If there is one last bastion of desperation for political parties trying to play the populist card, it’s the “too many politicians” line. We’ve seen it before, with Ontario eliminating seats under the Mike Harris years (eventually aligning provincial and federal ridings with the exception of splitting the Northern Ontario mega-riding in two provincially). We saw the Alberta Party trying to play this card in the last Alberta election. In the previous parliament, we saw the federal Liberals trying to play this card as they argued against increasing the number of MPs as part of seat redistribution. Now, we’re seeing this again courtesy of the Saskatchewan NDP, promising that if they win the election, they’ll reduce the number of provincial seats from 61 to 55. It’s a stupid policy idea, and it’s one that fits into the kinds of populist noise that gives us “tough on crime” policies that generally only exacerbate problems. Why is it stupid? Aside from being desperate, it generally is a signal that you have no other practical ideas for improving any aspect of governance, but rather falls into the narrative trap of “politicians are the problem.” The problem is, is that you can wind up with too few politicians to do what is required of them – particularly in smaller provinces. One of the biggest problems is that when you start reducing the number of backbenchers, you have fewer members to hold the government to account. We’ve seen a few places where the government has tried to go with a smaller cabinet (Alberta, for example), only to wind up having to appoint more ministers to share the workload better. If you reduce the number of total seats, it means that you tend to wind up with a government that has the majority of its seats in cabinet, which is terrible for both governance and for allowing backbenchers to voice dissent – especially if it means that they’re one scandal or screw-up away from a substantial promotion. It means there are fewer bodies for committee work, for dealing with constituents’ issues, and when you’ve got a lot of rural ridings – particularly in places like Saskatchewan – making those ridings bigger to accommodate fewer members becomes impractical, as does the idea of reducing the number of urban members so that they have more population within them so as not to drown of the rural seats (which explains part of the gerrymandering that places like Alberta were terribly adept at for years provincially, and Saskatchewan federally, with no urban seats until this last election). Politicians have important work to do, and having more of them spreads the work around and can make them more effective as they do the job that they were elected to do. Trying to claim that there are too many of them is cheap populism, and in the end, everyone loses as a result of it.

Good reads:

• A report leaked to The Canadian Press shows that the lack of technical capacity at DND and Public Works means defence procurements wind up costing more.
• The minister of defence has been joining the minister of international development on her meetings to help bring a whole-of-government approach to foreign aid.
• The former ambassador to the US, Gary Doer, says we need to watch for currency manipulation in the TPP implementation.
• A senator and the Commons finance committee have recommended it, now Ontario promises a pilot project on guaranteed basic income.
• Chrystia Freeland says that thanks to Trudeau’s meeting with Obama, softwood is on the negotiating table with a timeframe rather than languishing on a desk.
• Thomas Mulcair talks about his decision to fight to stay on as leader.
• Here’s an interesting read on the science of attractiveness, and how that translates into politics (particularly around Trudeau).
• Bruce Hicks writes about the history of “free votes” in Canada, and the particular problems that they were supposed to get around for MPs.

Odds and ends:

After their apperance at the State Dinner in Washington, here’s a look at Sophie Grégoire Trudeau’s parents.

The young man who got a homophobic Valentine’s card at work got a card from Trudeau and cabinet.