Roundup: On not electing first ministers

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There was something going around the Twitter Machine yesterday regarding past prime ministers, and Kim Campbell in particular, and it appealed to my sense of pedantry/exactness in our civic discourse – no, Kim Campbell was not “elected” as prime minister, but no prime minister is actually elected in the Westminster System.

She was not the first prime minister not to have been appointed to the position without leading their party to victory in a general election. We had two early prime ministers who were sitting senators and not MPs. John Turner didn’t have a seat in either Chamber when he was sworn in as prime minister. At least Campbell had a seat and had led several high-profile Cabinet portfolios (first female justice minister and defence minister), and she made significant reforms to the structure of Cabinet upon her appointment as PM, many of which have been lasting. She did not have to face Parliament as prime minister, but neither did Sir Charles Tupper, not John Turner. Trying to somehow insist that because her appointment did not follow a general election victory as somehow denigrating or making her lesser-than as a prime minister is ahistorical and ignorant of how Westminster parliaments work.

Part of this, however, is tied up with narratives that our pundit class keeps importing from the US, and which our media stokes out a sense of general ignorance of civics. We recently saw in places like Nova Scotia, where they just appointed a new premier, that the media are jumping up and down for him to get “his own mandate” – meaning going to a general election – which goes against how our system works. In Newfoundland and Labrador, their premier was appointed without a seat, which he promptly won in a by-election, and then called an election “to get a mandate” and lo, it turned into a gong show because they had a sudden outbreak of COVID. But this false notion about “mandates” keep cropping up, because media and pundits keep feeding it. It’s not how our system works, and it places false expectations on new first ministers, and creates unreal expectations for those, like Campbell, who did everything according to our system’s actual tenets. It would be great if we had a better sense of civics in this country to counter this ongoing nonsense.

Good reads:

  • It seems that allegations around Lt. General Dany Fortin date back to 1989 at the Royal Military College; his sudden departure signals how serious it is being taken.
  • It is believed that there will be a fairly seamless transition for whomever takes over for Fortin in leading the vaccine rollout.
  • Here is the inside story on how “one-dose summer, two-dose fall” came to be.
  • A chain of emails between Transport Canada and the Canadian Transportation Agency are raising questions about the regulator’s independence.
  • Contradictions are creeping up in the Conservatives’ narratives about the investigation they called into General Vance in 2015.
  • The co-chair of the Immunity Task Force thinks the post-COVID review will need international representation to get a more objective view of Canada’s response.
  • Here is an explainer of what the joint parliamentary committee reviewing the medical assistance in dying regime will be looking at.
  • The Canadian Press is asking western Conservative MPs how they’re selling O’Toole’s climate plan, which involves a lot of truth about the current carbon price.
  • Chantal Hébert makes five observations about Quebec’s new language legislation.

Odds and ends:

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: On not electing first ministers”

  1. “It seems that allegations around Lt. General Dany Fortin date back to 1989”

    I’m sure O’Toole and Singh will be by in a short while to blame Trudeau for not stopping Fortin from being an idiot while Trudeau was at university. Just like he didn’t prevent Mulroney from selling off Connaught Labs when he was in high school, and owes Quebec an apology for his father’s response to the FLQ crisis that happened before he was born. (In Havana, of course.)

    Has he been blamed for the Avro Arrow yet? Is Chuckles the Clown going to write a letter to Mario Dion demanding an ethics investigation into Trudeau’s role in the Pacific Scandal? Canada’s version of “Hillary shot JFK” and “Why didn’t Obama prevent 9/11?”

  2. I get your point about how Prime Ministers aren’t directly elected, but is the convention developing that heads of government need to be seen as having won their own mandates to be considered fully legitimate? I’ve read about how the coalition that threatened to unseat Stephen Harper back in 2008 fell apart in part due to some Liberal and NDP MPs fearing the wrath of their constituents if they participated in it. It was like King-Byng in that it was legal according to the written letter of the Constitution, but it was widely seen as illegitimate by a public that would have punished MPs they considered to be acting undemocratically.

    From everything I’ve seen, most people simply don’t cast their votes based on the local candidate. They vote for political parties and leaders, with the candidate being at best a secondary consideration.

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