In a democracy, what is the use of politics? Vast question, as Jacques Parizeau would have said. In an ideal world, it should serve the common good. Through policies and public investments aimed at making a society fairer, more equitable, more humanistic and freer.
Is this really the case? Sometimes yes, but sometimes no. When it aims at power for power’s sake, politics and those who make it are at their worst.
Ditto when its main fuel is made of polls that slice the electorate into small slices to seduce with empty promises, catchy slogans and polarizing themes.
In the magazine Policy OptionsÉmilie Foster, associate professor at Carleton University and CAQ MNA from 2018 to 2022, argues that political parties are increasingly obsessed with “controlling the message”.
According to her, the “centralization of power” in the office of the prime minister, whoever it is, is another cause for concern. The same is true when parties are “imbued by a logic of marketing”, “sell themselves as a product” and behave as if they were “in permanent campaign”.
The observation does not date from yesterday
“Private MPs,” she writes, find themselves crushed “by communications control and the party line.” This observation, even a bit over-dramatized, is not new, however.
One could even add to this the obvious weakening of the militant bases, yet formerly pure oxygen in the life of the parties. And what about the echo chambers which, through social media, fuel polarization, resentment, prejudice and increasingly artificial conflicts?
Without counting the media which, even traditional, forgive little or not the public display of dissensions within a party or a government. Anyone who’s ever worked in a prime minister’s office knows all that.
In Quebec and Canada, our British-style parliamentary system also has a lot to do with it. Any prime minister, if he leads a majority government, comes very close to being omnipotent for the time of his mandate.
However, the reality is still more nuanced. In fact, each Prime Minister has the freedom, behind the closed doors of his Council of Ministers and his caucus, to limit the freedom of speech and initiative or to encourage it. Each and everyone has their own modus operandi.
The message matters more than the form
For example, a René Lévesque and a Jean Lesage granted great freedom of thought and action to their elected officials. Result: thanks to internal debates even muscular, they produced governments able to work together for the common good.
These prime ministers exercised their authority over their troops without being authoritarian. They were certainly formidable communicators. Their respective partisan machines were too.
For them, however, the message was more important than its form. Hence their long list of innovative, progressive and bold policies. With good or bad polls, they did what they promised to do.
And nowadays? In her article, because the obsession with marketing has won over most political parties, here as elsewhere, Émilie Foster does not mention the CAQ specifically.
The sudden abandonment of his flagship promise of the third link at the start of a strong second term, without even his own ministers and deputies having been consulted, nevertheless testifies to a strong centralization at the top of power, a machine pervasive communication and its tight control of the message.
Which, for better or for worse, is part of how politics is done. Not always, but more and more often.