Boessenkool writes, "Let’s start with a central truth of politics: democratic reform is for losers. People who can’t win under the current rules always think they can do so under better rules."
The rot in Boessenkool's thinking is he views 'democratic reform' through the blinkers of political parties. He should be looking at democratic reform from the perspective of citizens.
Enumerated in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms is "Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law." Because of First-Past-the-Post (FPtP), most Canadians--yes 'most'--do not have a Member of Parliament who can equally and effectively represent them in Parliament or who has any political or electoral incentive to do so. Meaning, most of us (me included) are not enjoying equal benefits under the law when it comes to democratic representation in their legislatures.
It is worth emphasizing that individuals are mentioned in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution Act, but nowhere are political parties mentioned. Political parties are private clubs serving the self-interest of their members, nothing more. Putting a private club's fortunes ahead of those of individuals, as Boessenkool does, is endemic in the wooden-headed thinking of most people opposed to democratic reform or who are in the thrall of a political party.
Of all the electoral systems used in putative democracies, the worst, in terms of serving individuals, is FPtP.
FPtP is the best system, however, for campaign strategists, like Boessenkool, and unethical politicians, because it is the easiest system to game, corrupt, and subvert. If a strategist's 'dirty tricks' include voter suppression, hyper-targeting data mining, trafficking in misinformation, disinformation, defamation, and falsehoods FPtP is the best system. Why? Because winners or losers can be decided by a tiny shift in votes.
FPtP's perverse incentives unduly reward the most unethical politicians and the people who work for them. It denies citizens ethical and effective representatives and legislatures.
It is unfortunate that very early on Mr. Boessenkool writes, and I quote: "democratic reform is for losers. People who can’t win under the current rules always think they can do so under better rules"
Mr. Boessenkool is someone with influence in one of our main political parties (which I have voted for at least half of the time since becoming an eligible voter) this is not just problematic, it is deeply worrisome and downright unpatriotic. Just look here: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=ele&dir=turn&document=index&lang=e
FACT: There is a constant, drip-by-drip erosion of the floor and the ceiling when it comes to voter turnout as a % of eligible voters. There are independent academic papers signalling that while older voters with jobs or retired tend to vote in high numbers, those who are unemployed, not own a house, belong to minorities or are of aboriginal descent are disfranchised and do not vote reliably. Youth vote has other set of challenges but those have been more top-of-mind.
We have a voting system and participation problem in Canada. It seems to disproportionately affect individuals with less wealth and/or belonging to a minority group. These individuals are not losers, they are CANADIANS and deserve to be heard and for the voting system to address their lack of participation. I am not saying ditch first-past-the-post, I am no voting expert, but clearly we need to work on this and if political operatives are so darn ignorant and all they care is about gaining power to get a plum job, well I do not wish to read anything from them.
Every day that goes by, being an independent but engaged Canadian sucks. I have no political party blanket to cuddle with, I just want politicians and parties to work hard on policy and good government, and not be oblivious or glib about the shortcomings of our system. Maybe I am just too quixotic. Maybe I should join the disfranchised and stop voting... If this is how little political operatives value the true meaning of voting participation.
When people talk about politics in terms of "winners" and "losers" I find they often make a living off the mainstream political party ecosystem. For the rest of us politics is about improving our lives and maybe democracy or worst of all we don't think of politics at all... a recipe for democratic failure.
I dumped the Washington Post and subscribed to The Line, and while most commentary is conservative and I'm not, it's a balm to a hurt mind. Todays' WP has not one article on the front page about the Infrastructure Bill policies and programs just passed; they only care about the conflict of passing bills, not what's in them. Bills with no conflict over their passage get almost no converage (the military spending bills now running $8 trillion per decade get one story, because they're bipartisan).
And here, I read conservatives talking about policy options. Options! In the USA, conservatives have no options, every position is mandated.
The Line tells me how lucky I am to live in Canada, where liberals and conservatives debate policy choices rather than just shouting insults.
Even as someone who probably leans further left than right, and has to plug my nose when I vote Conservative rather than NDP (since our local NDP candidate is more or less absentee) I absolutely love this line:
"...Conservatives are conservatives because, unlike Liberals, they want to get elected to do things, not to be things. They are like New Democrats in this way."
Yes, the Ford Government and Trudeau both govern, form policy, start programs, and decide whether you stay in your homes by the polls. In order to move forward on anything they are constantly polling. This is why the Alberta oil and gas sector has faced such destruction and why the high costs for farmers and ranchers have been difficult due to the carbon tax. This is the reason why you can expect more harm through policy, more regulations, and more taxation. It will be the rural Canadian's who pay the high costs and receive the least in return. It will be the Provinces with the least votes in the federal election that receive the most harm and the least aid. This is something we must contend with and is not news to most. I believe that this is a reminder that your voice is not necessary nor are your conspiracy theories, your values do not matter, they would rather you keep your hillbilly representatives out of the Legislature and Parliament, get your forced injections, and just keep sending that money as the majority are in need.
The big, blue tent cannot contain the conservative movement: PR fixes that.
By way of response to Mr. Boessenkool’s piece in which he rejects proportional representation in favor of FPTP features like forming a majority government with even less than forty percent of the vote, he neglects the high electoral price the CPC pays to keep Liberals governing the country in minority rule about seven years in ten. His desire to win with a compromised electoral system fuels the Canadian stereotype of power-hungry, elite politicians that both parties enjoy.
As former Prime Minister Harper and Prof. Tom Flanagan noted in their paper, Our Benign Dictatorship: Canada’s system of one-party-plus rule has stunted democracy. The Case for More Representative Government (1996-97) that Liberals are a non-ideological party which exists to gain power, the same is not true of the CPC, as Mr. Boessenkool asserts. When CPC leader O’Toole attempted to campaign from the center, to govern on the right and lost the seat count, which is a FPTP feature, he got blow-back never experienced by a Liberal who campaigns left and governs right.
The union of ideological groups into the CPC to gain power is not unlike the hasty creation of the UCP in Alberta. The UCP, which is now falling to pieces, contains parts some of which do not care about winning or keeping out the NDP and Notley. Due to a single member plurality system feature which concentrates seats in a particular geography, as goes conservatism in Alberta, so goes the CPC. This is a fire you can’t put out with demands for unity in order to gain power.
Prime Minister Harper made this CPC shotgun marriage work briefly, even though prior to it he argued that Canada needed to mature as a democracy via proportional representation. Sadly, his benign dictatorship (and Kenney’s in Alberta) only forestalled the emergence of irreconcilable differences that demand divorce and prove his argument correct.
The brief union of the CPC has incubated streams within the conservative movement which are better served by PR votes. With PR, the fractious factions in the big blue tent are set free to their own political devices, to go forth and garner seats in proportion to their vote, instead of working against each other in our SMP system. No one expects a PR governing coalition to be without differences and contradictions. The conservative movement can flourish without a zero sum vote which are a feature of PR, not a bug.
PR better preserves the conservative movement by removing the unnecessary layer of big-tent party control. PR removes wasted political capital on internal party divisions like those coming from Senator Batters and her Members’ Vote petition with 4500 signatures, Mr. Chen, former CPC MPs, the freedom caucus etc. Canada becomes a more mature democracy for not wasting energy to repress dissent in a big tent party and instead allowing politicians to negotiate deals between themselves.
Without the top-down control, PR puts the politics back into Canadian politics. Our democracy matures when a coalition of MPs from conservative parties can stop the clapping seal act in parliament and enact the conservative movement’s agenda. Until recently, Germany and Norway, which both use PR, were governed by dynastic true majority center right coalitions. That’s a feature of PR, not a bug.
Mr. Boessenkool, and those like him, need to show more faith in the appeal of the conservative movement to voters equipped with an equal and effective vote, some of whom do not care about winning and many of whom do not live in one concentrated geographic region of the country.
A recent conservative spin-off party, the PPC, had 5% of voters in election 44 who were willing to waste their vote for the PPC. The last two elections show that neither Scheer nor O’Toole appealed to enough voters for one party plus government. Canadian voters have rejected big-tent, brokerage politics twice in recent elections (43 & 44).
A new era of minority government is here. Liberals couldn’t win false majority government even when they were ahead in the polls and called an election after showering various ridings in the country with spending promises. Why let FPTP continue to award Liberals the most ‘efficient vote’, which is yet another attractive FPTP feature to benign dictators?
Let the CPC turn the table on Liberals with an election 45 campaign promising to match seats to votes. Instead of governing thirty percent of the time at best, let conservatives play a long game wherein proportional representation allows a coalition of conservative parties to take root in our country and in our politics. Let the CPC act in its best interests and that of the country to set this uncontainable conservative movement free and end the undemocratic favors FPTP bestows on parties, mostly on Liberals.
It's probably useful to remember democracy is not the norm in human history. Thus without democratic reform there is no democracy. So if you are living in a democracy, you are a loser, according to the author.
If electoral minorities controlling the political life of majorities is a feature not a bug, then presumably authoritarianism is just a feature-filled version of this form of 'democracy'.
We're offered Harper's vision of a modern principled conservatism formed from fusing Burkean conservatism (social) and classical liberalism (economic).
But even more important, Harper offered a strategy for political success in an FPTP system based upon expediency. Coalitions are supposed to unify various traditions, need to be incremental not radical, and open to changing their membership composition. The author suggests expediency trumps purity in the pursuit of electoral success.
Begging the question how far can one stray from traditional principles in the pursuit of electoral success and still be an A, a B or a C? And does it even matter, as long as your gang wins?
The writer suggests that shifting positions on carbon pricing, pandemic vaccine passports or flirting with working-class voters by flip-flopping on minimum wage, are all indications of such practical coalition-building expediency.
However, if building successful coalitions is simply the pursuit of mixing and matching policies until one finds a winning combination, why have principles at all, if they turn out to be just complicating affectations? And is the charge of expediency not the charge that purists on the left and right are always making against those unprincipled Libs?
Not at all we're told.
"Conservatives are conservatives because, unlike Liberals, they want to get elected to do things, not to be things. They are like New Democrats in this way."
"Doing" versus "being"? Have to admit, haven't a clue what that's about. Apparently there's no connection between doing stuff and being the gang doing the stuff. I suspect that's a bit of precious inside-baseball teeter-talkin after a long night of heavy, partisan bottle-bending. Best to save the insider baseball stuff for the insiders club of smiley bobble heads.
But maybe the Cons will buy a lot of ads to explain this coalition-building, sure-fire, election-winning distinction, doing vs being, to voters in the next feature-rich, no bugs aboard, electoral struggle between A, B and C.
"Vote for us, not because you want to BE a Conservative, but because you want to DO a Conservative!" Hmmm, then again, who knows when you say it out loud like that, just might work, building a fertile coalition of As and Bs and Cs?
Thought provoking article. To be successful sometimes doing a cull at the outer edges of the party is required to hopefully limit the Bozo eruptions as they have been called in the past. For this reason the big tent idea is more of a slogan than a workable strategy. With the Conservatives of late defaulting to the left instinctively hoping to win on the premise of being a not-Trudeau alternative the shift will need to be larger than need be had they stayed closer to the Harper formula. A viable climate policy may be the most important task at hand as choosing a lane is vital and at present they aren’t even close. Perhaps before the next election there is a position available that would be less tax and more action once the ridiculous costs of the present policy become more apparent to all when the rising costs to consumers become more apparent. At present most still seem to believe that saving the planet is great as long as they don’t personally suffer because it’s those evil corporations that cause all the trouble. Having to choose between rent and food can be a poignant wake up call down the road after inflation and interest rate hikes pile on with a rising carbon tax to make life a lot harder. It’s going to be interesting to watch going forward if they still believe they can be everything to everybody which hasn’t worked out so far. Maybe third times a charm but I doubt it.
Ken, I'd love to see a column about how you think a climate change agenda could and would appeal to the conservative mainstream while "broadening the tent" to bring in other voters.
I've felt this was a HUGE missed opportunity in 2019 and even more so this past year. It seems O'Toole realizes it, but just hasn't been able to get the rest of the party on board. Which I guess ties into the theme of the article above.
Climate change feels like it's become a big enough issue that it keeps people away from the party, even if they feel like the current government needs replacing.
Boessenkool writes, "Let’s start with a central truth of politics: democratic reform is for losers. People who can’t win under the current rules always think they can do so under better rules."
The rot in Boessenkool's thinking is he views 'democratic reform' through the blinkers of political parties. He should be looking at democratic reform from the perspective of citizens.
Enumerated in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms is "Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law." Because of First-Past-the-Post (FPtP), most Canadians--yes 'most'--do not have a Member of Parliament who can equally and effectively represent them in Parliament or who has any political or electoral incentive to do so. Meaning, most of us (me included) are not enjoying equal benefits under the law when it comes to democratic representation in their legislatures.
It is worth emphasizing that individuals are mentioned in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution Act, but nowhere are political parties mentioned. Political parties are private clubs serving the self-interest of their members, nothing more. Putting a private club's fortunes ahead of those of individuals, as Boessenkool does, is endemic in the wooden-headed thinking of most people opposed to democratic reform or who are in the thrall of a political party.
Of all the electoral systems used in putative democracies, the worst, in terms of serving individuals, is FPtP.
FPtP is the best system, however, for campaign strategists, like Boessenkool, and unethical politicians, because it is the easiest system to game, corrupt, and subvert. If a strategist's 'dirty tricks' include voter suppression, hyper-targeting data mining, trafficking in misinformation, disinformation, defamation, and falsehoods FPtP is the best system. Why? Because winners or losers can be decided by a tiny shift in votes.
FPtP's perverse incentives unduly reward the most unethical politicians and the people who work for them. It denies citizens ethical and effective representatives and legislatures.
It is unfortunate that very early on Mr. Boessenkool writes, and I quote: "democratic reform is for losers. People who can’t win under the current rules always think they can do so under better rules"
Mr. Boessenkool is someone with influence in one of our main political parties (which I have voted for at least half of the time since becoming an eligible voter) this is not just problematic, it is deeply worrisome and downright unpatriotic. Just look here: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=ele&dir=turn&document=index&lang=e
FACT: There is a constant, drip-by-drip erosion of the floor and the ceiling when it comes to voter turnout as a % of eligible voters. There are independent academic papers signalling that while older voters with jobs or retired tend to vote in high numbers, those who are unemployed, not own a house, belong to minorities or are of aboriginal descent are disfranchised and do not vote reliably. Youth vote has other set of challenges but those have been more top-of-mind.
We have a voting system and participation problem in Canada. It seems to disproportionately affect individuals with less wealth and/or belonging to a minority group. These individuals are not losers, they are CANADIANS and deserve to be heard and for the voting system to address their lack of participation. I am not saying ditch first-past-the-post, I am no voting expert, but clearly we need to work on this and if political operatives are so darn ignorant and all they care is about gaining power to get a plum job, well I do not wish to read anything from them.
Every day that goes by, being an independent but engaged Canadian sucks. I have no political party blanket to cuddle with, I just want politicians and parties to work hard on policy and good government, and not be oblivious or glib about the shortcomings of our system. Maybe I am just too quixotic. Maybe I should join the disfranchised and stop voting... If this is how little political operatives value the true meaning of voting participation.
When people talk about politics in terms of "winners" and "losers" I find they often make a living off the mainstream political party ecosystem. For the rest of us politics is about improving our lives and maybe democracy or worst of all we don't think of politics at all... a recipe for democratic failure.
But nationally you have the pandering to Quebec that changes everything.
How else would a purported "Conservative" party support something like religious symbol bans, language laws or even dairy supply management?
Is Canada, with Quebec being the tail that wags the dog, worth it?
So it isn't the straightforward calculus that Ken lays it it out to be.
I dumped the Washington Post and subscribed to The Line, and while most commentary is conservative and I'm not, it's a balm to a hurt mind. Todays' WP has not one article on the front page about the Infrastructure Bill policies and programs just passed; they only care about the conflict of passing bills, not what's in them. Bills with no conflict over their passage get almost no converage (the military spending bills now running $8 trillion per decade get one story, because they're bipartisan).
And here, I read conservatives talking about policy options. Options! In the USA, conservatives have no options, every position is mandated.
The Line tells me how lucky I am to live in Canada, where liberals and conservatives debate policy choices rather than just shouting insults.
Even as someone who probably leans further left than right, and has to plug my nose when I vote Conservative rather than NDP (since our local NDP candidate is more or less absentee) I absolutely love this line:
"...Conservatives are conservatives because, unlike Liberals, they want to get elected to do things, not to be things. They are like New Democrats in this way."
Yes, the Ford Government and Trudeau both govern, form policy, start programs, and decide whether you stay in your homes by the polls. In order to move forward on anything they are constantly polling. This is why the Alberta oil and gas sector has faced such destruction and why the high costs for farmers and ranchers have been difficult due to the carbon tax. This is the reason why you can expect more harm through policy, more regulations, and more taxation. It will be the rural Canadian's who pay the high costs and receive the least in return. It will be the Provinces with the least votes in the federal election that receive the most harm and the least aid. This is something we must contend with and is not news to most. I believe that this is a reminder that your voice is not necessary nor are your conspiracy theories, your values do not matter, they would rather you keep your hillbilly representatives out of the Legislature and Parliament, get your forced injections, and just keep sending that money as the majority are in need.
What Harper said back then is true today. It means adapting to a new political landscape instead of running on old ideas.
The big, blue tent cannot contain the conservative movement: PR fixes that.
By way of response to Mr. Boessenkool’s piece in which he rejects proportional representation in favor of FPTP features like forming a majority government with even less than forty percent of the vote, he neglects the high electoral price the CPC pays to keep Liberals governing the country in minority rule about seven years in ten. His desire to win with a compromised electoral system fuels the Canadian stereotype of power-hungry, elite politicians that both parties enjoy.
As former Prime Minister Harper and Prof. Tom Flanagan noted in their paper, Our Benign Dictatorship: Canada’s system of one-party-plus rule has stunted democracy. The Case for More Representative Government (1996-97) that Liberals are a non-ideological party which exists to gain power, the same is not true of the CPC, as Mr. Boessenkool asserts. When CPC leader O’Toole attempted to campaign from the center, to govern on the right and lost the seat count, which is a FPTP feature, he got blow-back never experienced by a Liberal who campaigns left and governs right.
The union of ideological groups into the CPC to gain power is not unlike the hasty creation of the UCP in Alberta. The UCP, which is now falling to pieces, contains parts some of which do not care about winning or keeping out the NDP and Notley. Due to a single member plurality system feature which concentrates seats in a particular geography, as goes conservatism in Alberta, so goes the CPC. This is a fire you can’t put out with demands for unity in order to gain power.
Prime Minister Harper made this CPC shotgun marriage work briefly, even though prior to it he argued that Canada needed to mature as a democracy via proportional representation. Sadly, his benign dictatorship (and Kenney’s in Alberta) only forestalled the emergence of irreconcilable differences that demand divorce and prove his argument correct.
The brief union of the CPC has incubated streams within the conservative movement which are better served by PR votes. With PR, the fractious factions in the big blue tent are set free to their own political devices, to go forth and garner seats in proportion to their vote, instead of working against each other in our SMP system. No one expects a PR governing coalition to be without differences and contradictions. The conservative movement can flourish without a zero sum vote which are a feature of PR, not a bug.
PR better preserves the conservative movement by removing the unnecessary layer of big-tent party control. PR removes wasted political capital on internal party divisions like those coming from Senator Batters and her Members’ Vote petition with 4500 signatures, Mr. Chen, former CPC MPs, the freedom caucus etc. Canada becomes a more mature democracy for not wasting energy to repress dissent in a big tent party and instead allowing politicians to negotiate deals between themselves.
Without the top-down control, PR puts the politics back into Canadian politics. Our democracy matures when a coalition of MPs from conservative parties can stop the clapping seal act in parliament and enact the conservative movement’s agenda. Until recently, Germany and Norway, which both use PR, were governed by dynastic true majority center right coalitions. That’s a feature of PR, not a bug.
Mr. Boessenkool, and those like him, need to show more faith in the appeal of the conservative movement to voters equipped with an equal and effective vote, some of whom do not care about winning and many of whom do not live in one concentrated geographic region of the country.
A recent conservative spin-off party, the PPC, had 5% of voters in election 44 who were willing to waste their vote for the PPC. The last two elections show that neither Scheer nor O’Toole appealed to enough voters for one party plus government. Canadian voters have rejected big-tent, brokerage politics twice in recent elections (43 & 44).
A new era of minority government is here. Liberals couldn’t win false majority government even when they were ahead in the polls and called an election after showering various ridings in the country with spending promises. Why let FPTP continue to award Liberals the most ‘efficient vote’, which is yet another attractive FPTP feature to benign dictators?
Let the CPC turn the table on Liberals with an election 45 campaign promising to match seats to votes. Instead of governing thirty percent of the time at best, let conservatives play a long game wherein proportional representation allows a coalition of conservative parties to take root in our country and in our politics. Let the CPC act in its best interests and that of the country to set this uncontainable conservative movement free and end the undemocratic favors FPTP bestows on parties, mostly on Liberals.
"Democratic reform is for losers"?
It's probably useful to remember democracy is not the norm in human history. Thus without democratic reform there is no democracy. So if you are living in a democracy, you are a loser, according to the author.
If electoral minorities controlling the political life of majorities is a feature not a bug, then presumably authoritarianism is just a feature-filled version of this form of 'democracy'.
We're offered Harper's vision of a modern principled conservatism formed from fusing Burkean conservatism (social) and classical liberalism (economic).
But even more important, Harper offered a strategy for political success in an FPTP system based upon expediency. Coalitions are supposed to unify various traditions, need to be incremental not radical, and open to changing their membership composition. The author suggests expediency trumps purity in the pursuit of electoral success.
Begging the question how far can one stray from traditional principles in the pursuit of electoral success and still be an A, a B or a C? And does it even matter, as long as your gang wins?
The writer suggests that shifting positions on carbon pricing, pandemic vaccine passports or flirting with working-class voters by flip-flopping on minimum wage, are all indications of such practical coalition-building expediency.
However, if building successful coalitions is simply the pursuit of mixing and matching policies until one finds a winning combination, why have principles at all, if they turn out to be just complicating affectations? And is the charge of expediency not the charge that purists on the left and right are always making against those unprincipled Libs?
Not at all we're told.
"Conservatives are conservatives because, unlike Liberals, they want to get elected to do things, not to be things. They are like New Democrats in this way."
"Doing" versus "being"? Have to admit, haven't a clue what that's about. Apparently there's no connection between doing stuff and being the gang doing the stuff. I suspect that's a bit of precious inside-baseball teeter-talkin after a long night of heavy, partisan bottle-bending. Best to save the insider baseball stuff for the insiders club of smiley bobble heads.
But maybe the Cons will buy a lot of ads to explain this coalition-building, sure-fire, election-winning distinction, doing vs being, to voters in the next feature-rich, no bugs aboard, electoral struggle between A, B and C.
"Vote for us, not because you want to BE a Conservative, but because you want to DO a Conservative!" Hmmm, then again, who knows when you say it out loud like that, just might work, building a fertile coalition of As and Bs and Cs?
Thought provoking article. To be successful sometimes doing a cull at the outer edges of the party is required to hopefully limit the Bozo eruptions as they have been called in the past. For this reason the big tent idea is more of a slogan than a workable strategy. With the Conservatives of late defaulting to the left instinctively hoping to win on the premise of being a not-Trudeau alternative the shift will need to be larger than need be had they stayed closer to the Harper formula. A viable climate policy may be the most important task at hand as choosing a lane is vital and at present they aren’t even close. Perhaps before the next election there is a position available that would be less tax and more action once the ridiculous costs of the present policy become more apparent to all when the rising costs to consumers become more apparent. At present most still seem to believe that saving the planet is great as long as they don’t personally suffer because it’s those evil corporations that cause all the trouble. Having to choose between rent and food can be a poignant wake up call down the road after inflation and interest rate hikes pile on with a rising carbon tax to make life a lot harder. It’s going to be interesting to watch going forward if they still believe they can be everything to everybody which hasn’t worked out so far. Maybe third times a charm but I doubt it.
Ken, I'd love to see a column about how you think a climate change agenda could and would appeal to the conservative mainstream while "broadening the tent" to bring in other voters.
I've felt this was a HUGE missed opportunity in 2019 and even more so this past year. It seems O'Toole realizes it, but just hasn't been able to get the rest of the party on board. Which I guess ties into the theme of the article above.
Climate change feels like it's become a big enough issue that it keeps people away from the party, even if they feel like the current government needs replacing.