13 Sep How Canada’s media created all-powerful party leaders

In a National Post column about the recent spate of candidates fired for past misdemeanors and errant views—or views opposition mischief-makers could portray as errant—Andrew Coyne decries the assumption party leaders should be all powerful:

The only reason we accept that a leader should have the power to “fire” the duly-nominated representative of the riding association of Someplace-Whereveritis is that we have also accepted he must be held personally accountable for every slip of the lip or peccadillo committed by every candidate for his party in every riding in the country.

And the only reason we accept that is that we have previously accepted that no one in his party may breathe a word or move a muscle without his authority; any stray utterance or ill-judged twitch, therefore, if not personally authorized by him, is at least his responsibility to deal with after the fact. If he does not punish it — and there is only one penalty that is acceptable — it must mean he condones it.

In a series tweets, Dale Smith, a parliamentary press gallery freelancer who describes himself as a “pedant about civic literacy,” adds the important point that political journalists bear heavy responsibility for these assumptions. (For ease of reading, I have gathered the tweets into paragraphs.)

[Coyne] makes some very good points here about turfing candidates, but I would add a couple of things.  We The Media are a big part of this problem. As soon as something is revealed, we turn to the leader and demand action/accountability. Never mind that we’ve all agreed that we don’t want the leader to have a veto over candidates, we still insist that they have it anyway.

It’s the very same with the way we cover MPs and senators. We want them to be independent, except when they are. The moment one of them shows a bit of spine or independent thought, we immediately look aghast and wonder if the leader has lost control.

It’s no different with these candidates. If we want MPs who aren’t just ciphers for the leader, then We The Media need to stop this. If anyone is guilty of turning our system even more leader-centric than it is, We The Media should be looking in the mirror.

How many times have we seen this? Let a backbench MP or MLA vote against her party on any issue—be a matter of high principle or a parochial constituency concern—and the press gallery’s response is not to probe the issue more thoughtfully but to storm the leader and demand to know how he will punish the insubordinate.

This is why parliamentary debate is so sterile: An MP argues about any given issue not because she has thought the issue through, but because she belongs to Team Blue and this is its position—or more likely, because these are the talking points issued to her by the Team Blue Leader’s Office. Thus are deliberation and debate shifted from the open forums of the House of Commons and its committees to the closed confines of party staff and lobbyists. In the extreme examples of the Harper and Dexter governments, even Ministers of the Crown are marginalized, as the un-elected staff of the PMO rule all. Political reporters act merely as enforcers.