Sort of political Monday

Barbecue-people at the gate!
There are some people that John Ibbitson does not want to have a say in the way the Liberal Party of Canada party runs. Who are these people? Liberals! The kind of people who go to community barbecues are threatening to take over and he is ready to man the barricades to stop them.

Mr. Rae is touring the country and consulting what political types like to call the grassroots, though Alykhan Velshi, a former aide to Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, astutely calls them the grasstops. The grasstops are the riding executives, policy wonks, activists and other need-to-get-a-life types who make up the infrastructure of a political party. They’re not the grassroots. You’re the grassroots, and you wouldn’t be caught dead at a Liberal (or Conservative or NDP) barbecue.

Now you might think, "Hey, the party did very badly last election, maybe they should try something new." The particular something new favoured by Ibbitson being a primary system in which any Canadian who registers can vote.

But to conclude that you would need to honestly believe that these party members—the ones Ibbitson calls "grasstops"—were the ones picking leaders in the past. And that is where Ibbitson's thesis falls to pieces. Because he kinda, sorta forgets that letting card-carrying party members choose their leader is something the Liberals have never done. Never!

If there is one thing that Liberals have always done it has been to carefully exclude the people who go to party barbecues from having any say in how things run. Insiders fear these people and have always worked to exclude them from the inner workings of the party. As a former Liberal, I can tell you that there is no party anywhere where riding executives, policy wonks, activists and ordinary card-carrying members have less voice. In the past, the party has always formed its policy positions and has selected its leaders at big conventions. These conventions are easily controlled by insiders. That is with the exception of last time when they skipped even the convention and arranged for a new leader through a backroom deal.

Once in power, Liberals have tended to govern in consultation with various stakeholders from interest groups and industry. Even elected MPs have very little voice or power in the Liberal Party of Canada.

Mr. Ibbitson presents himself as a guy pushing for the radical reforms but if he really is that, it's rather bizarre that his proposed reforms just happen to be exactly what the party's insider elite is proposing. No really.  The very "radical", "bypass the insiders" approach that Ibbitson is proposing is exactly what president of the Liberal party put forward when speaking to the Empire Club of Canada.

Just that name tells you something. "The Empire Club of Canada" sounds like the sort of place where ordinary Jills and Joes can get together and chat about the country doesn't it? Nothing so elitist as a party barbecue here! Why a cynic might think that what is really going on here is an attempt by the elite to maintain their hold on the Liberal Party no matter what.

In that regard, we might go back and reread this paragraph of Ibbitson's again:

People are eventually going to tire of voting Conservative, if not in 2015 then surely in 2019, and the NDP appears to be relentlessly determined not to grow up.  

What he is really describing here is a strategy by which an elite group of people will maintain control of the Liberal Party.

I've written about these people before:

When I think about Canadian politics there is one thought that troubles me and has troubled me for a few decades now (and it is not an issue unique to Canada). And it is the fear of a disproportionate amount of power and influence held by a relatively small group of people who live in Ottawa and Toronto and who have senior positions in the public service, the media and a small set of universities. These people aren’t a conspiracy. They don’t have meetings where they plan their strategy. No, all they have in common is a shared set of values. These values aren’t nefarious or evil and they aren’t a secret. Most anybody could make up a list.

1. They believe that government should be a large and dominant presence in the lives of Canadians.
2. They believe in multiculturalism and in having large numbers of immigrants come into Canada.
3. They believe the arts, universities and scientific research should be heavily funded by government.
4. They hate the idea of a media that is mostly driven by profit and so they support government regulation and subsidization of the media and government support for the CBC.
5. Related to the above, they want government to use its regulatory power to keep existing media from having to face any serious competition particularly from American sources.
6. They believe the government should tax people not just to get revenue but also to decrease what they see as unfair income distribution.

What really disturbs me about this group is not that they believe what they do. I live in a neighbourhood dominated by these people. I live among and like these people and I believe they have every right to believe the things they do and every right to push and promote these ideas.

But one thing that does disturbs me is that they don’t respect anyone’s right to disagree with them. They demonize everyone who does.

The other thing that really disturbs me about this group is that for the last few elections it has tended to feel like it didn’t much matter what Canadians actually voted for, these people got what they wanted anyway. It felt to me like they were using their power to effectively neutralize any opposing voices.