Canada needs primaries
My latest for the Huffington Post, in which I contrast the Canadian and American methods of choosing party leaders. If I may be a conventional blogger, here’s a quote from it:
Last Tuesday, Mitt Romney eked out his narrow victory in the Iowa caucus with a total of 30,015 votes. That slim tally in a single, Midwestern state is nevertheless only slightly fewer than the 31,150 votes that elected Jack Layton leader of the national New Democratic Party in 2003, and much greater than the 16,149 that elected Stephen Harper leader of the federal Conservatives in 2004.
And keep in mind, these are both parties that use (or, in the Tories’ case, used to use) the so-called “one-member-one-vote” system. When the Liberals installed Paul Martin as the 21st Prime Minister of Canadain their 2003 convention, by contrast, the 3,453 “party delegates” who made that decision were a notably smaller group than the 6,073 voters who gave Michelle Bachmann her last-place finish in Iowa, to say nothing of (as some wags noted at the time) the 3.3 million voters who crowned Ryan Malcolm the first Canadian Idol.
January 9th, 2012 at 6:43 pm
The Liberal delegate comparison is fatuous – by that standard, we've never had a Prime Minister who got more than 211 votes in our nation's history.
Also, why is there virtue in sheer number of electors? The most open political process in Canadian partisan politics, the Alberta PC leadership race, produces the most reliably useless leaders of any process in Canadian politics short of an NDP race. Stelmach got 50x the votes per capita that Harper did, but I think we know who's done a better job. The process should of course be open to anyone who wants to participate, but a party's goal is to elect good leaders who can win elections with appropriate policies, not just to have a lot of ballots cast.
January 9th, 2012 at 8:10 pm
I think the number and rigidity of the two party systems are linked. That is, because America is a two party system, it is pretty easy for Democrats and Republicans to define themselves against one another even while being philosophically amorphous. Even just being against each other is probably enough.
But the more parties you have, the more specifically parties have to define themselves ideologically in order to stand out. Further, once coalition-building becomes neccessary (which I know isn't the Canadian situation quite yet, but becomes more likely as the number of parties increases), defining yourself as against everyone else closes off coalition possibilities and locks you out of power.
January 10th, 2012 at 4:22 am
According to Tom Flanagan's book, Stephen Harper got a total of 67,143 votes in the leadership race. The parl.gc.ca site you link to appears to be reporting the number of "points" that Harper got (out of a maximum of 30,800 – 100 points per riding) in the weighted voting system. And they got that number wrong, too; it should be 17,296 points according to Flanagan.
Also, your comparison of the 2003 Liberal convention to the GOP primaries is apples vs. oranges. You're comparing the initial vote for the Republican candidate to the delegates at the eventual Liberal convention. But the Republicans and Democrats ultimately pick their candidates via convention delegates too, and the 3,453 voting delegates at the Liberal convention actually number 45% greater than the 2,380 delegates at the 2008 GOP equivalent.
That said, I agree that switching to a primary-style system would probably be a good thing for Canadian political parties.
January 10th, 2012 at 11:13 am
That's a very interesting point.
January 10th, 2012 at 11:21 am
I don't know about the CPC numbers without seeing the book, but I stand by comparing the Liberal delegates to the Republican voters. In the Liberal Party, the delegates effectively choose the leader, while in America, the delegates are a formality, like the electoral college. The caucus/primary votes are a de facto popular election, while the convention itself often elects unanimously, as all the primary losers have long since dropped out.
January 10th, 2012 at 11:21 am
Well, I think the Alberta PC races are really more of a case study of the particularly weird electoral system they use than anything else.
I don't think the delegate business is fatuous. MPs don't elect the PM. They actually have very little power over the party leadership, which angers a lot of them. The question is simply "who do you trust to pick the leader," and the Liberals have historically said they trust a small elite of delegates, rather than a free popular vote, like the Republicans.
January 11th, 2012 at 2:04 am
The delegates are only a formality because one candidate usually wins an unbeatable majority of them (which also happened with the Liberals in 2003), and the losers normally pledge their delegates to the winner as a show of party unity. But that's not always the case: the 1976 Republican nomination was decided by delegates who were roughly evenly divided between Ford and Reagan, and the 2008 Democratic nomination would have been the same, if Hillary had decided to force the issue (both she and Obama elected less than 50% of the total voting delgates).
January 11th, 2012 at 3:09 am
So you're saying the popular vote wins when there's a clear, popular winner and the delegates break the tie otherwise? What's wrong with that?
January 11th, 2012 at 4:49 am
Nothing.
January 11th, 2012 at 3:20 pm
I'm not sure that 1976 was really that consequential. Ford won because he had won the most primaries, which was to be expected. I think you have to back to at least the 1950s to find a US convention where the nominee was chosen through multiple ballots, as we so often do in Canada.