The story of my association with “candidate vetting,” is likely better known and simpler. In 2008, I supported an old friend’s campaign to become an NDP MP on Vancouver Island. But he and two other BC NDP candidates were forced to drop out of their respective races because news media and opposition researchers for their competitors dug up past scandals for which the NDP was ill-prepared. To avoid this process in future, New Democrats adopted a “candidate vetting” process.
Previously, any person could seek an NDP nomination at the riding level, obtain a nomination and then present the party leader with a choice to either sign the candidate’s papers, or risk local members not nominating an alternative. Now, the party took advantage of the 2003 Elections Act and created a new system. First, a candidate had to be ruled eligible to seek a nomination by a group of party staffers in head office who would administer a questionnaire and conduct research on the candidate to determine if they were “qualified.” The names of committee members, the contents of their deliberations, and the reasons for their decisions were all secret. Once a candidate was approved by this committee, they could then go about seeking a nomination at the riding level. In 2010, I was the first person in the party this committee ruled unqualified to seek a nomination, largely because of a Facebook post about the Gustafsen Lake siege of 1995.
Over time, this process has spread to all major Canadian parties, and now usually includes the payment of a non-refundable fee. What this means with respect to democracy is pretty clear: power does not primarily flow into a candidate from below, but from above. Whereas local members do not have the power to undo a candidates’ nomination, the vetting committee can at any time. The Liberal Party of Canada has taken this furthest by de-vetting an incumbent MP seeking re-nomination, simply because she was insufficiently full-throated in heaping false praise on her leader.
In this way, even an incumbent parliamentarian owes more to the party staffers above them than to the literally tens of thousands of voters who carry them across the line on election day. Given that over 80% of Canadians vote based on national leader or brand, rather than the identity of their local candidate, those who control a person’s access to the party name are the people on whom they are primarily dependent for their presence in the House of Commons.
To an even greater extent than citizens’ assemblies, practices of vetting are about undermining democratic representation. In a “vetted” nomination system, a candidate primarily serves the party staffers who have permitted them to run, and local party activists only secondarily, especially because the Elections Act specifically empowers party leaders to directly appoint candidates without oversight by local members. In this way, the act of representation that takes place is that the candidate or legislator’s job is to represent the interests of head office party staffers to local party activists and unaffiliated voters, because it is to them that they are primarily accountable.
Still, even with vetting in place, many Canadian parliamentarians still draw a considerable amount of power from building a base of local voters who are prepared pay to attend a local nominating meeting for a party to choose its candidate. This, again, is where demographic representation has been mobilized to shut down democratic representation.
As with vetting, it has been the party of Canada’s progressive technocrats that has led the way. Over the past decade, the BC NDP has enacted a Byzantine system of what might be mistaken for affirmative action, were it being practiced at a non-elite level. Over half of the provincial ridings not occupied by incumbents had to be represented by people from “equity-seeking” groups. What this means is that if a person did not come from an identity group that the party deemed “equity-seeking,” they were not eligible to seek a nomination.
In the piece I wrote about the Columbia River-Revelstoke NDP nomination race, I noted that this, in no way, precludes straight white patriarchs from contesting and winning local nomination races. Claim, without ever having taken a man on a date that anyone has witnessed, that you’ve sucked one dick, and you’re fine if the party brass likes you and need to you defeat a woman in a wheelchair.
On the other hand, if you’re a troublesome white man who is working class, on social assistance, with a history of conflict with the law, you’re triple-disqualified by a fee, the vetting committee’s search for trouble in your past, and the fact that poor people are not on the list of “equity seeking” groups who need more representation in our legislatures, according to the NDP.
But the adverse effects of these disqualifications are not just limited to the individuals and classes of people the disqualify. Their main effect is to change whom candidates and legislators represent. Every time a combination of vetting, fees, and this counterfeit affirmative action succeed in turning a contested nomination meeting into an acclamation because the party’s office has ruled only one candidate is eligible to seek a nomination, it fundamentally changes whom that person “represents.”
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If no local voters or party members are involved in selecting one as a candidate, those voters and members are owed nothing by the candidate. All of the candidate’s debts point upwards to the party staffers who disqualified every other candidate in order to anoint them. They do not represent local members of their party, the identity groups of which they are members or anyone else below them – their debts all point towards the party leader and the technocrats who run the party on their behalf.
If a member of an equity-seeking group seeks a party nomination and is subject to a contest, they are accountable to the local party members who voted for them and owe them representation in order to maintain their position. But if a member of such a group is acclaimed, their debts only point upwards. Instead of representing both local members and party brass, they represent only the latter. Their ability to represent members of the equity-seeking group(s) they purport to represent is contingent on grassroots members of that group mobilizing to win a local nominating contest, something purported efforts to empower minority groups now increasingly prevent.
As exemplified in the Green Party of Canada’s national campaign, many people have associated the steady decline in grassroots democracy and the vanishing of dissident or maverick MPs with the office of the party whip, the caucus member charged with ensuring other caucus members vote with the caucus majority. But if the office of whip were causing these changes, something about the office itself would have changed. But it has not; no legislative or constitutional changes have taken place to extend the office’s power. It is as powerful as it was three hundred years ago when it came into being.
If anything, the office of party whip has become less powerful as less and less authority is vested in a party leader’s caucus, while more and more is vested in their head office staff. While a whip can threaten, on behalf of a caucus, to remove a member, they cannot prevent that legislator from being re-nominated under the party banner. On the other hand, the leader’s core staffers cannot remove a member from caucus but they can prevent their renominattion, a far more powerful and serious threat.
The problem with the parliamentary and legislative caucuses of Canada’s major parties is not that the caucus has too much power and subjects its members to its consensus excessively. The problem with these caucuses is that they are almost powerless. The office of party whip could be abolished tomorrow, every vote in parliament declared a free vote and MPs in each party would all still act in lock step—because the powers controlling them are outside parliament. Faceless bureaucrats, not flamboyant and belligerent party whips, wield the power now.
But like so many white men, especially those of us who are newly white or nearly white, I have held back on putting this analysis together because I know that its full articulation will damage my reputation and upset my friends who care about it. I am making a complex argument that is easily misinterpreted. I feel considerable pressure to go along with the use of a false idea of demographic representation to smash democratic representation so I will not be called racist, homophobic, transphobic or misogynist.
But here’s how I see it: if I have been dealt into this absurd patriarchy as a culturally bourgeois white man who grew up in a rich neighbourhood and has a blue chip education, it is kind of my responsibility to call out a system designed to empower people like me at the expense of others. If I am safer and can lose less, is it not my responsibility to denounce this anti-democratic nonsense for what it is: a scheme to intensify white supremacy, male supremacy and bourgeois supremacy. Because, despite all the colourful optics, that is exactly what it is for and what it is doing right now.
At least in Canada, “progressives” are the problem, not the solution. If we want to actually democratize and emancipate ordinary, decent people so they can help save the planet, we have to stop toadying to our faction’s technocratic elite and head back into the streets—that’s the only place we will find the power and moral authority to turn this thing around.
