Managed Democracy - One Party Slate

All three parties are organized to pitch to the same dominant group

Political parties in Newfoundland and Labrador look the same and sound alike. The reason is simple. They *are* alike.

You can sort political parties on a line, so the story goes.

On the right end are conservatives parties. Emphasis on individuals rights, free enterprise, business, wealthy people.

On the left end are the socialist parties. Groups. Labour. State-ownership and state control. Working people.

In the middle are parties that will accept some of the ideas from the left or some from the right, usually in more moderate versions than the two extremes.

That’s the theory.

In Canada - at the federal level - you can actually line the parties up like that.

NDP on the left. Liberals in the middle but these days closer to the NDP than not. And the Conservatives on the right.

Plus, if you want to do some research, you will be swamped with books and articles describing parties and elections generally or at specific times.

At the provincial level, things are different. The parties don’t line up so neatly. In British Columbia, the Liberals sound more like Progressive Conservatives than federal Liberals. In Ontario, the Conservatives are pitched closed to the middle of the road, with the latest election showing broader appeal than the left, centre, right line-up would suggest.

Things are different on the research side as well. Big provinces - Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta - tend to get more attention from political writers and academics. Smaller ones not so much. William Cross looked at Political parties in Canada, for example. The book is 18 years old. He makes only four references to Newfoundland (not Newfoundland and Labrador). One of those is Sid Noel’s 1972 book on politics in Newfoundland, which was long out-dated before Cross got to it. There’s a table on federal parties qualifying for federal financing in the 2000 federal election and bugger all else.

If you do some diligent searching, you will find a couple of books and some articles written up to 2010 by a couple of political scientists at Memorial University. Those are rare things, though as most poli sci professors at Memorial these days aren’t interested at all in provincial politics. Most everything else dates before 1990, with some of the work going back to the 1960s.

Let’s fill in a bit of that huge blank space. We’ll start with a brief historical context. Then we’ll look at three topics:

• Dominant ideologies,

• Party organization and candidate selection, and

• fund-raising.

What you will see is that the parties have moved closer together in all areas. They recruit the same kinds of people, limit wider public participation, control elected members tightly, raise money mostly from corporations and little from individuals, and push the same ideas.

Next week, we’ll look at elections. When you put the changes in parties together with the changes in elections, you will see why it is very hard to change the direction the province is heading. You’ll also understand why movements that supposedly push reform of the electoral system - like the ideas in this recent op-ed by a local poli sci prof - actually reinforce current trends, not change them.