Many old Liberals just couldn’t get over it. The Liberal Party of Quebec has posted a page on its website allowing you to apply for a nomination or even to suggest people who could be approached to run in the next election.
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
Officially, it’s innovation, it’s openness and transparency, it’s “doing politics differently”. Dominique Anglade had promised it during the leadership race.
But for many, this recruitment on the internet is a sign of distress or even panic.
The website is really didactic and aimed at people who don’t know much about politics. Like the fact that you have to have your Liberal Party membership card in order to run. This shows that we are not fishing precisely in the basin where we normally try to find our future deputies.
Obviously, there are plenty of extenuating circumstances, starting with the pandemic which has reduced the internal life of political parties and activism almost to nothing. The PLQ, which once had up to 200,000 members in good standing, had only 20,000 left when it ran for leadership two years ago.
But what a public call for nominations reveals above all, say old Liberal activists, is the weakness of riding associations. Normally, it is activists at the local level who seek out those who could be candidates and who are well aware of local issues.
And when the party decides to parachute in a star from the outside, most often someone eminently “ministerable”, the local association is told that the party needs this person and, most often, the militants locals are responsible for welcoming him and making him aware of local particularities.
The signal sent by the nominations website is that many riding associations no longer have the resources to play a very active role in recruiting candidates. This suggests that we are more in distress than in innovation.
But to what can we attribute this distress? Obviously, there is the pandemic which is not very conducive to political debates at the local level, but also at the national level.
The Legault government is taking all the oxygen available. He governs by press conferences, where he is the only one to present his point of view and where the opposition is absent. And when the media will ask for reactions, they will more often do so in civil society rather than questioning the opposition parties.
And, it is obvious that the marriage of Dominique Anglade with the PLQ did not take place in the best circumstances. Bad luck caused M.me Anglade was elected by acclamation and therefore without much participation from liberal activists. Even when she had an opponent, the debates had to be held virtually, which hindered the mobilization of members.
There are also deeper reasons.
The PLQ has long experienced and even embodied the debate between federalists and sovereignists. It was his real business, much more than economic development.
During the decade of the Charest years, the PLQ could content itself with saying the word “referendum” to win elections. It was simple and effective. The party could save itself from the great debates of ideas and was often satisfied to be a machine to collect money for the electoral coffers, with all the harmful side effects that this entailed. Mme Anglade inherited a party that had very serious problems.
But that being said, the fact remains that the best way to attract interesting candidates is still to have good polls and a possibility of forming the next government. However, the PLQ has been hopelessly stable at 20% of the vote – and even less in the French vote – for months and is very far from the zone where a party can aspire to win the next election.
But if the PLQ – or any other party – wanted to do useful work, it could think about how candidates are chosen. One could start by eliminating the possibility of the nomination contests becoming a contest to sell party membership cards. This most often allows the best organizer to control the nomination, the riding association, or even the MP. The “open conventions” are, most often, only matters of organization.
It’s too similar to the way we used to choose the Duchesses of the Carnival, with the difference that it was then a question of selling candles. If this was deemed to be an outdated process for the Duchesses, it would be high time to think of another mechanism for choosing MP candidates.