Front Burner - The problem of unelected leaders

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Conservative Rishi Sunak has just become the third leader of the U.K. in two months, and he's got a mandate to rule until 2025. But many are questioning the process that led to him, and his predecessor Liz Truss, becoming prime minister in the first place: neither was chosen by British voters in a general election. They voted for a different Conservative MP, Boris Johnson, back in 2019 — before he was pushed out by a series of scandals. And they may not get to choose another prime minister until 2025. This is not an uncommon situation in parliamentary democracies. B.C., Alberta and Manitoba now all have leaders that weren't voted in by the general public. Is this a bad thing? A bug, or a feature? And if it is a problem, what should be done about it? Today, Aaron Wherry, a senior writer with CBC's parliamentary bureau, is here to dive into all of that.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Trust is earned, and I will earn yours. Yesterday, Conservative Rishi Sunak gave his first public address as the new Prime Minister of the UK,

replacing Liz Truss after she spent just 44 days leading the country. Many have criticised the whole process that led to Sunak becoming PM as fundamentally undemocratic. We have an unelected head of state, now we have an unelected government. That's not democracy, is it? People have to be allowed a choice. Or be it. We tend to choose our own monsters, but be that as it may, it is the principle. British voters didn't select him or Truss through a general election.

They voted for a different member of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson, way back in 2019. Before, of course, he was pushed out by a series of scandals. And they may not get another chance to choose their prime minister until 2025. Well, what we've seen played out is a coronation here and not an actual election where people have a mandate to serve the British people of this country. You know, the people of this country now deserve us to go to the electorate to put our policies forward about how we're going to deal with this cost of living crisis that the Conservatives have put upon the British people and let them have a vote.

The thing is, situations like this aren't unique to the UK. They're actually kind of common in parliamentary systems. Just in the past few weeks, Alberta and B.C. have gotten new premiers that the general population didn't vote in. Manitoba has one too. So is this a bad thing, a bug or a feature? And if it is a problem, is there some solution to make it better? Today, I'm going to talk all this over with our pal Aaron Wary. He's a senior writer with CBC's Parliament Hill Bureau. Aaron, hi, thank you for being here.

Hey, Jamie, anytime. All right, let's start with the most recent news, which is out of the UK. So Rishi Sunak has just become the country's third prime minister in a matter of about two months. And can you just briefly explain the process that led to him becoming the prime minister? Yeah. So, I mean, we could go back a couple hundred years and chart parliamentary democracy. But basically, what happened here is the UK Tories usually, their leadership process is that they allow the MPs to kind of pick which people will stand for leader, which people will be candidates, and then those candidates then go to the sort of general membership vote of the entire party. Some breaking news about the leadership race. Sky Analysis has it that Rishi Sunak has now reached 100 backers, which obviously means that he has now passed the threshold needed to make the ballot for the next PM.

And in this case, though, Sunak not only, you know, was kind of first out of the gate, but he also piled up a lot of endorsements from the caucus, ended up with a majority of MPs. endorsements from the caucus, ended up with a majority of MPs. Rishi Sunak has reached a significant number, 178 MPs publicly backing the former Chancellor to become the next leader of the Conservative Party and the country's next Prime Minister. And, you know, once it became clear that he kind of had an overwhelming lead amongst MPs, the other candidates, including Boris Johnson, withdrew. And since there was only one candidate left standing, there was no need to go to a membership vote. So really, what happened in this case was that the Conservative caucus essentially picked a new leader. As returning officer in the leadership election, I can confirm

that we have received one valid nomination. I can confirm that we have received one valid nomination. Rishi Sunak is therefore elected as leader of the Conservative Party. Okay. And notwithstanding the fact that Boris Johnson almost came back, which is in itself really something to talk about, there have been criticisms that this wasn't a sufficiently democratic process. And so tell me about some of the controversies here. So there's a tension in the UK and really in a lot of parliamentary democracies now

where leadership elections have moved into kind of wider general votes of the party membership, have moved into kind of wider general votes of the party membership, that there's this conflict between what, you know, necessarily the caucus wants and what maybe the party membership wants. You can get these cases where the membership picks somebody that the caucus doesn't actually like. And it's an open question about, you know, what would have happened if there'd been another wider membership vote in this case. But as we're probably going to end up talking about, you know, what would have happened if there'd been another wider membership vote in this case. But as we're probably going to end up talking about, the Conservative MPs and the Conservative caucus may at this point have been tired of the thought of going back to the party membership and decided that, you know, at this point they should be the ones selecting the leader

and that's the best way to go about this. So let's talk about what happened before Sunak with his predecessor, Liz Truss. So she was prime minister, of course, for a grand total of 44 days. We've talked about her time in office on the show recently, but just Cole's notes for people. She announced this mini budget that wreaked havoc on financial markets, almost immediately caused the pound to tank. that wreaked havoc on financial markets, almost immediately caused the pound to tank. She eventually walked a lot of her plans back, but she still ended up stepping down after a month and a half. And so what happened with her, though, is what you were talking about before, right? Like she was elected not by the caucus, not by the MPs, by members of her party. And just talk to me a little bit more about what happened there. Yeah, when the MPs met to kind of vote on which of the candidates

would go forward to the leadership, she was not amongst the front runners. Well, of course, the next big question facing the Conservative Party is who will replace Boris Johnson when he goes? Well, remember, crowning the next prime minister is a two-step process so firstly tory mps will whistle it down to the two front runners themselves then it goes to the tory party membership and they decide top of the list defense secretary ben wallace next most popular is penny morden then you get Rishi Sunak. Now he's second favourite with the bookies. Less popular with the bookies, Liz Truss. And she sort of had to get kind of into second place after multiple ballots. And if the MPs had had a chance to just vote and pick a leader,

it would have been Sunak. And yet when it went to the party membership, the party membership was much more excited about her. The total number of valid votes given to each candidate was as follows. Rishi Sunak, 60,399. Liz Truss, 81,326. Therefore, I give notice that Liz Truss is elected as the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. And so it becomes a classic case where a leader that the MPs don't necessarily want or aren't in favour of kind of gets foisted upon them. how it ended for her. You have to ask whether if it had just been a vote of MPs, would they have picked someone different and possibly better and had someone in place that would have lasted longer?

In broad strokes, you don't want to oversimplify these things, but in broad strokes, you could look at this and say that MPs are naturally going to look for someone who they like, who they know from personal experience is going to be able to handle the job and that is electable. And the party membership, on the other hand, these are the people who are the sort of most ardent supporters of the party. They might be looking for more of a candidate who's more exciting, who's pushing ideas that really speak to them rather than the broader electorate. And so you have to, looking back on this, wonder whether if it had just been MPs, you know, maybe the entire country may have avoided a lot of unnecessary chaos.

Yeah. And just before we start rolling through some Canadian examples of what we're talking about here, it might be worth just pointing out the obvious that neither of these leaders were elected by the broader population. And the UK would go from late 2019 when Boris Johnson was elected to 2025 with zero general elections. Yes, which is, can seem jarring. And it's's in discussing it, you have to always remember that when when we're talking about the design ofruption or if a leader has to step down suddenly or there's a reason to, you know, for that for that leader to decide not to run for reelection. You don't you don't immediately have to go into a general election. So there's some stability built into that. election. So there's some stability built into that. The problem with it is that if a leader comes in and is suddenly pushing a different agenda than the party got elected on, or is somebody the public really doesn't like, it's not necessarily going to immediately go to a new

election for voters to pass judgment again. And it can be frustrating to look at it and say, well, shouldn't the public have had a chance to vote on Liz Truss? Shouldn't the public be allowed to vote on this new prime minister? But you're sort of always trying to balance, you know, that kind of stability with responsiveness, I guess. All right, let's move to some Canadian examples. So we talk about Liz Truss and how she essentially came to power because members of her party were excited by her ideas and voted for her, not the MPs. They, from the very beginning, were behind Sunak. And it feels like there are a lot of similarities there to Daniel Smith in Alberta. So she recently became premier and leader of the United Conservative Party after Jason Kenney stepped down as leader in the middle of his term. And maybe take me through some of the similarities that you see here to the Liz Truss situation. Yeah, I mean, obviously, it remains to be seen how things are

going to play out for Daniel Smith. But she's another candidate who became leader without having the support of a majority or a plurality of the elected members of the caucus, the MLAs in Alberta. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the results of the sixth ballot. Our members have elected a new leader. Please welcome the next premier of our province, Danielle Smith. She is pushing an idea in the Alberta Sovereignty Act that other MLAs and other candidates have all stood up and said, it's unworkable, it's not a good idea to go down that road. Smith's Sovereignty Act would enable the authority of Alberta's legislature

to refuse the enforcement of federal laws. When Ottawa announces policies and laws that attack our economy or violate the rights of our people, or when Ottawa seeks to take control of our sovereign areas of provincial jurisdiction, our UCP government will not enforce those laws and policies in this province, period. But she speaks to the larger membership, and they're excited by her ideas. They're excited by her. Sovereignty Act. I want to see it. And I just want Alberta to stand up for its rights and not be pushed around by Ottawa.

Yeah, I think it would be great. I'd like my own little piece of land that is just mine and I have control over. So, yeah, it would be awesome. Everything that comes out of her mouth is common sense. It's down to earth. And, you know, look, the argument that gets made is that opening it up to more people is fundamentally more democratic.

The problem, there are a couple of problems with that. One is that, you know, the way our systems are designed, the public votes for MPs or MLAs and, you know, they go to legislature, and whoever can hold the confidence of the legislature gets to govern. And so in the old world where MLAs and MPs got to pick their leaders, it kind of all flowed up from the basic first principles of the sort of representative parliamentary model. And when you take a membership-style model and you kind of graft it onto the parliamentary model, you can get into these kind of awkward situations. The other thing that has to be said is, you know, people who have watched leadership, you know, modern leadership races that are based on

membership, I think at this point would all acknowledge that, you know, these are not necessarily perfect democratic experiments, right? They're, you know, there are not, these are not necessarily perfect democratic experiments, right? They're, you know, they're based on who can sell the most memberships, which candidates can kind of get the, you know, can excite the most people. You're maybe not getting people that are coming into the party that are there for a long time. They're just there to vote for that leadership candidate and leave, you know, they're not necessarily, you know, perfect barometers of who's going to be a good leader, you know, the arguments always going to be made that opening it up is, is more exciting, more democratic, it engages more people. You know, it can be a great

fundraising tool for political parties. But it's, it's an awkward fit with the parliamentary system. Yeah. And on the note of what's most democratic, I think it bears underlining that in the case of Danielle Smith, some of her policy plans, like the Alberta Sovereignty Act that you mentioned, don't appear to be supported by a majority of Albertans more broadly. So essentially, you've got a small minority of Albertans, the grassroots party members who've made this choice for the whole province. But I also want to get into something that's a kind of counter example, which is what we just saw in B.C.

I want to put the speculation to rest so we can get back to what really matters. It won't be the last time he walks into a room as B.C.'s premier, but on Tuesday, John Horgan made it clear his days as leader are numbered. Horgan says he will step down as premier after his party holds a leadership convention in the fall. It's a decision he arrived at with his family after his second bout with cancer and months of treatment. with cancer and months of treatment. So a different kind of exit. There was this more leftist environmental candidate for leader,

Angelia Padurai, who appeared to be bringing in a lot of that excitement you're talking about of new grassroots members to the NDP, and the party disqualified her. And they said that she broke election rules, but she and her supporters alleged that she was pushed out so that the party establishment could get their preferred candidate in, who will now be Premier Dave Eby. And it doesn't matter on what side of this argument you fall. The impact has been that the more lefty, environmentalist part of the party base was effectively neutralized here. So whether through a powderized error or through the party base was effectively neutralized here. So whether through a patterized error or through the party's intent, and, you know, what sticks out to you

about this example? So I guess a couple things. One is, you know, let's imagine like without litigating exactly what happened in whether, you know, there was actual wrongdoing committed, you could have gotten into a situation, another classic situation where this person who generates all this grassroots support becomes leader of a caucus where almost all or all of the MLAs supported the other person. And so the question would then be, how would that work?

Would all these MLAs or MPPs have to just sort of fall in line with that leader? Would that leader have their support? How long would this last? How well would it function? But the other piece of this is that you also have to allow for the possibility that opening it up means that you get interesting, new, fresh voices that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. One of the ways to look at this is, it's not a perfect analogy, but the American primary system, where they have these open primaries and candidates can come in and run for the Republican or the Democratic Party, it has arguably pushed American politics to extremes. And it has arguably been corrosive.

But it's also brought in, you know, some exciting and interesting candidates who've become sort of major forces in American politics like AOC and others like that. So you do have to allow for the possibility that it is sometimes going to bring in fresh new voices that are going to shake up politics in a positive way. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

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We talked about how all of these leaders, regardless of these different differences, came to power without going to a general election. And I think it's worth asking the question, like, how much of a mandate do any of them really have, especially to make big sweeping changes? Yeah, probably not much of one. Like, you know, a lot of times, if you look at sort of cases in Canada, where a new, particularly where there was an incumbent government and a new leader came in, the new leader, the new prime minister, fairly quickly called a new election.

You know, John Turner, Paul Martin, Kim Campbell, figures like that have come in and fairly quickly decided, OK, at some point I need to call a new election. I'm not I can't start sort of implementing a whole new agenda. I want my own mandate. But it's not necessarily wrong for someone to come in and say, I'm going to see the rest of the mandate that we have. It's just that at some point the public public may rightly say, you're doing things that haven't been put before us that weren't voted on. You know, yes, we're in a part, we live in a parliamentary democracy. And yes, we elect our representatives to make these decisions. And yes, you could continue on governing until the very end of the mandate. But you know, you're doing

things that go beyond what, you know, we would have allowed and we'd like a say in these things. I think the hope you would have is that or the sort of positive case you could make is eventually that new prime minister is going to have to go to the public. And if they've been doing a bunch of things that the public doesn't like, the public's probably going to toss them out of office. So, yeah. Although, I mean, you could do a lot of damage in a short amount of time as we just saw with Liz Trust, right? Yes, totally. The problem, the challenge you would have is designing a system that would allow, you know, in a case like BC, where they're changing leaders, but they've, you know, fairly recently just had an election, there isn't really a crying need for a new election. Yeah. And I mean, to be fair, Dave Eby is sort

of continuing on in the same vein as Horgan, right? Like this seems like a more pertinent question when we're talking about the UK or Jason Kenney in Alberta, where the electorate were really, really angry, even with the people that they voted for. Yeah. And so the conundrum, I guess, is how do you design a system that would allow for stability and not having an election when you don't need to have an election, but on, because ultimately, you know, the MPs and the MLAs we elect are going to have a fairly influential presence within the legislature in terms of, you know, determining when leadership changes happen, when, you know, which direction governments take, they still get to exert a fair bit of control. And if they are kind of independent, or important people in their own right, they are maybe going to stand up

periodically and sort of be the kind of guardrails on these sorts of situations. And do you see that as the best option to try and hedge against these issues that we've been talking about, either trying to maintain stability or trying to prevent the party from being, you know, hijacked by ideas that the electorate does not support. Right. I mean, I think, look, if we could just sort of snap our fingers and make change, there's probably a pretty good argument for going back to just having MPs or MLAs pick leaders. But that's probably never going to happen. And there are, as I said, there are some benefits to not to having a wider vote on leaders. I think in the absence of kind of going back to that system, you know, reinforcing MPs, MPPs,

you know, reinforcing MPs, MPPs, MLAs, making them independently powerful or influential, giving them some kind of backbone and security to stand up to leaders, to be influential, to have direction on policy, can at least, you know, ensure that the legislature itself is a good check on leaders. You know, even if the leader changes, even if, you know, you go through multiple leaders between elections, if the legislature itself is strong, it can act as a kind of guardrail and sort of keep things within bounds and, you know, hopefully prevent sort of the most extreme scenarios you can imagine.

But that's sort of the best option I can kind of think of. As I said, it's hard to design a perfect political system because you're always going to be dealing with, you know, trade-offs between different interests. Aaron, this was really interesting. Thank you. Thank you. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.