Tragedy in the Commons by Alison Loat Read Free Book Online Page A

Nevertheless, the MPs spent a great deal of time describing how painful and mystifying they found this particular aspect of their entry into politics. They said the nomination process was wild and unpredictable. Nasty. Unclean, and sometimes corrupt. They also said it was opaque—it was difficult for them to discern the rules, and how an ideal nomination process should go. The impression formed from the MPs’ accounts? A political party often regards the nomination process as an inconvenient detour on the way to installing its preferred candidate as the party nominee, rather than as an important process that gives the party’s riding supporters a mechanism to select the candidate they favour. It’s here, in the nomination process, that our MPs first encountered the bullying and controlling behaviour of their parties.
    “There’s too much power in the hands of the central campaign committee,” said former Oakville-area Liberal MPBonnie Brown. “They don’t recognize the need for the local associations to have their own way. In other words, what they do is, they try to interfere and get the person they think can get elected nominated.… Then they wonder why all the other Liberals in town aren’t working very hard. Instead of having a proper process and letting the best person in the eyes of the local Liberals win, and then everybody gets on board and you have a great team.”
    Such criticisms of the nomination process are of concern because political nomination is the point of entry into politics, the crucial first step in our electoral process. That moment is a key moment of engagement for regular citizens, and often their first contact with the political system. A nomination may give a first impression of what politics is like from the inside—and the way this first impression goes can either encourage or discourage people from further participation. Judging from Monte Solberg’s encounters with former supporters, his first nomination turned a lot of people on to politics. To what extent are “opaque” and apparently predetermined nomination proceedings turning people off?
    Although some MPs leave their parties once in office, in the past thirty years only two have been elected independently of a party. So, nominations also form many candidates’ first impressions of working with a political party.
    Working with an established party to win a seat in the House of Commons is supposed to be a three-step process: first, the party’s riding association organizes a nomination contest to determine which party member will be its candidate for that riding. Next, the nominee’s candidacy must be approved by the party leader. Then comes the election itself.
    The nomination process is particularly important in Canada because many federal ridings tend to be won by the same political party, election after election. In recent decades, Toronto and Vancouver have largely voted Liberal, Winnipeg NDP and Alberta Conservative. Newfoundland tends to be Conservative in rural areas and Liberal in St. John’s. The Quebec riding of Mount Royal has been Liberal since 1940. Ottawa–Vanier and its predecessor riding of Ottawa East have been Liberal since 1935. And Central Nova has been Conservative or Progressive Conservative for thirty of the last forty years. Of course, ridings do change hands, often as part of a wave—such as the 1993 election that nearly obliterated the Progressive Conservative Party, and the 2011 election, in which the Bloc Québécois lost forty-four of its forty-seven seats—but the preponderance of safe ridings in this country means that the nomination contest is effectively the real election.
    At first glance, the nomination procedure seems straightforward: the delegate with the most votes wins the nomination. But even years after their first nomination, many of the MPs we interviewed struggled to articulate how nominations functioned, citing a lack of clarity in time lines, sources of decision making and