suffolkowner said:
I'm curious why we don't see in Canadian politics more caucus revolts like our Australian friends. Our political party leaders being elected from the general membership and then the caucus gets stuck with maybe an inferior "boss" and PMO. Party discipline just seems extremely strong here even at the expense of future party success. I can see the Liberal party being reduced to a minority in the next election as some of the mushy movable vote switching back to the Conservatives plus the youth vote might not come out as strong with pot already legal
I wonder if Canada hasn't been "leading" the Commonwealth in Party Politics while Australia has been "clinging" to the older traditions of Westminster. In Britain it is only now that Westminster is fully confronting the difference between a Parliamentary Party and an Extra-Parliamentary Party.
The Liberals and Conservatives in Britain were both essentially Parliamentary Parties with the members being "democratically" elected by extra-parliamentary supporters and then being allowed by those supporters to freely and independently elect their own leaders in the House.
Labour has always been different because it was an extra-parliamentary party whose battle-cry was, to paraphrase Preston Manning, "the workers want in"; the god-fearing, nationalist, monarchy supporting members of the Co-Op movements, the Masons and the Unions.
That has always produced a tension between the Parliamentary Party, forced to abide by the traditions of the House, and the Extra-Parliamentary Party, demanding that their voices be heard, and their opinions directly reflected, in the House.
Up until Tony Blair the balance favoured the traditions of the House. But Tony blew up the House and his own Labour Party and shifted the balance to the Extra-Parliamentary Party which has resulted in Jeremy Corbyn drawing his legitimacy from fee paying party members while being despised by the Parliamentary Party and considered, at best, dubious by voters who have traditionally elected Labour MPs.
The Conservative Party in the UK is facing the same problem of managing its fee paying members, its MPs and the voting public.
I suggest that in Canada, that Extra-Parliamentary Party element predates that of Britain and finds its original expression in The Family Compact and the Chateau Clique - now commonly known as the Laurentian Elite. People who have grown up in the shade of Scots Episcopalian Bishop Strachan and the Bishops of Quebec - people who disagreed vehemently on Religion but ultimately agreed on the need for a directed, ordered, top-down, corporatist society to deliver Peace, Order and Good Governance. In Canada they could exert an influence over a small population that their brothers and cousins in Britain were denied.
Britain is, in many ways, especially since joining the EU, "catching up" to Canada, by abandoning its free-booting liberal past to join the corporatist model prevalent in the EU and Canada.
The difference between Canada and Australia is, I think, bred in the bone. We got the good kids that sat at the front of the class. The Aussies got the kids that sat at the back, were regularly suspended, occasionally expelled and didn't give a toss for rules and elites.
In Canada the closest we came to "radicals" were William Lyon MacKenzie and George Brown. Interestingly it took Mackenzie's grandson, MacKenzie King to create the modern Liberal Party of Canada which put a radical veneer on a corporatist party centred on Montreal's Golden Square Mile - which married Scots businessmen with the Ancien Regime Seigneury. That union found its ultimate expression in Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Scots mother, French father). Curiously Justin is a Scots-French mix as well - Margaret Sinclair's father, a Liberal from Vancouver, was born in Scotland.
Our governing system looks more like what the EU aspires to - where most of the moves are made off the chess board of the House.
The EU is holding up the current open debate in Britain about Brexit, and the involvement of the people, the courts, the press and parliament, as an example of the chaos that results from democracy and is to be avoided at all costs.
