Not Guy Fawkes Exactly but the Case For Blowing Up Canada's Political Parties

It's a sad truth but today political parties vie for power for the sake of holding power, not for the chance to serve the country. It's been that way for too many years and it has not served us well.

The Tyee's Crawford Killian asks whether it might be time to blow up Canada's political parties.

In theory, a party ought to form around a set of principles for dealing with problems: employment, education, climate and so on. In practice, like the Americans, our own parties are far more interested in power. So they tell us what they think we want to hear, and try to put as many people as possible under their proverbial big tents. As Groucho Marx once famously said, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

So they read their bases very closely, and consider how to lure a few more into those bases by offering a fresh principle or two. Or dropping some old principles. Even when elected, Canadian parties routinely break any promise they never meant to keep and count on voter amnesia to escape punishment in the next election. The result is horse-race politics, voter apathy and pundits earning good incomes bemoaning the sad state of Canadian democracy.

Killian points to political scientist Lee Drutman who wants to dismember Americas's utterly dysfunctional, often corrupt two-party system. Drutman posed a quiz in the New York Times inviting readers to position themselves among six political possibilities.

Americans who took the quiz would find themselves aligned with one of those parties. Social conservatives fell into the Patriot Party or Christian Conservatives. Economic conservatives would support the Growth and Opportunity Party. On the left would be the American Labor Party, the New Liberal Party and the Progressive Party (where I predictably landed, with the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren).

Each would have the support of only a fraction of the American electorate, Drutman estimated in his article. The Progressives would win just 14 per cent of the vote, while the New Liberals would take 26 per cent and the Christian Conservatives 20 per cent.

Absent electoral reform, Drutman's model is another way of undermining predictable "winner takes all" political gridlock which, today, has hit rock bottom.

The result, as Drutman sees it, is a “doom loop” in which each side sees the other as an enemy who must never be allowed to take power — on any level from school board to the courts to the White House. Negotiation is impossible, and the enemy must be silenced as well as kept out of office. Otherwise, the only recourse is civil war.

We Canadians aren’t quite that badly off, but our parliamentary democracy might do much better with more parties than we have now. Many of us like the idea of proportional representation; Justin Trudeau got himself elected on the promise of it in 2015, only to renege once elected with a majority.

Killian imagines what a six plus one (Quebec) party state could look like:

People’s Party of Canada: Maxime Bernier, this is your moment. You’re the Canuck version of the Trumpist Patriot Party.

Conservative Party of Canada: Stephen Harper, all is forgiven. Come back and push for your neoliberal programs. Erin O’Toole clearly can’t handle the job.

New Conservatives: The return of the Red Tories: Do we have a new Joe Clark willing to demand vaccinated MPs and able to twist corporations’ arms to do serious emissions’ reduction?

Liberal Party of Canada: If Justin Trudeau can demand booster shoots from his MPs, and twist even more corporate arms, he can run this party. The Liberals can’t be “centrist,” because multiparty democracies don’t have many centrist voters.

Bloc Québécois: Yves-François Blanchet can try to save Quebec from climate disaster as part of Canada, or flirt with independence. Many Quebecers would go elsewhere.

Social Democrats: Whatever remains of the unions and managerial Brahmin Left now calling themselves the provincial and federal New Democrats.

Preservation Party: This is where people of whatever region, class or race could vote to do what seems needed to mitigate the combined climate and pandemic catastrophes. Forget economic growth; Preservation will just try to save as much as possible of what we’ve got now, as fairly as possible. I’d probably vote for them, but we’d be a small splinter until perhaps 2030, when November 2021 will look like the good old days.

It's an intriguing idea, parties structured around principles, not principals. Enough options to appeal to almost every voter including today's "none of the above" contingent. Governments that coalesce around  ideas and values. 

As too many politicians say, let me be clear. No one of these parties would save us from the impending disaster. But if enough of our present parties decided to break up, a coalition of fragmented parties might thrash out a deal that would buy us some time.

We’re already on our own death loop, shipping gas and oil overseas while pretending our customers are the real emissions problem, not us. Very powerful interests, including the present parties, would ridicule the very idea of multiparty democracy.

But Stephen Harper forced the Conservative splinter parties into a coalition that’s been falling apart since Maxime Bernier quit the party. The NDP could fragment too, and the Liberals have a history of civil war.

If our present parties broke up and then ran on policies instead of personalities, we might actually get ourselves out of the mess the old parties have put us in.