The Saskatchewan Legislative Building in Regina last year.Heywood Yu/The Canadian Press
Brad Wall is the former premier of Saskatchewan.
It was during the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio on hardcore pornographers that Justice Potter Stewart famously offered as a threshold test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
The news of Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu’s defection to the Liberals will shock many Canadian voters. It’s timely then to explore the question: are any floor crossings defendable or even laudatory?
Such crossings are a fact of our British parliamentary system. Political parties are the dominant conveyance for candidacy to Parliament. It is very hard to get elected as an independent and it is equally as hard to be an effective independent MP without the significant resources that Parliament bestows on parties with official party status. The resources increase significantly the opportunity for government MPs to secure spending in their constituency and the concomitant improved chances of re-election.
John Ibbitson: Floor-crossings are part of a Canadian tradition – and fair play in our politics
Then there is the hope of a cabinet post for a great many that offer for Parliament. None of those are doled out to the left hand of the Speaker.
The motivation for crossing the floor seems weighted to personal or electoral gain, rather than the good of constituents or the country. This is especially true less than a year after electors sent that person to Parliament on a different party platform. They are understandably bothered. And our belief that a floor crosser ought to face his or her constituents before bearing the new party’s standard is reasonable.
But the parliamentary system is not always reasonable.
It is not against any parliamentary rule for MPs or MLAs to sign up for, or even start, another party. There might even be circumstances where it is the right thing to do.
The Saskatchewan Party, which the people of Saskatchewan have granted a majority in five successive general elections, would not exist without four Progressive Conservative and four Liberal MLAs courageously cutting ties with their parties to form the Saskatchewan Party in August, 1997.
The rationale for the move was compelling. The NDP had won many majority governments with far less than the majority of votes from Saskatchewan people, starting in 1944 when it was the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Those eight MLAs understood that there was precious little that separated them in terms of policy. They were centre-right. Some more centre. And some more right. But on the important policy matters, things they believed Saskatchewan needed to reach its full potential, they agreed.
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Their actions were swiftly attacked as undemocratic and opportunistic by the governing NDP, pundits and some academics.
They were being anything but opportunistic, however. If anything, each one of them risked their seats in the next election. They left parties that were well-resourced by the legislative assembly, owing to their official party status. They had to build a new party from scratch. They collected signatures to gain party status. They had to face their local constituency associations and explain themselves. They tirelessly travelled the province to any meeting, big and small, to make the case for this brand new party and to defend their decision.
The NDP Premier Roy Romanow accused them of making this deal in the “dead of night.” These founding members would tell us newcomers who joined a few years later that the Premier and other NDP front-benchers would heckle them in the house, saying that they would go down in ignominious defeat for swapping parties in the next election – implying that they had the polling to back it up.
But in the 1999 election, each of those founding members won bigger under their new banner than they had under their old flags. And they greatly helped elect 17 others, including me.
The Saskatchewan Party won the popular vote, but there was still enough of a split that the NDP held on to a minority government. Ironically, Mr. Romanow was able to deftly secure a de-facto majority by enticing the three elected Liberals to join his “coalition” government, giving two cabinet posts and the third the Speaker’s chair.
In 2007, we were fortunate to form a majority government and then four more.
I am completely biased of course, but when I left politics the province’s population had reached a record level, there were 60,000 more full-time jobs, record income tax relief for families and Saskatchewan had earned its first ever AAA credit rating
All because those original eight courageously left the comforts of recognized parties to start something new. Compare that with the crossings that are in the news today. If there are indeed good crossings and bad, these latter would seem to be of the “bad” kind.
How can we know that? We know it when we see it.