What Does the US Have That Canada Needs? Open Primaries

Commentary

What does it take to subvert Canadian democracy?

No grand conspiracies, misinformation bots, or foreign sleeper agents are required. All you really need are a couple of school buses.

Consider the case of MP Han Dong. In 2019, several busloads of Chinese international students suddenly arrived at the federal Liberal nomination contest for the Toronto riding of Don Valley North to support him. According to Marie-Josee Hogue, chair of the Foreign Interference Commission, “a known People’s Republic of China proxy agent” delivered those students and provided falsified documents that allowed them to vote for Dong and hand him the win.

As Hogue noted in her report, “Nomination contests may be gateways for foreign states that wish to interfere in our democratic processes.” In fact, it’s worse than that. Beyond the potential for foreign interference, the system Canadian parties currently use to select their candidates is deeply undemocratic and biased at all times. Its main features are shadowy backroom deals, constantly changing rules, and a disturbing lack of fairness. It all needs to change.

Party leaders in Canada wield an enormous amount of control over how their party’s candidates are selected. Leaders can directly appoint a preferred candidate or eliminate their competition altogether, ignoring the wishes of local riding associations.

In 2017, for example, Liberal candidate Juanita Nathan recruited 1,600 new party members, only to see them declared ineligible by party bosses, paving the way for a victory by party insider Mary Ng. In 2019, the Conservatives “parachuted” Nelly Shin into the B.C. riding of Port Moody-Coquitlam after Shin was pushed out of her own riding in Ontario to make way for a Liberal MP crossing the floor. The Conservatives simply disqualified the only other candidate in the race to assure her the win.

Given the control party insiders have over the nomination process, potential candidates learn to focus their attention on pleasing the party bosses, rather than representing their constituents. There is a better way. And it can be found south of the border.

The American primary system is messy, loud, and complicated. But turn on the news during any election cycle, and you’ll see voters in every state engaged in exciting, dramatic, and genuinely meaningful nomination battles. The rules for these primary elections vary from state to state, but the most democratic and transparent of them are called “open primaries.” This means all voters can participate in any party’s nomination contests, even those who support another party.

There are many advantages to an open primary. First, it increases overall participation. Less than 5 percent of Canadians are even party members, and therefore allowed to vote in a nomination contest; in the United States, 20 percent or more of voters participate in primary elections. Second, open primaries give voters genuine choice by limiting the power of party insiders to control the process. This dynamic cultivates a broader diversity of candidates, from moderates to mavericks to reformers. This is also a good thing as it puts greater pressure on incumbents and leads to more turnover among a party’s candidates. A recent report by the respected Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., backed open primaries as the best option in the United States.

Would open primaries work in Canada? There is nothing in our parliamentary system to prevent this sort of reform. In fact, the UK’s Conservative Party successfully experimented with open primaries beginning in 2009 under leader, and later prime minister, David Cameron. It was a big success, leading to greater voter engagement and media attention. Unfortunately, the experiment ended when Cameron left office.

Here in Canada, the important thing is to ensure reform occurs organically and democratically. While some organizations, including the Samara Centre, want to put Elections Canada in charge of party nomination processes, the last thing this country needs is another cumbersome federal bureaucracy. Note that the U.S. open primary system evolved out of demands from party members within the Democratic and Republican parties for a fairer system of selecting candidates.

And there is precedent for such change in Canada. Conservative MP Michael Chong’s Reform Act, 2014 proves that it is possible to reduce the power of party leaders. This piece of legislation currently allows MPs to hold a secret vote to remove their leader, under certain circumstances. It has already been used once, when the Conservative Party turfed former leader Erin O’Toole in 2022. The same kind of limit on party leader power could be work for nomination meetings as well.

Democracy thrives on transparency, competition, and broad participation—all of which are undermined by our current nomination system. If we truly value democratic principles, we should be prepared to use what works. The U.S. open primary system shines a big, bright spotlight on how candidates are selected. We need the same thing here.

Jake Melo Valinho is a political communications consultant majoring in finance & economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C. Connect with him on LinkedIn. The original, longer version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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