ABSTRACT
Introduction The Canadian party system has experienced significant flux in recent years. In the 1993 federal election, the governing Progressive Conservatives (PCs) were reduced to just two seats in the House of Commons. This led to a decade of contestation on the right between the PCs and the upstart Reform Party. At the same time, a new force, the Bloc Québécois, emerged within the province of Quebec and succeeded in winning most of the province’s federal seats in six successive elections (from 1993 to 2008). With the Bloc dominating Quebec, Reform winning most seats in Western Canada and the Liberals sweeping Ontario, there was a strong regional cast to party politics in this era (Cross 2002). With their vote shares spread inefficiently across the country, the PCs and the left-of-centre New Democratic Party (NDP) suffered significant loss of seats and found themselves struggling for survival (Carty et al. 2000). By dominating the country’s largest province, and thanks to the machinations of the single member plurality electoral system, the Liberals managed to form majority governments from 1993 to 2004 (though never approaching a majority of the popular vote). This situation began to change in 2004 with the merger of the two right-of-centre parties. The new Conservative Party held the Liberals to a minority victory in 2004, came to power themselves in 2006 and won again in 2008 and 2011. Removed to the opposition benches after more than a decade in power, the Liberals found themselves deeply divided along factional lines representing rival leadership aspirants. The party suffered its worst-ever electoral drubbing in 2011 as it slipped to a distant third place behind a resurgent NDP benefiting from the widespread popularity of its leader Jack Layton. Illustrating the perceived importance of effective leadership to electoral success, the Liberals’ response to their defeats has been to replace the leader after every recent election. Liberals are now on their fifth leader since the 2003 retirement of their last successful one, Jean Chrétien (subsequent leaders have been Martin, Dion, Ignatieff, Rae and Trudeau). The 2011 election also brought a significant setback for the Bloc as Quebec voters moved en masse to the NDP. Given the significant upheaval in support
level for the parties in recent elections it is foolhardy to predict the future. One thing is certain, though: all of the parties view strong leadership as key to electoral success and have shown a willingness to remove those not seen to be meeting this standard. Party leaders in Canada are chosen for an unlimited tenure, meaning there is no set term to their time in office. They lead their party both during parliamentary sessions and election campaigns. The Canadian situation is similar to that in many countries in that leaders are seen to be accumulating greater power as the parties are increasingly viewed through the prism of their leaders and election campaigns are seen as contests among party leaders (Poguntke and Webb 2005). Two important contextual factors that facilitate strong leaders are a relatively high degree of party discipline in parliament and the leaders’ veto power over candidate selection. Party discipline in the Canadian House of Commons is extremely strong and significantly greater than that found in legislatures in many other Western democracies such as the United States and Great Britain. One result is that leaders are able to exert great control over their party’s policy and parliamentary agendas. In addition, election laws provide that party leaders must approve of their party’s candidate in each of the country’s single member electoral districts. While this authority is used to varying degrees it has regularly been exercised by leaders refusing to endorse locally selected candidates that the leader, for whatever reason, does not approve of (Cross 2004, 2006). The result is that members of parliament and would-be MPs know they must remain in the good favour of their leader in order to be sure of a chance to contest the next election. With some exceptions, as discussed below, leaders can be formally removed from their position but this happens very rarely. Instead they serve until they choose to retire or until mounting opposition makes their staying in office untenable. Poor election returns often result in leaders leaving their post. There are no laws governing how parties select their leaders. The decision is left to each party to make for itself. The result is that there has been significant experimentation with different methods and change over time reflecting the parties’ shifting democratic ethos and electoral imperatives. There has often been strong debate within parties over the appropriate way to select leaders and these debates have often been coloured by the leadership ambitions of potential candidates and how they perceive they would fare under different regulatory regimes. Parties typically establish a leadership rules committee just prior to the outset of each contest and these committees often engage in vigorous debate before deciding on the rules for the upcoming election. Leadership campaign operatives suggest that influencing the decisions of these committees, to ensure a regulatory framework favourable to their candidate, is a key part of any successful campaign (see Flanagan 2007). This chapter focuses on leadership selection in the four principal political parties at the federal level. These are the governing Conservatives, the New Democrats, the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois. Only the Liberals and Conservatives
have ever governed and thus only their leaders have served as prime minister. The New Democrats have traditionally been a third-or fourth-place party, though in the 2011 election they had a significant breakthrough and finished a strong second. The Bloc runs candidates only in the largely francophone province of Quebec and thus has no aspirations to governing. The data in this chapter focus on the period from 1965 to 2012. During this time frame the current Conservative party was split into two competing groups between 1987 and 2003 – the Progressive Conservatives (PCs) and the Reform/Canadian Alliance. References to the Conservative Party relate to the PCs for that time period.
