While the list may be particularly long for Torontonians — who may be contemplating such measures as reversing amalgamation to diffuse political animosities between policy factions, or introducing a stronger set of regulations to allow council to depose a mayor — those outside of the Big Smoke should also be thinking deeply about this question. It turns out that when American late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel joked that something seemed “very Canadian” about Toronto councillors’ inability to properly sanction the mayor, he couldn’t have been more right.
What would have happened if an individual with the political (and recreational) habits of Rob Ford had been not mayor of Toronto, but prime minister of Canada? In other Westminster parliamentary systems, the answer would be simple: Caucus would vote him out, as the UK’s Tory caucus did to Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and Australia’s Liberal and ALP caucuses have done a combined total of six times.
However, unlike these and other Westminster parliamentary states, Canada bears the stamp of a Parliament with no mechanism for caucus to vote out the prime minister. Prime ministers have in the past been pressured by their caucuses to resign — as in the case of Jean Chretien, after his firing of Paul Martin upset many in the Liberal party.
This informal system relies, however, on a certain level of decorum and what might be described as an altruistic desire for parliamentary order on the part of the leader. If the Rob Ford saga teaches us nothing else, it’s that decorum and altruism are dangerous principles on which to base the integrity of the system.
Conservative MP Michael Chong is poised to introduce a private member’s bill which would bring Canadian parliamentary practice in line with the U.K. and Australia, by giving caucuses the power to trigger a leadership review and vote out a party leader. But we know what tends to happen to private member’s bills.
Worse yet, the Canadian state (unlike its counterparts in the U.K., Australia or New Zealand) gives a truly defiant prime minister who has tested his or her legitimacy in office the power to decide on an election date.
This provides delinquent leaders with a very powerful tool to retain and prolong power in inappropriate circumstances, and continue operating in the full knowledge that voters would turf them out at the first opportunity.
Canadians tend to assume no sane individual would go to such lengths to stay in power — but what could we do if a prime minister came along who either proved us wrong, or proved their own insanity with such actions?
Seen in this light, the quintessentially Canadian aspects of our parliamentary system that leave so much power over deposition in the hands of a hypothetical one-person disaster seem less patriotically charming — and more alarmingly foolhardy.
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