Weed out the grassroots

Adrienne Snow

Friday, March 23, 2001

As the ground continues to shift on the right of Canada's political spectrum with the resignation of Preston Manning, speculation about the future of the party he founded will continue to build. Stockwell Day is consolidating his hold on the Canadian Alliance, and Joe Clark is steadfastly clinging to the Tory leadership. The time for a clear-eyed look at what exactly it will take to end the schism created by Mr. Manning, when he founded the Reform Party in 1988, has arrived.

Most speculation about "uniting the right" currently centres on two questions: How will the disputes over the Alliance's socially conservative policies be settled? Who will lead this new "Alliance Plus," should such an entity ever emerge?

But these issues will, I suspect, eventually resolve themselves with less fuss than is expected. If a genuine merger of Canada's two conservative parties is ever effected on anything like equal terms, many of the Alliance's most socially conservative members will, I believe, almost inevitably leave to form a party of their own.

Moreover, as Baby Boomers age and start to think more seriously about moral and spiritual issues, general support for moderate social conservatism seems to be rising, and compromises on some issues that would have been unresolvable five or 10 years ago may become possible.

As to the leadership question, it seems safe to assume neither of the two current leaders is likely to prove acceptable to a united right, if only because their roles as heads of the parties of the "divided right" seem likely to inflame the tribal rivalries that are now keeping conservatives apart. There are, happily, other candidates for the job. Some have not yet received the attention they deserve; most do not sit in the Commons.

In addition to various provincial politicians -- Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, Ernie Eves, Jim Dinning -- who come to mind, there are several plausible candidates in think-tank land.

Walter Robinson, the boyishly articulate and engaging head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, is one. Bill Robson, the C. D. Howe Institute's widely respected and almost universally liked director of research, is another. And Stephen Harper, the highly intelligent former Reform MP, now head of the National Citizens' Coalition is -- or, perhaps, was, until he recently threw his lot in with the crypto-separatist "Alberta Firsters" -- another natural contender.

No, the real spoiler in any effort to amalgamate the two parties will be, I think, the chasm that lies between them on questions of governance. The Alliance, composed almost entirely of people who have never governed -- certainly not at the federal level -- still seems too prone to the mindset that gave rise to Mr. Manning's infamous declaration that he planned to convert Stornoway into a "bingo hall."

And it is, in my view, this unnuanced view of the benefits of bare-knuckled "grassroots democracy" that seems most likely to prevent the Alliance and the remaining Tories from getting together.

For while the Tories may, as the Alliance claims, still suffer from the central-Canadian "business as usual" approach to governing that characterized Brian Mulroney's unimaginative (with the exception of free trade) and self-satisfied term in office, they still have within their institutional memory a healthy sense of what government in a representative democracy does and how it works. As a result, they know that in a large and complex country, full-tilt populism may not always produce the same tidy results it does in smaller, more homogeneous places, such as Switzerland or California.

For instance, it is only too easy for the average Newfoundlander to picture a scenario in which a referendum on scrapping regional transfer payments succeeds solely on the strength of support in the western half of the country. Hence the screaming success of the This Hour Has 22 Minutes mock referendum on changing Mr. Day's name during the federal campaign.

As if to prove that the populist reforms the Alliance endorses at both the party and the national level can sometimes have their drawbacks, it increasingly seems one need look no farther than the continuing chaos within the Alliance to see the effects of "too much populism" -- or the wrong kind of populism -- in action. With the internal division and disorganization in the Alliance now serving as an object lesson that the party's ideas about grassroots governance aren't all they're cracked up to be, there seems little incentive for the Tories -- or for the electorate -- to embrace the Alliance's vision of a political process driven solely from the bottom up.

Naturally, it won't be easy for the Alliance's leaders to tell their enthusiastic grassroots membership that too much grassroots input at certain stages in the political process might just be unworkable -- not to mention politically unsaleable. But say it they must.

For the very nature of the enterprise in which the Alliance is engaged -- seeking to form a national government -- means they must accept this. In modern, industrialized democracies, just as we choose to hire others to reshingle our roofs, to manage our stock portfolios, and to teach our children, so we choose, through the democratic mechanisms of electing party executives, party leaders, and parliamentary representatives, to let others do much of our political heavy-lifting for us.

That is not to say the paternalism that lies at the heart of much Tory thought is without hazard. To the contrary. Just as it is possible to place too much faith in "the will of the people," so it is possible to place too much emphasis on preserving political institutions for their own sake, and not enough on allowing them to evolve to suit the electorate's changing needs.

For instance, the continued existence of an unelected Senate is a feature of our system of government that, in a country already suffering from too much patronage, as recent reports from the Auditor-General make clear and as the Alliance has long pointed out, seems overripe for reform.

The steady concentration of power in the prime minister's hands is another. The Alliance's insistence on more "free votes" in the House of Commons is consistent with the principle of representative government and might help correct the vast powers the prime minister enjoys under the current system of iron-clad party discipline.

The Tories, although clearly rather slow in learning from their mistakes of the early 1990s, are apparently nevertheless still capable of learning new tricks. For they have, after much delay, finally embraced these more sensible items in the Alliance's populist agenda, making Senate reform and more free votes part of their official platform.

What remains, then, to bring the two parties into harmony on governance issues is for the learning curve to slope in the other direction and for the Alliance to grasp that a commitment to expressing every whim of any sizeable faction of their party (or of the electorate) is not always the high road to effective representative government.

But if this does not happen, common sense and even the haziest understanding of the Progressive Conservative Party's history both suggest it is likely the Tories will lose their urge to merge. For, at least from where the Tories stand at the moment, too much emphasis on grassroots governance is not only a risky political strategy, it is, by their lights, unrealistic, unconservative, and, worst of all, incompatible with the practical art of governing.

Centre for the Study of Civic Renewal
Published in The Globe and Mail
March 23, 2001