Over the weekend, Aaron Wherry wrote a piece about party discipline, comparing Derek Sloan’s ouster from the Conservatives in Canada, with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s censure in the US. While I think Wherry makes a few interesting points, he misses a boatload of nuance that should probably be included in there – including the fact that I’m not sure that control over nominations is necessarily an issue of party discipline per se, and I fear that the piece suffers a bit of conflation as a result.

What I thought in particular was his point where parties can exert more control over who can and cannot get nominations in Canada, where party influence is much weaker in American primaries. The ability for party leaders to be able to veto nominations is a fairly recent development, dating back to the Canada Elections Act reforms in 1970, when they needed an accountability mechanism when party names appeared on ballots for the first time, and in the interests of not burdening Elections Canada with intra-party disputes over nominations, they gave party leaders the ability to sign off on nominations. At no point in the debates (and I did read the Hansards and committee transcripts when I was researching for my book) was the possibility of this being used as a tool of party discipline raised. Nevertheless, this became essentially a tool of blackmail, where leaders could threaten to withhold signing the nomination papers of any MP who wanted to run again if they didn’t toe the party line. But this is only a tool of discipline for an incumbent, not someone who has never run before, which is more what Wherry is talking about with Sloane and Greene.

In either of those cases, these were newbies to the party, and control over who is and is not running is part of the argument he is making – that it’s tighter control in Canada than in the US, and maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think there is more elegance to the argument than that. When it comes to the more substantial difference between Canada and the US when it comes to quality control of who winds up on the ballot is how the grassroots mechanisms different. In Canada, it is ostensibly a matter for the riding association, which can be hundreds of thousands of members – especially if there is a membership drive for a contested nomination – but that’s not the same as a primary, which is many, many times larger. There is a more robust intra-party green-light process in Canada that has grown up over time, but the bigger problem right now is it is being abused, and parties are gaming the nomination process, in many cases to favour candidates that their leader would prefer, and this is a problem that very much needs to be solved as soon as possible. While yes, it may be preferable that we have a bit more quality control over our candidates (emphasis on “bit” – plenty of people get elected who never should have made it past their green-light process), it should still be a more grassroots driven process, and not be the sole discretion of the party leader. That is the part that is harming us more than helping us, and the happy medium won’t be found until we get back to a place where we aren’t selecting party leaders through membership votes, and the grassroots has their proper role in ground-up democracy restored.

Good reads:

• Anita Anand says that most of the vaccine delivery delays are behind us, and she is also ensuring that AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson doses ship upon approval.
• Here is a deeper look into the loss of domestic bio-manufacturing capability, which is why we haven’t been able to produce more vaccines.
• Here is a look at how provinces could be using rapid tests effectively, rather than sitting on the millions of kits the federal government procured for them.
• PCO says that funding for former Governors General-led initiatives is discretionary and not an entitlement, so that may limit any plans Julie Payette may have.
• Part of Friday’s health committee document dump were emails from senior staff calling on withholding or delaying making some PPE information public for reasons.
• A number of MPs have joined the call to demand the Olympic Committee relocate the games away from Beijing because of the treatment of the Uyghurs.
• In Nova Scotia, Iain Rankin won the provincial Liberal party leadership and will become the province’s next premier shortly.
• Kevin Carmichael argues that telecom oligopolies taking wage subsidies while paying out dividends is making the post-COVID landscape hostile to monopolists.
• Heather Scoffield delves into the job numbers posted on Friday, but does not go far enough in pointing the fingers at the premiers who allowed the COVID to get here.

Odds and ends:

A new Parliamentary Poet Laureate was named last week, Louise Bernice Halfe, otherwise known by her Cree name of Sky Dancer.

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