A Matter of Too Many Grassroots

July 3 to August 11, when Sirius, the Dog Star is bright in dawn sky, newspaperman expect Dog Days stories. They are the year’s loopiest. Sirius does things to us that Friday the 13th and Wiccan naked dancing in the monlight don’t.

Dog Days 2001AD:

A wild duck dragged a Vancouver policeman over by his pant cuffs so he could rescue her brood from a storm sewer.

In Quebec the police had to be called to aid a man who was being torn up by his house cat. Blood was all over the house because the cat took offence when he showered in the bathroom with the family parrot.

Third, also for reasons not abundantly clear, a Philippine lady chose to be locked up in a room with 2,000 scorpions for company. That brings us, naturally, to the Stockwell Day story.

It is perhaps the oddest of all, with every newspaper in the nation assuring us that the race for Alliance leadership is on and assuring us with equal fervor that nobody is running in it.

Properly, the Stockwell story doesn’t fit. Dog Days stories should be comic. His is tragedy -- a well meaning man of slender talents, promoted, by the Peter Principle, to his level of incompetence and then abandoned among scorpions he had thought looked like such nice chaps.

On one thing, practically all Alliance Party members agree. It’s no laughing matter. The leadership affair has done serious, possibly fatal damage to their party. Also is has left the federal government with no effective Opposition in the House of Commons. We are all the worse for that.

How was so huge a mistake about leadership made?

The best explanation: too many grassroots grew. Call it, if you prefer, too much democracy.

Mr. Day was chosen by a process even wider, as well as shallower, than the widest of the old-style party conventions. Alliance members everywhere had delegates’ rights. Among the thousands voting for him were a great many who had never seen him, never heard him speak, never saw him challenged in debate and who didn’t listen too closely to see if what he said one day was the same as he said the next.

A significant number of his supporters -- is ninety percent be too high? -- just had a good feeling about him. He had such nice, even teeth. In democratic procedure, ignorance is no impediment, as Socrates, among others, could testify. The most clueless party member’s vote was just as good as the vote of people who knew what this strange business called leadership is all about.

All the Canadian political parties now act as if feel good is good. It isn’t. Opening up the choice of leader to everybody whose breath can fog a mirror is one more example of our unwise shift from the British parliamentary system to the American congressional.

Not every American idea is a good one. That country does not get the best and brightest people for leaders. It hasn’t for a long time. Neither have we.

We’d do better with the old, tried and true British system.

The best people to pick leaders of parliamentary parties are their associates in the House of Commons plus a small number of those clever lads in the smoke filled rooms. It is a task for experts, not for rowdy amateurs.

What about all that enthusiasm generated in party leadership conventions where you get to wave a placard, scream slogans and if you’re lucky seduce the suicide blonde delegate from Rimouski?

Is that what you really want? Getting half looped and hollering at a convention or staggering to a telephone at home with a bottle in one hand to cast a long-distance vote? Wouldn’t you prefer getting outstanding people to lead your party?

But what of the rights of the citizens to express their democratic will?

They have that. Everybody does. Every four years, sometimes less, they can pass judgment. At such elections they should be reasonably sure that each political party in the House has had the best leader it deserved, chosen by the people with whom he worked.

Remember Britain. She did not so shabbily for a few centuries with MPs choosing people like Pitt, Disraeli, Gladstone and Churchill.

It won’t happen here now, nor for quite a while. The words democracy and grassroots are now as sacred as the word motherhood used to be. So is protocol, whatever it’s supposed to mean.

Oh well. Dog Days. Courageous Mother Duck, Fierce Jealous Cat, the Scorpion Queen and Mr. Day. Call it a Sirius matter and let’s get on with enjoying summer.

August/01