The Age of Factions has begun in Canadian Politics
Nobody's grasped it yet, but the New Leaf Liberals have changed everything.
I’ve already written about the result of the Ontario Liberal Party’s Leadership Review. Despite technically gaining more than 50% of the vote, Bonnie Crombie resigned just a few short hours later as it became clear that her continued tenure would be untenable without the support of caucus, the executive council, or party membership.
But in the immediate aftermath, as journalists and organizers alike both try to discern who will be running in the future Leadership Contest, there is a bigger picture that people have failed to recognize. Throughout this power struggle in the Ontario Liberal Party, individuals in Crombie’s camp have made repeated allusions to purging those who challenged her.
And yet despite that attempt to snuff out their flame, the New Leaf Liberals persisted, successfully unseated the leader, elected several candidates from a gender-balanced slate to the party executive, and are now working as an organization to determine longer-term goals for their preferred direction of the Ontario Liberal Party.
Years ago, the idea of a branded, visible subgroup arising within a Canadian political party and openly engaging in conflict with other members of that party would have been unthinkable. The idea of them winning that conflict would have been ludicrous But with the enduring presence of the New Leaf Liberals within the Ontario Liberal Party, it is abundantly clear that the core paradigm of Canadian politics has changed.
In Alex Marland’s book Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada, he makes the point that based on the numbers, Canadian legislators are by far some of the most whipped parliamentarians across the globe, only voting against their party on extremely rare occasion.
Regardless of the political party, in Canada there is a strong culture that silences dissent and debate, bending everything towards the leader’s cult of personality. This contrasts heavily with the Democrats in the United States, who unlike Canadian parties have an open system for primaries and nominations that allows incumbents to be challenged.
There would be no Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Liberal Party or the NDP, because she simply wouldn’t have been allowed to challenge an incumbent MP for the nomination, as there are no open nominations for held ridings in Canadian parties. Despite all the flaws of the American system, iron sharpens iron, and the rigour of competitive primaries makes for stronger candidates. The Democratic Socialists of America are able to exist as a faction which fights other factions for control over Democratic nominations and positions of authority.
Even in the Westminster parliamentary systems of other countries, their parties do not have the same rigid opposition to public disagreement between party members. In the United Kingdom, the conflict between Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn’s rival factions of Labour was an extremely bitter one, which has now led the Corbynites to abandon Labour and form a new party.
But again, such drama has simply not been present in modern Canadian history. There are conflicts between members of the same political party, but they will rarely admit to those conflicts in public. The New Leaf Liberals are not the first time someone has tried to form a faction within a Canadian political party, but it’s the first time in living memory that such a faction survived their party leadership’s attempt to smother it in infancy.
Now? The system has completely changed, even though very few political organizers in this country seem to recognize it. Political parties are no longer synonymous with factions in the Canadian context. The New Leafers may have been the first to accomplish this, but they certainly won’t be the last now that they’ve proven success is a possibility.
This fundamentally reshapes the nature of partisan identity, as sharing a party is no longer common ground by itself; the question immediately shifts to what kind of Liberal or Tory or NDPer you are. And before New Leafers get too excited, they should keep in mind that their ideological opponents will likely start to copy their tactics and structures.
It would be very foolish to assume that the Crombie staff who spoke of revenge upon her victory will abandon that desire now that she’s lost. Indeed, the desire for revenge may be even greater now that the positions and privileges she gave them are at risk. I will not be surprised if the coming weeks and months see an Anti-New Leaf organization formed by Crombie Liberal remnants.
And I especially won’t be surprised if other political operatives start to mimic the successful tactics of New Leaf Liberals across Canada, at all three levels of government. After this weekend, all the rules have been rewritten, and Canadian political actors will be organizing themselves in novel and innovative ways.
In conclusion? The old paradigm is dead…and the Age of Factions has begun.