Imagine the following scenario.
Labour (or the Conservatives) lose the general election.
Gordon Brown (or David Cameron) resigns as party leader.
With much of the rest of their frontbench team also discredited, the party elects a non-MP – the (ex) Mayor of London – as its leader.
A sitting MP then resigns so the new party leader can stand in a by-election for Parliament.
With me so far?
Now imagine that in the by-election the other main parties do not put up candidates but rather give the new party leader a free pass into Parliament.
Pretty unthinkable, isn’t it?
Yet curiously that’s just what political tradition in Canada dictates. Not only is it common enough for new party leaders to come from outside the existing ranks of MPs for their to be a tradition of how to treat them, but it is also common for the main parties to give new leaders a free pass to Parliament.
If you look through the electoral and Parliamentary rules, Canada is in many ways very similar to the UK. Both are Parliamentary democracies for a start. Yet whatever the rules and structures say, political culture makes – in this respect – for a massively different system. What is common in one country is unthinkable in another.
Is there any lesson in all this? Perhaps. When talking about Parliamentary reform, we often concentrated overwhelmingly on the details of what the rules say. But that isn’t the only thing which shapes how the system works.
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3 Comments
Of course, the really amusing thing is when the other party refuses to stand aside. In the province of Ontario, the appropriately named John Tory was elected leader of the Progressive Consevatives. Having failed to win his home seat in Toronto at the last round of provincial elections, a member of the provincial parliament in a safe PC seat was persuaded to stand down to allow the leader to enter the legislature. The ruling Liberals didn’t stand aside, and the rural voters didn’t appreciate a failed candidate from Toronto being installed to represent them. Result – Liberal gain 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haliburton%E2%80%94Kawartha_Lakes%E2%80%94Brock_(provincial_electoral_district)
I think Jean Chretien was not a sitting MP when he became Liberal leader and shortly afterwards became Prime Minister from 1993 to about 2005.
Although he had been an MP in the 70s and 80s if I recall correctly.
Yeah, Chretien dropped out of politics after he lost the leadership at his first attempt, and then came back once John Turner stood down. An MP in a safe Liberal seat stood down in his favour once he became leader, then he won his own seat in Quebec back in the 1993 election – one of the questions was whether he could actually win it in the face of the nationalists, but he did. I guess the equivalent would be something like Ken Clarke having quit politics in 1997 when he lost to Hague, then coming back in 2005, with some Surrey tory standing down to create a vacancy for him before he could stand again in Rushcliffe. The way the electorate are taken for granted under this convention is quite unsettling!