NDP on homestretch

Party elites select a premier? Got to be a better way

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Next weekend, roughly 2,000 people -- less than 0.2 per cent of Manitoba's population -- will cast ballots to choose the next premier of our province.

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Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/02/2015 (3875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Next weekend, roughly 2,000 people — less than 0.2 per cent of Manitoba’s population — will cast ballots to choose the next premier of our province.

When you frame it this way, the process of picking the next NDP leader and premier seems elitist and even undemocratic. How can such a small number of people decide who gets to occupy the province’s highest political office?

The process of deciding whether Greg Selinger, Theresa Oswald or Steve Ashton will become (or for Selinger, remain) the premier is convoluted, but boiled down to its essential elements it means that groups of NDP members in each of Manitoba’s 57 constituencies gather in school gyms and community centres to select delegates to go to the NDP’s annual general meeting. In addition to these constituency delegates, NDP-affiliated labour unions can send a certain number of delegates. We don’t know exactly how many delegates each union gets to send, or whether these unions will fill the allotments, but we do know unions are entitled to nearly 700 of the 2,217 potential delegate spots up for grabs. We also know that there are another 192 “automatic” spaces reserved for elected officials, constituency-association presidents and members of the NDP’s provincial council.

In a competitive three-way race, every delegate spot counts. And in the past few weeks, we have heard a great deal — as we often do in these contests — about irregularities with the process, including accusations of someone filling out delegate-selection ballots on someone else’s behalf and a story that a group of seniors were driven to a delegate selection meeting and promised a free meal. Then there’s the fact the campaigns themselves each report different numbers about how many delegates they have, as the party does not provide an official breakdown of the delegate standings.

Stories of campaigns bending and even breaking the rules go hand in hand with delegated leadership races and must always be taken with a large helping of salt. That being said, just because these things tend to happen in a typical leadership campaign does not mean we should accept the status quo.

The real issue here is the process used to select the leader of many parties — and particularly the Manitoba NDP — is not only arcane, but it could also be perceived to be lacking popular legitimacy. Increasingly, parties market themselves around their leaders, and citizens decide which party to vote for based on the party’s leader. The 2011 Canadian Election Survey found in the last federal election, 18 per cent of Canadians made their determination based on the party’s leader, slightly more than the proportion who based the choice on their local candidate.

The whole notion of having “leader-centric” parties does not fit comfortably in our parliamentary system, which is based on the idea the premier or prime minister derives legitimacy from his or her responsibility to Parliament and the requirement that he or she needs the confidence of a majority of elected officials to govern.

Our current system of having party members choose party leaders, either through a delegated convention or the increasingly common and much fairer “one member, one vote” method, is somewhat more democratic than the old method of giving the parliamentary caucus the exclusive power to pick and depose leaders. However, it is subject to many other problems, the greatest of which is these contests are not subject to the same degree of independent, neutral oversight as general elections.

Although there is a degree of financial oversight, the fact remains party officials are responsible for setting and enforcing the rules. In a divisive, close-fought campaign (which the NDP leadership process certainly has been) this can create all kinds of conflicts, putting party members in awkward and potentially compromising positions. The simpler thing to do would be to make Elections Manitoba responsible for administering leadership races, having all members vote on the same day and then reporting the outcome in a transparent fashion.

But why stop there?

To encourage a greater level of public participation in selecting party leaders, another idea would be to open the process up beyond those select few who purchased a party membership card. The federal Liberals experimented with this in their last leadership campaign by creating a “supporter” category. Another more radical step would be to go so far as creating a primary process similar to those in the United States, where even those who do not belong to, or even support, a party are still free to choose a party’s candidates for local, statewide and national office in publicly administered elections.

These ideas will not sit well with committed partisans who believe in the current system, but a process that gives a greater number of people a say in who becomes the next premier of the province would give that leader a stronger popular mandate, one that extends beyond the preferences of a couple thousand union and party members.

Curtis Brown is vice-president of Probe Research Inc.,

a Winnipeg-based market research firm.

These views are his own.

curtis@probe-research.com Twitter: @curtisatprobe

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