Opinion

December 5, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s pundit class has been lit up this week with commentary on Tory MP Michael Chong’s new Reform Act, which would empower a party’s caucus to turf its leader and give local riding associations the final say over who wears their banner in elections.

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I’m still making my mind up about some aspects of the bill, such as the clause allowing a mere 15% of caucus to launch a leadership review, but I think the one part that’s absolutely necessary is the provision removing a leader’s veto over candidates. The leader’s veto was only added to the Elections Act in 1970. I think we should call it a failed experiment.

The provision would encourage political engagement because it empowers individual citizens to take part in the electoral process. As it is, there’s little incentive to do the grassroots work needed to bring forward a candidate you believe in when the party leader could, in the end, just decide on his own anyway.

Time and again the pro-life movement has witnessed strong candidates being denied admittance to a nomination contest because they’ve been just a little too vocal on the life and family issues. Countless other potentially strong candidates have been dissuaded from even trying because they know their papers would never be signed.

With the help of Liberals for Life, the pro-life movement had a lot of success at advancing pro-life candidates in Liberal riding associations in the 1980s and early 1990s. But Jean Chretien put a stop to it in 1992 and began to appoint candidates to targeted ridings. The reason, he said, was to stop “single-issue groups” from overtaking the party.

Now some are saying that Chong’s bill again raises the specter of party takeovers by “special interest groups” and “single issue” activists.

A Yahoo News headline this afternoon asks: “Could Michael Chong’s ‘Reform Act’ bill give pro-life groups new life?”

At Maclean’s, Paul Wells suggests the bill could easily bring us back to those bad old days of Liberals for Life.

“If the riding associations aren’t healthy then special-interest groups will have fun stacking them, as pro-life groups did with the Liberal party 20-odd years ago,” he writes. “That adventure led to an earlier reform: giving the Liberal leader, fellow named Chrétien, the power to appoint candidates. Reforms tend to replace problems with different problems.”

Michael Chong has responded to those concerns in an interview with Maclean’s Aaron Wherry. His take, I must say, is refreshing. Essentially, he says that riding associations, particularly weak ones that might be more susceptible to a so-called “takeover,” should welcome increased engagement. At the same time, he refutes the notion that we should try to leave some Canadian citizens out of the electoral process because they fail an “ideological smell test.”

When people say it’s relatively easy to take over nominations or these people don’t fit with the party? What does that mean? Taken over by people who don’t look like us, or people who don’t pass the ideological smell test or taken over by people that are too young or too old?

… And the argument that, well, wouldn’t this bill allow unhealthy riding associations to be easily taken over. Well, why is that a bad thing? If a riding association isn’t quote-unquote “healthy” it means it doesn’t have very many members, so why would we not want new members to join that association to grow its membership?

When Wherry asked about the risk that “issues-based groups or mischief makers” could take over parties, Chong questioned the language.

We don’t have voters who are eligible to vote because they’re not mischief makers and they’re not issues-based. In other words, the franchise is universal in Canada. And that means that everyone has the right to participate in the political process.

… Because a group of people who believe in something strongly join a local riding association shouldn’t preclude them from membership.

(Head over to Maclean’s for Chong’s full interview with Wherry.)

The point is that there is nothing nefarious whatsoever about pro-life organizations, or any organization, engaging the electoral process to promote a cause that’s important to them.

It’s not “mischief making”. It’s democracy.