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stressed at weekly caucus meetings. Every caucus meeting begins and ends with an address by the leader. The opening comments are generally mundane: a summary of relevant events which occurred since the caucus last met and/or the plans regarding the week(s) ahead. However, the closing comments, which are akin to a half-time pep talk, would make a college football coach proud. After summarizing the government’s record, Prime Minister Harper will close a Wednesday caucus meeting with a Knute Rockne-esque speech including platitudes, such as: “Now let’s go back to our ridings this weekend and remind Canadians that we are the only ones they trust to manage the economy; and that we are the only party with ideas for the economic growth and crime prevention that Canadians want and deserve.” “And now let’s go win one for the Gipper,” would not seem out of place!
So pervasive is this emphasis on the team and players that in the spring of 2013, during the so-called “backbench spring,” Chief Government Whip Gordon O’Conner took the team analogy to new and disturbing limits. Langley MP Mark Warawa wished to deliver a statement in the House of Commons, expressing his disappointment that his private member’s motion condemning gendercide would not be allowed to proceed to a debate. O’Connor justified denying Warawa the opportunity to speak in the House by stating that the caucus was a team and that he was the coach. As coach, he argued, he had the unfettered discretion to determine who gets to “play.”[2]
The problem is that governing a country is not a game. The stakes are much too high and the outcomes too important to trivialize them to the equivalent of a game. The bigger problem is that the inappropriateness of the analogy was clearly lost on the chief government whip. The sad reality is that government advisors too frequently will evaluate the success of any initiative, or the day’s events, in terms of partisan objectives, rather than policy outcomes. But governing has to be more important than just notional winning; it ought to be about achieving effective outcomes for Canadians.
Although the Speaker’s Ruling on the Warawa matter confirmed that only the Speaker ultimately gets to determine who is allowed to speak in the House of Commons, the reality is that backbenchers continue to allow themselves to be ruled by the government, believing that they are part of the government team. Because said belief serves the interest of the party leadership, it is in leadership’s interest to ensure the team concept remains a powerful reality. In such political ecosystems, perception easily becomes reality. In such political ecosystems, there are rarely any occasions when the government needs to worry about restraining its backbench MPs — the members restrain themselves.
I have participated in four elections and close to twenty election forums. In almost every one of these job auditions, the question is posed: “How will the candidate, if successful, vote on a matter of local importance, if the position of the constituents is different than the official position of the party under whose banner the candidate is running?”
Invariably, the answer offered, especially by neophyte candidates, is, “Of course I will stand up for my local constituents.” Incumbent candidates and those with more experience will offer a more nuanced answer, such as “it depends on the issue,” or “you have to pick your battles and your hill to die on.”
The truthful answer should probably be something along the lines of: “I will support the party position and thereafter attempt to persuade you of the correctness of that position, because if I stray from the party position, I will be out of the caucus and off the team and I can do more for you inside the caucus than I can from outside the tent.”
I cannot recall how many times I have heard elected members defend their refusal to fight against a particular decision that the government has made to which they object, rationalizing that you have to pick your battles and choose your hill to die on. However, the reality is that the longer one has been part of the team, the easier the members find it to rationalize their decision to stay on the team as opposed to staying true to the principles that they truly believe in and that sent the member to Ottawa in the first place.
Notable exceptions exist. In the current Parliament, NDP MPs Bruce Hyer and John Rafferty, both rural Ontario MPs, split with their party leadership on the merits of the Long-Gun Registry and voted in support of a government bill to repeal it. Both faced internal discipline. As a result, Hyer left the NDP and sat as an Independent before eventually joining the Green Party caucus.
Another defender of principle over team is former Nova Scotia Conservative MP Bill Casey. Casey actually voted against a Conservative government budget in 2007, because the budget messed with the equalization formula and, allegedly, broke the Atlantic Accord. Casey voted against the budget and was expelled from the Conservative caucus mere minutes thereafter. However, so appreciative were Casey’s Cumberland-Colchester constituents that they re-elected him with an impressive plurality when he ran as an Independent in the 2008 general election.
Teams and parties all use the aforementioned discipline to enforce loyalty to the team. When Hyer and Rafferty voted in favour of scrapping the Long-Gun Registry, they were removed from their respective committee assignments, disallowed from speaking in the House of Commons (as the whips had complete control of the speaking lists pre-Warawa), and suspended from all international parliamentary travel (junkets).
In the fall of 2012, the Conservative party leadership tried to discipline me when I refused to remove, or edit, several blog posts I had written that were critical of such non-conservative matters as ministerial opulence (e.g., expense claims for such things as $16 glasses of orange juice and parliamentary limousines), the F-35 fighter jet procurement fiasco, and taxpayer subsidies to private corporations.
Now, party discipline is truly medieval. It consists of a highly unsophisticated series of awards and punishments. Favourable committee assignments, office locations, and international parliamentary travel are held out as carrots. The stick is the threat to deny them.
When my blogging was deemed offside and I refused to delete or edit my posts I was removed from the Public Safety Committee and placed on the Library of Parliament Committee. My seat in the House of Commons was also moved, to the back corner of the Opposition side of the House.
The whip knew I coveted the Public Safety Committee, while the Library of Parliament Committee is famous for being the equivalent of a high-school detention hall. The irony was that being transferred from the Public Safety Committee to the Library of Parliament Committee was absolutely no punishment at all. Although the work of the Public Safety Committee is certainly more interesting and is better suited to my background as a lawyer, it also has a heavy workload. It sits a minimum of four hours per week and requires considerable reading and preparation time in advance of those meetings. The Library of Parliament Committee, meanwhile, almost never meets. It meets only once or twice per parliamentary session, sometimes only to elect a chair. Because it is a joint committee of Parliament, it always meets in an opulent room in the Senate’s East Block, always at noon, and always with a hot lunch.
If they had really wanted to prevent me from blogging, they should have given me more, not less, work to do. They should have assigned me an extra busy committee, not taken one away. However, such is the medieval system of human-resource management inside the Ottawa Bubble.
I suspect that the powers that be actually believe that a recalcitrant team member will be so embarrassed or so ardently miss being a team player that he will eventually come around, regardless of how ineffective or counterintuitive the punishment is. And that does seem to be the case. As Andrew Coyne of Postmedia has correctly pointed out, the reason that party discipline is so effective is because it is largely self-imposed.[3] So strong is the need to be a member of the team that the team polices itself. Team members will occasionally feel the need to encourage players who have been tempted to stray from the pack to get back in line. More often, however, such action is unnecessary; the members exercise self-discipline entirely of their own volition.
The big carrots in the Ottawa Bubble are not international travel or a big office in the new Promenade Building. The big carrot is the upward or, more accurately, forward movement of one’s political career. The prospect of moving from the back to the middle, and then, possibly, the front benches; the prospect of being named a committee chair, a parliamentary secretary, or, the brass ring, a cabinet minister — that is really the glue that makes party discipline stick.