Clapping Backbencher Seals

Coyne knows political history too well to argue that Canada ever had a golden age. After all, the Dominion’s architect and very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a dirty operator and once had to step down from office after getting mixed up in a campaign financing scandal. Still, Coyne is able to identify deep and often concerning changes in the balance of power within Canada’s political system — starting with parliament.

It is hard to maintain that prime ministers are accountable to parliament when they can and have prorogued it with ease. If parliament ever was a theater of deliberative democracy in Canada, it isn’t now. Governments routinely cut off debate through time allocation and “guillotine” motions. They roll together bills with critical financial legislation in distended omnibus bills that MPs are reluctant to vote against for fear of triggering federal elections. MPs today function less as legislators than party loyalist sheep: they vote with their party 99.6 percent of the time. In the chamber, they give standing ovations and rote speeches and repeat and tweet attack lines outside it. In Coyne’s mordant words, they are parrots as well as clapping seals.

This lack of both brain and spine, Coyne argues, is the consequence of how MPs are selected. Their nomination races are opaque and rarely even contested, with candidates parachuted into seats by their parties. Worse still, since the 1970s, candidates have required the signature of their party leader to run, making them dependent on the leader’s favor to enter — and stay — in parliament. This, Coyne believes, is not only bad for the functioning of parties but it is also bad for the country.

Prime ministers may prove themselves to be hopeless generals, but their junior officers know that they will be cashiered if they try and fail to mount a coup against them. The passive obedience of his caucus enabled Trudeau to hold on to office for months after it became clear that his cratering popularity had encouraged Trump to ridicule him as “Governor Trudeau” and unnerve Canadians with annexation jokes. Only after Trudeau had humiliated and then demoted his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, did she summon the gumption to challenge him.

Coyne concedes that Canadian prime ministers have always wielded outsize powers. In any Westminster system, the prime minister governs in the name of the sovereign and is answerable to parliament. But in a distended confederation such as Canada, they’ve also had to counterbalance the provinces. This has left them — or rather the Prime Minister’s Office, a swelling corps of shadowy advisers — with enormous influence over the institutions that ought to check or at least scrutinize their exercise of power. The PM appoints senators, Supreme Court judges, and governors general.

While Coyne is respectful of the judiciary, he is derisive of the senate. He worries that it is not just fatuous but disruptive: if it ever discovers a keenness to show its independence and to block bills, it might worsen the crisis of democracy in Canada by taking stances for which it has no popular mandate.

If party leaders have become petty monarchs — unchecked by their MPs and, once in office, by any meaningful constraint — then it matters a lot how they are chosen. Ever the Eeyore, Coyne thinks the rot set in as long ago as 1919, when Mackenzie King was chosen as leader of the Liberals by his party’s convention rather than by agreement among his MPs. But things got very much worse when Trudeau became Liberal Party leader: he was returned merely by his “supporters” — people who did not even have to be citizens of Canada and were able to register as such expressly to take part in his election.

While parties profit from the wholesale selling of memberships in these open leadership races, Coyne sees them as little more than auctions. In his account, they sever any line of accountability between the leader and the parliamentary caucus, leaving the PM beholden only to loosely affiliated, and often ideologically extreme, supporters temporarily mobilized to secure victory.

The Ritual and the Ruse

If parliament is not working efficiently, then elections ought at least to give the people a periodic remedy, but here, too, Coyne dispels the fond myths of civics class. Elections in Canada are well run: it is easy to vote, and results are quickly and transparently declared and consensually accepted (at least until recently). Yet the country’s first-past-the-post system is wrongly said to let voters “throw the bastards out” by replacing a flagging administration with a new majority government that has a strong mandate for change. In fact, minority governments have become the norm ever since the rise of the New Democratic Party (NDP), a party which has itself been unfairly squeezed both by first-past-the-post and — in this spring’s election — attempts to game it with tactical voting.

The system’s failings are increasingly hard to ignore. It bakes in geographic injustices: huge numbers of voters who live in the “wrong” areas, such as Conservatives in urban areas or Liberal voters in Alberta, are effectively disenfranchised. It concentrates elections on battleground ridings and often produces wild swings in seat numbers out of all proportion with the support parties enjoy in the country as a whole.

Although he is a romantic Anglophile, Coyne urges Canadians (and Britons) to break the superstitious attachment to first-past-the-post and consider alternatives — such as the single transferrable vote or a party list system. Electoral reform is one of a long list of wonkish tweaks with which his book ends. Some are fairly good ideas, such as capping how much individuals can spend on both candidates and advocacy groups, to reduce the outsize influence of wealthy donors, corporations, and — his recurrent irritant — unions.

Other suggestions come across as curmudgeonly harrumphs. Like many people, Coyne despairs at the dumb things that politicians — especially, in recent years, Conservative ones — say and would love to police a line between legitimate commentary and “misinformation.” But a proposal for candidates to sign up to regulations that would see them heavily fined for such misinformation is an obvious nonstarter.

Coyne morosely doubts that anyone will pursue his book’s recommendations. When the going is good, political parties hesitate to change a system that seems to be working for them. Trudeau, for instance, reneged on his commitment to electoral reform once the Liberals were back on top. It looks like politicians will continue getting away with this because of the very complacency that Coyne laments.

Until now, he muses, Canadians have been some of the richest people around. They have enjoyed their natural bounty next to a largely friendly United States and separated by the oceans from the nasty powers of the earth. They grumble about “Ottawa” but have had the luxury of ignoring whether their democracy is performing as it should. And yet world events are now turning a boring problem into a crisis: Canada is not producing leaders with a powerful enough mandate to defend the country against Trump, Russia, or China.

The View From Toronto

Coyne’s claim about the weakness of Canadian leaders is less a presentation of hard facts than it is an ideological statement. Coyne shares the Globe’s view of the world — which is that of comfortably off Torontonians — that what counts in politics today is the epic struggle between autocracies and democracies. The American historian Timothy Snyder, who has done much to frame such a view, recently relocated to Toronto, where this message lands reliably with the Globe and Mail crowd.

Coyne presents no evidence that either China or Russia has the will or the capacity to menace Canada’s national interests in any serious way. In seeking to bring home to a complacent Canada its vulnerability to World Evil, he also seriously overdraws contrasts with the political health of other countries. Canadian MPs are said to be passive because they pass only three private member’s bills per year, whereas their British MPs are models of initiative because they pass eight. Is this really a big difference?

Other contrasts seem misguided. The senatorial right of veto on presidential appointments in the United States no longer looks like a shining example of checks and balances after Republicans nodded through Trump’s abject candidates. Coyne believes that the UK’s House of Commons encourages more genuine debate because its front benches are closer together and MPs are not marooned behind desks, but its “Question Time” features just as much vapid abuse as its Canadian equivalent.

Western European countries that Coyne holds up to Canada as examples — because they seem to have more rational electoral systems or more robust parliaments — do not seem better placed to preserve the market liberalism he champions. After decades of underspending on defense, they now cling nervously to Trump’s coattails. Their populations are disillusioned with their political elites, who are seen as drones — either failing to tackle cost-of-living issues (from the Left’s point of view) or failing to keep migrants out (from the Right’s). Systemic problems such as the question of who should pay to tackle climate change or the costs of aging populations are booted down the road rather than tackled.

In the end, Coyne has then compiled a long list of concerning symptoms but stopped short of diagnosing the disease. One can’t help but suspect that Canada’s malfunctioning political system produces precisely the kind of fudged inertia that its voters secretly want — at least at the federal level. (The dysfunctions of provincial politics are a different matter, although there, too, Canadians often vote for premiers who fail at or put off acting on crucial files.)

Despite his disappointing start, Carney is certainly polling well with Canadians. In throwing up a banker prime minister whose style and priorities contrast markedly with his predecessor’s trendy attitudinizing and emotive gush, perhaps the system has produced what Coyne really wants too, despite his recent grumbles about Carney’s cavalier impatience with parliament. Coyne’s Globe columns reveal him as an unreconstructed neoliberal from the long 1990s — someone who has yet to meet a crown corporation he doesn’t want to privatize or social spending he wouldn’t care to slim. He is also a foreign policy hawk who believes that an emotional defiance of Vladimir Putin and uncritical support for the state of Israel both count as the defense of the West.

If Canada does ever tackle its democratic deficit in the ways Coyne recommends, one can only hope that its revolutionized parties would pursue a very different vision of the nation’s social contract — and its place in the world.