging from Monte Solberg’s encounters with former supporters, his first nomination turned a lot of people on to politics. To what extent are “opaque” and apparently predetermined nomination proceedings turning people off?

Although some MPs leave their parties once in office, in the past thirty years only two have been elected independently of a party. So, nominations also form many candidates’ first impressions of working with a political party.

Working with an established party to win a seat in the House of Commons is supposed to be a three-step process: first, the party’s riding association organizes a nomination contest to determine which party member will be its candidate for that riding. Next, the nominee’s candidacy must be approved by the party leader. Then comes the election itself.

The nomination process is particularly important in Canada because many federal ridings tend to be won by the same political party, election after election. In recent decades, Toronto and Vancouver have largely voted Liberal, Winnipeg NDP and Alberta Conservative. Newfoundland tends to be Conservative in rural areas and Liberal in St. John’s. The Quebec riding of Mount Royal has been Liberal since 1940. Ottawa–Vanier and its predecessor riding of Ottawa East have been Liberal since 1935. And Central Nova has been Conservative or Progressive Conservative for thirty of the last forty years. Of course, ridings do change hands, often as part of a wave—such as the 1993 election that nearly obliterated the Progressive Conservative Party, and the 2011 election, in which the Bloc Québécois lost forty-four of its forty-seven seats—but the preponderance of safe ridings in this country means that the nomination contest is effectively the real election.

At first glance, the nomination procedure seems straightforward: the delegate with the most votes wins the nomination. But even years after their first nomination, many of the MPs we interviewed struggled to articulate how nominations functioned, citing a lack of clarity in time lines, sources of decision making and the application of the rules. Procedures varied widely from riding to riding, and the process appeared subject to a host of idiosyncrasies, giving the impression that the party’s, rather than the people’s, favoured candidate was selected.

The power that parties exert over the nomination processes increased in two ways during the early ’70s, as the result of a law passed in Parliament in 1970. Up until the 1972 federal election, ballots listed the names of candidates, along
with their occupations—which provided a small personal touch. Although candidates had been affiliated with parties since Confederation, it wasn’t until that election that the candidate’s name was followed by an identifying political party. According to research prepared by the Parliament of Canada, the intention was to make it easier for voters to differentiate the candidates (there had been cases of candidates with similar names running in the same riding); and listing party affiliation seemed more in step with practices of modern political campaigning, in which parties and their leaders are often front and centre.

It’s easy to read volumes of symbolic meaning in the change. Previously, candidates were individuals whose identity was informed by their job and perhaps the riding in which they lived. Once the candidate’s name was followed by his or her party affiliation, the candidate became an extension of the party’s brand. A second change further increased the candidate’s subordination to the party, as party leaders gained veto power over each successful nominee. Before this change, local constituency associations would organize and oversee nomination races. But the new legislation empowered the party leader to refuse to sign someone’s nomination papers, even if he or she had won the local nomination organized by the constituency association. From this point on, each candidate’s accountability was fractured. Whereas candidates had once been accountable only to their local party association, they would also now serve the party leader—and the party leader began exercising that power.

According to research published in 2011 by political scientists Royce Koop and Amanda Bittner, these changes were embraced most enthusiastically by the Liberal Party, which amended its party constitution in the 1990s to give the
party leader the ability to parachute in candidates, or pre-empt local nomination contests and appoint candidates with little or no input from members of a local riding association. In practice, however, this power is used sparingly. Its ostensible purpose is to increase the representation of women or other underrepresented groups, to appoint “star” candidates and to protect incumbents from well-organized local challengers. Yet in 2008, according to Koop and Bittner’s research, roughly one in five members of the Liberal caucus had been helped through the nomination by the leader.

It wasn’t only Liberals who had problems with the way the parties run nominations. The former Conservative MP for Saskatoon–Rosetown–Biggar, Carol Skelton, disapproved of the machinations of what she called the “backroom boys.” Skelton said, “It was one of those things I didn’t like about politics.” Her colleague, former Conservative MP for Kelowna Werner Schmidt, called the process “scary” and “frightening.” Inky Mark, a Manitoba MP for thirteen years, was scathing. “Parties are basically dishonest; totally dishonest. They lie through their teeth and manipulate their membership,” he said. “They take all they want. It’s a money grab. They grab your money. All the stuff they tell you to do is just a façade. It’s like a TV commercial.”

The former NDP MP for Winnipeg North, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, called her nomination process a really “eye-opening” situation. “I think, even though you might find that the NDP is more participatory and democratic than the Conservatives and the Liberals, I think … when we are in government, or close to being in government, we run into much more controlling situations that might be seen as the antithesis of true democracy.” Principally, Wasylycia-Leis mentioned candidate recruitment.
“You have all this great theory on paper about searching for candidates, and ‘we are never going to do what the Liberals do in terms of appointing candidates’ and ‘we are never going to do what the Conservatives do’ … but I think sometimes what we do is, we control the timing and … we can find ways to make it impossible for anyone to contest a nomination. I think there is some real angst in the party right now about that.”

Liberal Stephen Owen recounted his transition from law professor at the University of Victoria to Liberal candidate for Vancouver Quadra in the space of a week, after MP Ted McWhinney retired suddenly a week before Jean Chrétien’s government called the 2000 election. “There was no time for a nomination meeting because the election would have been almost over by the time someone had been nominated, so I was going to have to be appointed by the prime minister, which is never a particularly popular thing,” Owen said. “We were in an election within a week. Five weeks later we were standing before Parliament Hill.”

Owen’s case was exceptional—there wasn’t time for a standard nomination process. Another exception belonged to Liberal MP Pierre Pettigrew, whom Jean Chrétien appointed to his Cabinet before Pettigrew had a seat in the House of Commons, an emergency measure to bolster federalist experience following the close result in the 1995 Quebec referendum. It wasn’t until MP André Ouellet was named the head of Canada Post, opening up the Montreal riding of Papineau–Saint-Michel, that Pettigrew was parachuted into the riding as the Liberal nominee and won the by-election on March 25, 1996.

The Liberals gave Eleni Bakapanos her riding of Saint-Denis in 1993 after Jean Chrétien insisted, against Bakapanos’s
wishes, that she not run in a conventional nomination race—part of a push by Chrétien and his team to elect more women into the House of Commons. And Jean Augustine, former MP for Etobicoke–Lakeshore, had experienced a similar selection process the same year. “That appointment marred a lot of debates and discussions that I was involved in. Whether it was the media, community, all-candidates’ [debates], the whole business of ‘you were appointed’ came in,” she recalled. Controversial nomination proceedings continued through the mid-2000s, as the Liberal Party transitioned from Chrétien’s leadership to Paul Martin’s guard. One well-known case involves the 2004 nomination battle in a newly formed Hamilton-area riding that encompassed ridings held by two sitting Liberal MPs. The ensuing contest cost former deputy PM Sheila Copps her seat. Another case was the 2004 Ottawa South race between David McGuinty and Ottawa city councillor Diane Deans, who claimed that senior party members asked her to step aside so that McGuinty would be certain to win the nomination. She declined, then lost the nomination contest anyway.

Or take the nomination battle of Omar Alghabra, an engineer and long-time Liberal Party member who worked on many different campaigns over the years, mostly in the Mississauga area. He was on the board of directors for the riding of Mississauga–Erindale, where a spot opened up after Liberal leader Paul Martin expelled Carolyn Parrish from caucus in 2004 following controversial comments about George W. Bush and her publicly stated antipathy toward Martin himself.

“Some people said, you should consider doing this, and then I actually shrugged it off,” Alghabra recalls. “My
immediate reaction was, no, are you kidding? I had my corporate blinders on. I had a career, I had a good job.… All the negative associations with being a professional politician came to mind, whether it is how people label politicians or the gruelling tasks of fundraising, campaigning.” Then Alghabra had a conversation with a friend whom Alghabra had always badgered about getting involved in politics as a volunteer. Otherwise, Alghabra would say, just a handful of insiders had power. Now the friend told Alghabra that this was
his
chance—here was Alghabra’s opportunity to get inside the process. To put his money where his mouth was.

Alghabra decided to go for it. He filled out the paperwork required to begin his candidacy in October of 2005, weeks before the Liberal minority government fell—a complex and detailed form that also included police and credit checks. And then he waited. There was a long conversation with Charles Bird, the Liberal Party’s Ontario campaign manager. The telephone call felt like a job interview, Alghabra thought. Bird followed Alghabra’s answers with impenetrable silence. Alghabra can recall thinking, once he ended the call, that he’d messed up somehow. In typically opaque fashion, the party didn’t tell him anything about his application.

As time passed, Alghabra heard whispers about the Liberal Party’s nomination proceedings. Was Martha Hall Findlay going to be parachuted into his riding, as an appointed Liberal Party nominee? What about Bob Rae? Altogether, Alghabra figures he’d heard that ten other people were interested in the nomination. “Like everything in politics,” Alghabra says, “there were a lot of rumours and innuendo about what the party was going to do.”

On the evening of Sunday, November 27, 2005, Alghabra picked up the phone to hear Charles Bird’s voice. In a business-like manner, Bird informed him that the nomination meeting would happen in four days, on Thursday, December 1, at Mississauga’s Canadian Coptic Centre. Alghabra would be running against Charles Sousa—a friend of Alghabra’s, whom Alghabra had actually supported in earlier nomination battles.

What happened to the others who were supposedly interested in the riding? Did Liberal Party leadership interfere in the process, to increase the chances that the riding’s party membership would elect someone—Alghabra or Sousa—whom the party found acceptable? Why did Bird interview Alghabra as he did? Shouldn’t any Liberal Party member have been able to run in the riding, regardless of Bird’s opinion? Alghabra didn’t have time to pay much attention to those questions when he was just four days away from the biggest opportunity in his political life. He would eventually win the nomination, by 203 votes over Sousa, then go on to win Mississauga–Erindale in the 39th federal election by a count of more than three thousand, with 44.8 percent of the popular vote.

Alghabra had found the process uncomfortable, and wondered if there might not be a bigger role for a neutral body, such as Elections Canada, to better oversee the process—a belief several other MPs shared.

ANOTHER BONE OF
contention expressed by many of the former MPs was the way party memberships were sold to win nominations. It is common practice that if a candidate isn’t certain of support from the riding’s current party membership, he or she may opt to bring in new people, more likely to be supporters, by
selling them new party memberships. It’s also a great way to get new people involved in the process, with the idea that they’ll stick with you and lend a hand when the general election rolls around.

For example, to win the Liberal candidacy in the riding of Simcoe North in 1993, Paul DeVillers had to beat Alan Gray Martin, a former Liberal MP who had served one term in the 1970s and had run as the riding’s Liberal candidate in the previous three elections, losing each time. DeVillers and others in the riding were certain Martin would lose a fourth time. “That’s when I decided I’d take a shot at it,” DeVillers said. He spent the next twenty-one days selling memberships—twelve hundred in all. He ended up beating Martin on the first ballot, and would go on to serve twelve years as an MP.