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Party Discipline: You are there to Support the Team

In one of my favourite episodes of my favourite sitcom Seinfeld, Jerry comes into possession of four playoff hockey tickets for a game between the New York Rangers and the New Jersey Devils. With George taking a pass on the game to impress a new girlfriend, Elaine asks her Devils fan boyfriend, David Putty, to attend. However, when they are getting ready to leave, Elaine discovers that her enthusiastic hockey fan date has painted his face in the colours of the Devils — bright red and green.

When she asks the face painter why he looks as he does, Putty replies with eyes squinted, “You gotta support the team.”

An incredulous Elaine exclaims, “Well you can’t go out looking like that.”

Undeterred and unfazed, Putty inquires,“Why not?”

Exasperated, Elaine replies, “Because it’s insane!”

David Putty would make a great and valued member of the Conservative Party of Canada, or any other House of Commons caucus. Indeed, for modern Canadian caucuses, loyalty to the team and a desire to impress teammates and leaders are not only valued qualities, they are qualities that are seemingly valued above all others. Blind loyalty is valued over constructive criticism, and certainly over the ability to speak truth to power. These realities are certainly beneficial for promoting team and caucus solidarity. They have a negative effect, however, on an individual MP’s self-esteem and are ultimately detrimental to both democracy and to good decision-making.

I have previously stated, somewhat famously, that backbenchers of the governing party like to think of themselves as part of the government. They are not.[1] Under our constitutional convention of responsible government, the executive is accountable to the legislature. But the executive is not the legislative caucus of the governing party. The executive is the prime minister and his handpicked ministers of the Crown. Each minister heads, and is responsible for, a department of the permanent government bureaucracy. Since parliamentary secretaries answer questions in the House when their minister is absent and are frequently dispatched to the cable political news shows to defend the government, PSs must, by extension, be deemed to be part of the executive/government. However, the rest of the legislative caucus of the governing party is not part of the government. As MPs, their role should be to serve their constituents by holding the government to account. In theory this could involve occasionally voting against the government.

The government (ministers and parliamentary secretaries) are bound by two-line whips (instructions from party leadership) during votes. However, backbenchers, at least theoretically, are supposed to be allowed to vote independently on all but three-line whips. The convention of cabinet solidarity requires that a minister (or parliamentary secretary) must always support the government position when voting, or in public, or resign from his or her position. No similar doctrine of caucus solidarity exists, although an imposed one has been rapidly evolving.

I am always amused when Conservative backbenchers refer to “our government.” Again, backbenchers are not part of the government. However, sitting in the Commons, one frequently hears a member’s statement that begins, “Mr. Speaker, our government’s number one priority is job creation,” or something similar. Equally common are planted questions, delivered during Question Period, that begin with the same premise. A question such as, “Can the Minister of Finance comment on our government’s recent positive employment statistics?” is founded on the same false premise: that a backbench MP from the governing party is part of the government.

Even more troubling than these statements and questions, though, is the practice of Conservative backbenchers attending photo opportunities that are masquerading as government funding announcements, occasionally with novelty oversized cheques. “Our government is pleased to support the community through this important investment in infrastructure,” the backbencher will proclaim. The necessary implication, conveyed to the local media, is that the local MP was somehow responsible for obtaining the investment for his constituents. The reality is that the decision was made by a bureaucrat and then approved by a regional minister, both of whom are part of the government, which the announcing MP is not.

An interesting aside: I am no longer involved in making government funding announcements, even within the boundaries of my riding, Edmonton-St. Albert. It has been deemed more “appropriate” that a Conservative MP from a neighbouring constituency make the announcement. This is a blatant attempt by the government to indulge in partisan advertising using public tax dollars; the appreciative recipients of the funding announcement are supposed to believe that the grant came from the Conservative government (or the Harper government, as it is more often termed), when the reality is that the funds are courtesy of the Canadian government.

Two very odd and symbiotic sociological trends help to foster the belief in the desirability and necessity of this “team player-ship.” The first is the desire, sometimes the need, to belong. I cannot adequately explain why members of caucus place such emphasis on the importance of being part of the team. Perhaps it is the isolation and loneliness of being marooned in Ottawa and away from family and friends for half of the calendar year. Maybe it is the constant reminders from party leadership that politicians win as a team and they lose as a team. Ralph Klein frequently would borrow a hockey analogy and remind his caucus that you play for the logo on the front of the sweater and not the name on the back. Whatever the reason or combination of factors at play, there is great emphasis on the notion that “you gotta support the team.”

The second factor is that the party leadership unequivocally encourages all members and supporters of the government to think of themselves as members of the team. You would think that ego and arrogance would result in leaders and ministers regarding their governmental club with some sense of exclusivity. However, just the opposite is true. Why?

It serves the interests of the leadership to have all caucus members, and, in fact, all party members, think of themselves as part of, and contributing to, the team. Caucus members are more likely to defend the government’s record and party messaging, and donors are more likely to send the party financial support if they are made to feel that they are a part of it all.

The feeling of being part of a team is particularly stressed at weekly caucus meetings. Every caucus meeting begins and ends with an address by the leader. The opening comments are generally mundane: a summary of relevant events which occurred since the caucus last met and/or the plans regarding the week(s) ahead. However, the closing comments, which are akin to a half-time pep talk, would make a college football coach proud. After summarizing the government’s record, Prime Minister Harper will close a Wednesday caucus meeting with a Knute Rockne-esque speech including platitudes, such as: “Now let’s go back to our ridings this weekend and remind Canadians that we are the only ones they trust to manage the economy; and that we are the only party with ideas for the economic growth and crime prevention that Canadians want and deserve.” “And now let’s go win one for the Gipper,” would not seem out of place!

So pervasive is this emphasis on the team and players that in the spring of 2013, during the so-called “backbench spring,” Chief Government Whip Gordon O’Conner took the team analogy to new and disturbing limits. Langley MP Mark Warawa wished to deliver a statement in the House of Commons, expressing his disappointment that his private member’s motion condemning gendercide would not be allowed to proceed to a debate. O’Connor justified denying Warawa the opportunity to speak in the House by stating that the caucus was a team and that he was the coach. As coach, he argued, he had the unfettered discretion to determine who gets to “play.”[2]

The problem is that governing a country is not a game. The stakes are much too high and the outcomes too important to trivialize them to the equivalent of a game. The bigger problem is that the inappropriateness of the analogy was clearly lost on the chief government whip. The sad reality is that government advisors too frequently will evaluate the success of any initiative, or the day’s events, in terms of partisan objectives, rather than policy outcomes. But governing has to be more important than just notional winning; it ought to be about achieving effective outcomes for Canadians.

Although the Speaker’s Ruling on the Warawa matter confirmed that only the Speaker ultimately gets to determine who is allowed to speak in the House of Commons, the reality is that backbenchers continue to allow themselves to be ruled by the government, believing that they are part of the government team. Because said belief serves the interest of the party leadership, it is in leadership’s interest to ensure the team concept remains a powerful reality. In such political ecosystems, perception easily becomes reality. In such political ecosystems, there are rarely any occasions when the government needs to worry about restraining its backbench MPs — the members restrain themselves.

I have participated in four elections and close to twenty election forums. In almost every one of these job auditions, the question is posed: “How will the candidate, if successful, vote on a matter of local importance, if the position of the constituents is different than the official position of the party under whose banner the candidate is running?”

Invariably, the answer offered, especially by neophyte candidates, is, “Of course I will stand up for my local constituents.” Incumbent candidates and those with more experience will offer a more nuanced answer, such as “it depends on the issue,” or “you have to pick your battles and your hill to die on.”

The truthful answer should probably be something along the lines of: “I will support the party position and thereafter attempt to persuade you of the correctness of that position, because if I stray from the party position, I will be out of the caucus and off the team and I can do more for you inside the caucus than I can from outside the tent.”

I cannot recall how many times I have heard elected members defend their refusal to fight against a particular decision that the government has made to which they object, rationalizing that you have to pick your battles and choose your hill to die on. However, the reality is that the longer one has been part of the team, the easier the members find it to rationalize their decision to stay on the team as opposed to staying true to the principles that they truly believe in and that sent the member to Ottawa in the first place.

Notable exceptions exist. In the current Parliament, NDP MPs Bruce Hyer and John Rafferty, both rural Ontario MPs, split with their party leadership on the merits of the Long-Gun Registry and voted in support of a government bill to repeal it. Both faced internal discipline. As a result, Hyer left the NDP and sat as an Independent before eventually joining the Green Party caucus.

Another defender of principle over team is former Nova Scotia Conservative MP Bill Casey. Casey actually voted against a Conservative government budget in 2007, because the budget messed with the equalization formula and, allegedly, broke the Atlantic Accord. Casey voted against the budget and was expelled from the Conservative caucus mere minutes thereafter. However, so appreciative were Casey’s Cumberland-Colchester constituents that they re-elected him with an impressive plurality when he ran as an Independent in the 2008 general election.

Teams and parties all use the aforementioned discipline to enforce loyalty to the team. When Hyer and Rafferty voted in favour of scrapping the Long-Gun Registry, they were removed from their respective committee assignments, disallowed from speaking in the House of Commons (as the whips had complete control of the speaking lists pre-Warawa), and suspended from all international parliamentary travel (junkets).

In the fall of 2012, the Conservative party leadership tried to discipline me when I refused to remove, or edit, several blog posts I had written that were critical of such non-conservative matters as ministerial opulence (e.g., expense claims for such things as $16 glasses of orange juice and parliamentary limousines), the F-35 fighter jet procurement fiasco, and taxpayer subsidies to private corporations.

Now, party discipline is truly medieval. It consists of a highly unsophisticated series of awards and punishments. Favourable committee assignments, office locations, and international parliamentary travel are held out as carrots. The stick is the threat to deny them.

When my blogging was deemed offside and I refused to delete or edit my posts I was removed from the Public Safety Committee and placed on the Library of Parliament Committee. My seat in the House of Commons was also moved, to the back corner of the Opposition side of the House.

The whip knew I coveted the Public Safety Committee, while the Library of Parliament Committee is famous for being the equivalent of a high-school detention hall. The irony was that being transferred from the Public Safety Committee to the Library of Parliament Committee was absolutely no punishment at all. Although the work of the Public Safety Committee is certainly more interesting and is better suited to my background as a lawyer, it also has a heavy workload. It sits a minimum of four hours per week and requires considerable reading and preparation time in advance of those meetings. The Library of Parliament Committee, meanwhile, almost never meets. It meets only once or twice per parliamentary session, sometimes only to elect a chair. Because it is a joint committee of Parliament, it always meets in an opulent room in the Senate’s East Block, always at noon, and always with a hot lunch.

If they had really wanted to prevent me from blogging, they should have given me more, not less, work to do. They should have assigned me an extra busy committee, not taken one away. However, such is the medieval system of human-resource management inside the Ottawa Bubble.

I suspect that the powers that be actually believe that a recalcitrant team member will be so embarrassed or so ardently miss being a team player that he will eventually come around, regardless of how ineffective or counterintuitive the punishment is. And that does seem to be the case. As Andrew Coyne of Postmedia has correctly pointed out, the reason that party discipline is so effective is because it is largely self-imposed.[3] So strong is the need to be a member of the team that the team polices itself. Team members will occasionally feel the need to encourage players who have been tempted to stray from the pack to get back in line. More often, however, such action is unnecessary; the members exercise self-discipline entirely of their own volition.

The big carrots in the Ottawa Bubble are not international travel or a big office in the new Promenade Building. The big carrot is the upward or, more accurately, forward movement of one’s political career. The prospect of moving from the back to the middle, and then, possibly, the front benches; the prospect of being named a committee chair, a parliamentary secretary, or, the brass ring, a cabinet minister — that is really the glue that makes party discipline stick.

Forward bench mobility means that MPs will generally impose discipline upon themselves. The more ambitious a member is, the more that he or she will be prepared to do to support the team. Attending party fundraisers and working by-elections is the minimum expected of a member. The more forwardly mobile will send attack 10-percenters (party messaging) into their ridings, read inane talking points rather than participate in an actual debate in the House of Commons, and go on cable political panels to defend the indefensible.

During the infamous Senator Duffy-Nigel Wright debacle, a forwardly mobile Parliament secretary told CBC’s Evan Solomon that the then–chief of staff of the PMO was a Canadian patriot, so concerned that the taxpayers of Canada would be out the $90,000 that the senator had improperly claimed as a housing expense that he reached into his own pocket to ensure that the taxpayers would not be left holding the bag.

Four days later, Wright was gone, immediately becoming the object of vilification. Two months later, the aforementioned parliamentary secretary was appointed minister of state for democratic reform. This observation is in no way personal to the honourable minster, who I consider to be a friend; it is an institutional observation. The system, by design, encourages and promotes sycophancy. Prove yourself to be a loyal team player and your career prospects brighten. Represent your constituents and speak or vote in a different direction than your party leadership wishes you to and you will find yourself on the outside looking in.

American satirist P.J. O’Rourke wrote an entire treatise on this concept, aptly named Parliament of Whores.[4] No self-respecting individual would barter away his or her integrity or credibility in exchange for career advancement, especially in such an ephemeral world as Canadian politics. Just as no self-respecting adult would paint his face just to show support for his favourite hockey team. As Elaine Benes said in Seinfeld: “Because it’s insane!”