Conservative MP Garnett Genuis penned an analysis piece for Policy Options that tried to explain why MPs vote in lockstep, and it’s just so precious you can barely stand it. Genuis dismisses the talk of heavy-handed PMO and whips offices, and after some lengthy discussion, concludes that it’s the human nature of conformity that’s at play. His mode of analysis was the voting record on C-14, the highly contentious medical assistance in dying bill.

It’s not that Genuis doesn’t have some good – if somewhat infuriating points – in the piece, talking about how MPs are so busy with their constituency work that they just don’t have the time to sit down and study the legislation that they were elected to be considering. That one nearly made me blow a gasket, considering that constituency work isn’t actually part of an MP’s job description and its growing importance has come at the expense of their actual jobs of holding government to account. That Genuis uses it as an excuse for having MPs let the “experts” in their leaders’ offices tell them how to vote is utterly galling. I can see why they would use this excuse, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good one or one that we should let them get away with (but then again, almost nobody knows what an MP’s actual job description is, least of all the MPs themselves, and yes, that is a Very Big Problem. His better points, however, included that sometimes it’s good for local nominations to see that an MP will be willing to break ranks from time to time, but it’s a mixed bag when they also need to be seen to have a united front with the party. It is a tension that he doesn’t delve deeply enough into.

But so much of his thinking is flawed, in part because he relies on the data of votes on a single contentious bill rather than a broader sample, which would produce a more thoughtful discussion, and also because he ignores the other incentives for why MPs will vote in lock-step. For some parties, like the NDP, the need for solidarity in all things means a much more conformist voting pattern in all things, and there is an internal culture of bullying to keep MPs in line so as not to be unseemly with dissent. With government backbenchers, there is the hope that toeing the line enough will earn you a post in cabinet or as a parliamentary secretary, because the ratio of cabinet-to-backbench seats is still too low in Canada to encourage a culture of more independent backbenchers in safer seats willing to do their job of holding government to account. There is also the pressure – which We The Media shamefully perpetuate – that you don’t want to be seen as breaking ranks lest it reflect poorly on the leader (though this seems to be a bit less so under Trudeau who has been vocal about encouraging more free votes). There is no discussion about the blackmail of a leader that can withhold their signature from an MP’s nomination papers during the next election (or whatever the mechanism is post-Reform Act, because there is no actual clarity in law there any longer). So yes, while there is a human tendency to conformity, it is informed by a whole lot of other factors that Genuis ignores, and that taints his analysis to a pretty fatal degree.

https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/776734642225475584

https://twitter.com/e_tolley/status/776768733922471937

https://twitter.com/e_tolley/status/776769078878883841

Good reads:

• The Chief Statistician resigned yesterday in protest over the way that the Shared Services Canada gong show is hobbling Statistics Canada.
• Justin Trudeau is leading the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria replenishment conference in Montreal, pledging a 20 percent larger commitment.
• Apparently it’s an outrage that a minister of the Crown spent $178 on a Nexus pass, because we’re a bunch of gods damned rubes.
• Here’s a look at how the drive to get an Indigenous justice on the Supreme Court of Canada may mean reneging on the bilingualism pledge.
• It looks like we’ll be ratifying the Paris climate agreement before getting all of the provinces onside.
• While consensus doesn’t appear to be happening at electoral reform consultations, not many Conservatives are bothering to even hold town halls.
• Kellie Leitch spoke to Chatelaine, and insists that she’s not anti-Muslim.
• Here’s a profile of Leitch’s campaign manager, Nick Kouvalis.
• Peter Sankoff gives a deserved spanking to Parliament for not actually repealing struck-down clauses from the Criminal Code, which led to the Vader trial confusion.
• Kady O’Malley looks at the Ontario political finance reforms and compares them to how the federal rules developed.
• Susan Delacourt reflects on her summer series looking at new MPs, and on the balance between idealism and cynicism in politics.
• Andrew MacDougall diagnoses what’s wrong in the Conservative leadership, and the dance a future leader will have to keep the party together.
• John Ivison calls out the electoral reform consultations for the farce that they are.
• Emmett Macfarlane reminds us how votes work, why we don’t elect the prime minister, and why it’s not just semantics.

Odds and ends:

Here is the compressed timetable that the government is looking at for electoral reform (assuming it doesn’t get derailed).

As the by-election call date closes in, the Liberals have found their candidate for Medicine Hat–Cardston–Warner.