The coming chaos in federal politics and how we got here

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We are about to receive one hell of a civics lesson. It will be a particularly painful one for the Liberals, who are staring at political oblivion and have many agonizing weeks and months to go before then. But the country will suffer along with them.

We have been scraping by for decades, narrowly avoiding one disaster after another, with a political and constitutional order that is cracked in several places. A number of those cracks are about to open at the same time.

Let us consider how we got here. The Liberals endured the worst defeat in their history in the 2011 election – worse even than the one in 2008. It was clear that this was no ordinary election loss – that deep historic trends were at work that put the party’s very existence in peril.

Among them: the shift of population and money to the West; the rapidly vanishing Liberal brand at the provincial level; the growing polarization of Canadian politics. The party needed to think long and hard about what it meant to be a centrist party in such times, and how to break out of the narrowing political, geographic and demographic base that was left to it.

But that was difficult and boring, and besides, along came Justin Trudeau: son of a Liberal icon, media darling, cultural phenomenon. So the Liberals abandoned the big rethink, and surrendered utterly to the Hippie King.

Rather than take the time out of office to rebuild, to recruit and organize and develop new policies and slowly knit together as a team, they bet everything on an instant restoration, based around the cult of the leader.

And why not? Those are the incentives built into our political system. Canadian politics was already heavily presidentialized before Mr. Trudeau, but under the Trudeau Liberals it became positively monarchical.

Every party has made the mistake of turning leadership races into frenzied membership drives, leaving the choice of leader to tens of thousands of new recruits with no history with the party and less commitment to its future. The Liberals did not even require them to become members. It was enough to declare yourself a “supporter.”

As for the slow, incremental process of building a durable base of support – that’s for parties in systems based on incrementalism, where 5 per cent more votes translates into 5 per cent more seats.

That, heaven knows, is not our system. Ours is a winner-take-all system, a heavily leveraged, shoot-the-moon, Louisiana State Lottery where a few points in the polls, if the splits go your way, can spell the difference between a wipeout and a landslide.

So the Liberals bet on the Dauphin, and it paid off. They parlayed a relatively slim 39-per-cent plurality in 2015 into a thumping majority. Then they turned a pair of 33-per-cent popular votes – less, in each case, than their Conservative opponents – into a pair of minorities.

But it was clear from the start how this would end. Popular infatuations are quick to spark, but fade just as quickly. The Liberals began losing altitude in the polls in early 2017, and for the last year and a half they have been in freefall. The leader who was their prize asset in 2015 is now their biggest liability.

But he won’t go – or at least, has been unwilling to go, to date – and they have no way to force him out. Even in his present weakened state, his powers, as party leader and as Prime Minister, are so immense that few Liberal MPs to this day are willing to put their names to demands for him to go. It’s all “a consensus of the Ontario caucus” this and “a majority of the Atlantic caucus” that.

Worse, if he were to go, no one can agree on how to replace him. Years of centralized, top-down, leader-driven government, with cabinet ministers as little more than props, has left a field of second-raters as possible successors.

But what even would be the process? Another elephantine, months-long, one-supporter-one-vote race like the last one, as prescribed by the party constitution? But that is unthinkable, with the country under economic attack by our erstwhile American allies.

A quick whip-round of the caucus, then? Some will favour that – the ones backing the more established candidates, with the best name recognition. Others will oppose, or have their surrogates do so, seeking more time to make themselves known. The party is in for an extended period of wrangling.

But meantime events are likely to move out of their control. Already the Conservatives are preparing a motion of no confidence for next week’s meeting of the Public Accounts committee, which would likely come to a vote of the whole House within days of its return in late January.

That should be the end of it. But this is Canada, where any number of bedrock constitutional conventions have been allowed to atrophy – conventions like “a government that loses a confidence vote must resign.” Already there is talk of the Liberals defying the vote, as the Paul Martin government did in similar circumstances in 2005, exploiting a lack of consensus among constitutional experts and public apathy to cling onto power a little longer.

They may yet get away with it, but the prospect is for more chaos in the House, already paralyzed by the government’s refusal to accede to Parliament’s demand for documents in the Sustainable Development Technology Canada affair. And if that confidence vote fails to dislodge them, there will be others before long.

One of them will succeed, plunging the country into an election with the Liberals either limping along with a lame-duck leader the party itself does not support, or leaderless, divided and in the midst of a race to succeed him.

So there is also talk of the Prime Minister proroguing Parliament, the subject of my last column. I said then that the Governor-General would probably accept his request, the House having yet to definitively declare its lack of confidence in his government. But it’s not a slam dunk, as legal scholars have reminded me.

Even the 2008 prorogation request, which was on much more solid ground, met with a chilly reception in Rideau Hall, and for good reason. It would not do to establish a precedent that a prime minister can just prorogue any time he is looking at losing a no-confidence vote, and it’s conceivable that the current governor-general might wish to make that point rather more firmly. Unlikely, but conceivable.

Whether she has that discretion is another subject of debate among constitutional experts. But suppose she accepts his request. It is not impossible to think we might be plunged into a constitutional crisis even then: after the British Supreme Court overturned Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue in 2019 – the Court ruled it was for the “improper purpose of stymieing Parliament,” the better to force through Brexit – it is not a given that this sort of decision is off-limits for judicial review.

This way lies madness. The country is crying out for leadership. The Prime Minister has made no public comment in two weeks, since the devastating resignation of his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland. Ms. Freeland was one of the few ministers in this cabinet with any clout, thanks to her close ties with Mr. Trudeau and with his chief of staff, Katie Telford.

But even she ran into the reality that cabinet government in this country is a fraud, the Prime Minister airily announcing a $6-billion-plus spending package in advance of the Fall Economic Statement without consulting cabinet, caucus or her. But why wouldn’t he? That is what we have come to expect prime ministers to do, all of us, under Liberal and Conservative governments alike. That is the system we have allowed and encouraged. And now it has come back to bite us.

We have no prime minister, practically speaking. And we have no way of getting one for some time: either until the Liberals hold a leadership race, or until an election. And meantime the country is falling apart under the strain, pushed upon by the Trump administration and pulled at by the provinces.

In the immediate term, a way has to be found out of the crisis. Two principles should be clear. One, the country needs more than a changing of the palace guard. It needs an election, as soon as possible. And two, one of the chief impediments to an early election is the uncertainty surrounding the Liberal leadership. For as long as that remains unresolved, the government will find ways to stall, rather than be forced to campaign without a leader, or worse, with the leader they have now.

Is there the possibility of a deal, in which the Opposition agrees to hold off on a confidence vote in return for a speedy decision on the Liberal leadership, giving the party time to choose a new leader before the government falls and the campaign begins?

Longer term, however, we must begin to grasp the deep roots of this crisis – in the leadership cult that has engulfed every party, in the over-centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office, in the demeaning, serf-like status of ordinary MPs and even cabinet ministers, in the winner-take-all incentives of our electoral system, in the abuse of the powers of prorogation and dissolution and the erosion of once-sacrosanct principles like the confidence convention. Otherwise we are simply going to repeat this farce at periodic intervals.

Liberals, in particular, need to ask themselves some searching questions when all this is done. Questions like: How are we to rebuild from the ruins? Why did we allow a runaway leader to bring us to such a pass? How could we have ceded to him and his retainers such power, to the point that few of us dare speak out even as the walls are falling down around us?

And: how do we make sure this never happens again?