Nominations crucial to Canadian democracy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/10/2019 (2217 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last week, I went into a restaurant and ordered a BLT. It was OK. But what I had really wanted was a club sandwich, which wasn’t available. I had chosen a sandwich not on the menu, but someone else (maybe the chef or the manager) had written the menu that limited the choices I could make.

One lesson from this exciting story is: keep an eye on who makes the choice before the choice, because they have power that we often don’t recognize.

We all pull this trick with our kids. I ask my daughter, for example, if she would prefer to have broccoli or carrots with her dinner. She happily picks carrots, content in the knowledge that she has chosen for herself. But, really, she doesn’t want to eat any vegetables at all. And at age five, she has learned the technique herself and now presents me with my own unpalatable choices to make.

This applies to politics as well. In a democracy, the people get to choose who governs them. But when you get your ballot on Oct. 21, the candidates you will choose from have already been pre-selected for you. Political parties nominate candidates and present them to you to choose from. They make the choice before the choice. In Canadian politics, parties write the menu and if you don’t like the items available, then you’re out of luck.

In Canada, selecting candidates is an ancient right held by party members in the ­constituencies. Prior to an election, local members will gather to vote for a candidate to carry their party banner. The Liberal and Conservative parties often choose candidates with little party experience but who bring rafts of supporters with them — think, for example, of former mayors and presidents of the local Rotary club. NDP nomination contests, in contrast, tend to feature longtime party activists.

Sometimes these nomination battles involve multiple candidates and thousands of party members voting. More often, there is only a single candidate willing to put their name forward.

And there are many exceptions to the rule that local members choose the candidate. Parties scrutinize potential candidates’ backgrounds and, if anything arises that might embarrass the party, the potential candidate can be “red-lit” and prevented from running. Party leaders have to sign off on candidates and may refuse to do so. In some cases, party leaders may “parachute” in candidates, allowing them to bypass local party members. In other cases, incumbent MPs may be spared a nomination battle. Parties have developed elaborate rules that govern when there is and is not a nomination race and what they look like.

If the choice before the choice is an important democratic decision, then it stands to reason that nomination races should be run cleanly and in a transparent manner. But that’s not always the case. In a recent report, the think tank Samara Canada found that nomination races in Canada are often “too short, uncompetitive, unpredictable, untransparent and exclusionary.”

Only 17 per cent of the 6,600 nomination candidates covered by Samara competed in an actual nomination race. A total of 2,700 candidates were appointed to the position by the central party office. And out of 3,900 nomination races, more than 70 per cent had only a single candidate.

This is not exactly a picture of vibrant local democracy. Most nomination candidates are either appointed to the position or face no challengers. And where there is a competitive race, these can be tilted to favour one candidate by either the central party office or local party officials.

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In fairness, many of the candidates who are appointed or face no competition are likely stop-gap candidates: sacrificial lambs who run for their parties despite having little hope of winning. After all, we would not expect an exciting, competitive race for the NDP nomination in Steinbach or for the Conservative party nomination in Wolseley. In these areas, the parties take what they can get.

I am more concerned about the party poking its nose into competitive races. For the most part, the party should trust its local party members to select outstanding candidates. But on the other hand, the fact that the media is willing to report on the slightest social media foible of all candidates creates a big incentive for parties to closely police their candidate selection processes.

Further, parties are often reluctant to release the details of these nomination races, including vote totals. Samara concludes that if parties won’t clean up their nomination processes and make them more transparent to the public, then government (perhaps Elections Canada) might have to do more to regulate them.

I am loath to regulate yet another aspect of democratic life in Canada. If people are concerned about the state of nomination races in Canada and want to help determine the choice before the choice, the best way to do so is to join a party and participate in a race. Or, even better, run for public office yourself.

Royce Koop is an associate professor and head of the political studies department at the University of Manitoba.