Glasstry news

I like politics this much (M. Turnbull) They are having a spill in Australian politics again, and I kind of admire it. "Spill" is what Australians call a leadership challenge. The right wing government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has (with coalition support) a narrow majority, but the even-more right wing anti-immigrant demagogue Peter Dutton has resigned from cabinet and challenged Turnbull's leadership of the Liberal Party. �This is a fight for the heart and the soul of the Liberal party,� says one moderate MP. �These people surrounding Dutton � these people are not Liberals, they are not conservatives, they are fucking reactionaries, and I have nothing but contempt for them.� In Auz constituencies elect (or defeat) MPs and MPs elect (and when  necessary remove) their party leaders; it would only take 43 Liberal MPs to bring on a leadership vote within the caucus. This whole notion of accountability makes most Canadian commentators flutter and go pale and talk a...

Veteran political consultant and commentator Robin Sears is shocked to learn that selection processes for MPs in Canadian political parties are dodgy things: [Disgraced former leader Patrick Brown] is also right to say that political parties have demonstrated they cannot be trusted today to run their own nominations processes with rules they themselves set, and ones they clearly sometimes ignore � like paying for someone else�s party membership. Astonishing it nonetheless is, to have a conservative politician call for state intervention in the private affairs of a political party. Brown said that reflecting on the messy nominations processes he witnessed, he has concluded that, � � it is time for Elections Ontario to manage this part of our democratic process.� (!) The news that people buy and sell party memberships by the bushel whenever a constituency nomination or a party leadership strikes Sears like a thunderclap, according to his telling of it.  It is as if he has never seen...

Regarding the Conservative party leadership "race" in Ontario, let me just note that the party reports having 190,000 members, but only 74,000 of them seem to have had valid mailing addresses, and only 64,000 or so voted.  (And the "winner" trailed in both the popular vote and the vote-by-constituency.)  How many of the rest of the 190,000 "members," one wonders, were essentially avatars, memberships that had been created by the party leadership but had not yet been assigned to real people when the leadership contest suddenly emerged?  It doesn't seem to matter; no one is investigating it.

Kinda heartwarming, actually, how loyal the aging separatists of the Bloc Quebecois are to deeply held Canadian values.  When 7 of the 10 Bloc MPs in Ottawa find their leader intolerable... it is the seven who have to leave the party, while the leader, who is not even a Member of Parliament and is leader only because her supporters bought more votes the last time the BQ held a sale of leadership, somehow remains leader. It couldn't happen in a working parliamentary democracy, but it's so deeply entrenched in the Canadian way of politics that even the politicians who want to leave Canada accept it without a moment's reflection, even if it means career suicide. Update:  Dale Smith consider the pervers e state of party leadership in Canada

Hey, he brings in the votes, doesn't he? In the Globe and Mail , columnist Adam Radwanski examines how easily and routinely political parties in Canada are corrupted by the millions of dollars and thousands of people their leadership processes require  (italic added): Parties do not typically have exhaustive formal vetting processes to determine who is allowed to run for their leadership. In theory, the leadership races themselves are supposed to serve as informal vetting, with candidates' liabilities brought into the open as they take aim at each other. In practice, parties often have low enough membership rolls heading into their contests that an available path to victory is the one Mr. Brown followed in 2015: Flood the party with new members , at your disposal if you make the right deals with the right organizers, and don't worry too much about persuading stalwarts looking critically at each candidate before deciding how to mark their ballots. Regardless of how the job ...

Patrick Brown had an undistinguished tenure as federal MP, but his success in raising funds and selling memberships allowed him to become Ontario leader of the Conservative Party in one of those vote-buying orgies called leadership conventions. Now that he has been brought down by allegations of sexual harassment, the buzz seems to be that nobody actually liked him much anyway and the party might do better with someone else leading it in the June 2018 election. But the extra-parliamentary party executive has decided to go ahead with another leadership convention, against the will of the caucus of MPPs -- you know, the elected and accountable representatives of the people. Who will buy the most votes this time?  A rare glimmer of wisdom  has come from one backroom Conservative, Thom Bennett of Ottawa:   �I am at a total loss as to what the thinking could be that our executive would tell our elected MPPs � those soldiers who are putting their name in front of the elect...