Party Politics: Part 3, Managing a Campaign with Brent McArthur

Brent McArthur with someone I vaguely remember seeing before. Photo provided by McArthur.

I started this series about the "nuts and bolts" of how political parties work in a representative democracy with someone seeking a party nomination, Michelle Bowman, and then someone who'd already ran, Aisha Jahangir. Now I want to go behind the scenes with a conversation with a Campaign Manager, Brent McArthur. I started things off by asking him to introduce himself.

Cloudwalking Owl · Who Is Brent McArthur?

I think it's important to zero-in on Brent mentioning that his father was a politician. I did a bit of background reading on political membership in Canada and came across an article titled Factors Influencing the Decision of the Young Politically Engaged to Join a Political Party, by William Cross and Lisa Young (Party Politics, vol 14, no 3, pp 345-369).

That article deals with why membership in political parties has been and still is in decline in modern societies. As they state it, there is a worrying trend of young people not getting involved in the numbers that parties previously enjoyed.

The low rate of youth membership in Canadian parties currently stands in sharp contrast to the situation only a generation ago. Perlin et al. (1988) review the formal status accorded to youth in the major parties of the day and analyze surveys of delegates to the 1983 Conservative and 1984 Liberal leadership conventions. They express a strong concern that the over-representation of youth in party decision-making was distorting parties’ internal democratic processes. Twenty years later, such concerns have little currency. The shift towards plebiscitary forms of decision-making in Canadian parties has weakened youth organizations and reduced opportunities for young people to exert influence over leadership contests and other party decisions (Young and Cross, 2002a). [Cross and Young, p-348]

I won't bore you with the details of their discussion, but in a nutshell, this is what they say: 

1. Over a few decades (from the 1980s to the date of the paper, 2008), there has been a dramatic decline in youth participation in Canadian political parties
2. Presumably, if someone doesn't join a party in their youth, they won't later on. This risks parties "hollowing out" as the rank-and-file membership declines and parties become more and more controlled by paid professionals.
3. When polled, young people who are interested in exerting some role in society tend to split into two groups: those who believe that activist groups are better than political parties, and, those who think political parties are better than activist groups. (Young people who have joined political parties rank it as the most effective thing a person can do to change society, whereas people who've joined activist groups rank it as being the least effective.)
   
4. Young people who do join political parties have a much greater chance of having a parent who was involved in one. (Young people who do join have 62% chance that one of their parents has been a member in the past, whereas among young people in activist groups the number is only 28.4%.)

I'm a little concerned about this, as I have seen evidence in support of these issues during my time in politics and activism. On average, being involved in politics does seem to be something that people are born into---just like religion and class. And if fewer people are involved, then there will be fewer children that get introduced to it. Small changes will multiply over generations. 

Similarly, I meet people over and over again who seem to think that there is some sort of contradiction between activism and politics. Indeed, I stopped being involved with the Green Party mainly because I had always wanted it to be the one party that melded the two together---but once it gained some success, the new members overwhelmingly opposed being involved in anything except electoral politics. I think that unless people learn that they can walk and chew gum at the same time, politics will continue to have little interest for many engaged young people. I think that this is a really bad thing. 

Cloudwalking Owl · How Long Have You Been A Liberal

The back and forth between McArthur and I raises an issue that I've been wrestling with since I started thinking about this series of articles. I decided early on that I wasn't going to ask any members of the Conservative party to take part. I  didn't come to this decision lightly, but I think that recent behaviour by conservatives both here and around the world has pushed me to the decision that they simply aren't active participants in democracy so much as a force that is actively trying to undermine it. 

First of all, it's important to remember that it was the federal Conservatives who were behind a co-ordinated, national campaign to suppress the votes of Canadians through the "robo-call" campaign. Secondly, the party seems to have consistently courted the worst elements of Canadian society---to the point where former leader Andrew Scheer actually hired away a key member of Rebel Media to become his campaign manager. This vile undercurrent in the Conservative membership explains why someone like Max Bernier was appointed to a cabinet position by Steven Harper and came within a "hair's breath" of becoming the leader after him. (For those of you who might not remember "Mad Max", he founded the People's Party of Canada and has since become a darling of the anti-mask and anti-vaxxer groups.)  

Moreover, the federal and provincial Conservatives have shown repeatedly that they place ideology ahead of scientific evidence in particular and expert advice in general. The embarrassing way that the governments of Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and, Manitoba have repeatedly ignored scientific advice until the grim reality of case counts from Covid-19 forced them to back-track is just the latest examples of Tories shoving their fingers in their ears and humming loudly when experts tell them something they don't want to hear. Federally, the Harper government adamantly refused to take any action on the "so-called Climate Change" file---no matter what the science said. Doug Ford ripped up Ontario's cap-and-trade agreement with California and Quebec---even though his lawyers had to have told him that severing a contract has legal consequences and that the Federal government would then impose a carbon tax anyway. And Jason Kenney threw away over a billion dollars in support of an oil pipeline that would only have succeeded if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election---and any pollster would have said that there was a more than 50% chance of him losing.

Democracy can only exist in a world where people have respect for the rights of others. Any party that decides to actively deny people the right to vote rather than try to convince them to change their opinion has effectively given up on the democratic ideal. In addition, democratic discussion can't work in a society where key players have constructed alternative descriptions of reality based upon their particular ideological biases. By consistently following strategies aimed at subverting people's right to vote and lying to the public about important public policy issues, the Conservative party has walked away from the consensus that democracy is a good thing. As such, I have decided not to give them a platform that they have zero interest in earning. 

This isn't to say that there aren't good people in the Conservative party. I interviewed Michael Chong a couple years back and very much enjoyed the experience. But he seems to be a wild outlier and I don't see him as being in any way representative of the party. My only concern about him is why he hangs on with this gang. I suspect if asked (and he answered truthfully) he'd say that Canada needs a good Conservative party and if all the good people leave the worst elements will always control it. 

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Cloudwalking Owl · What Does A Campaign Manager Do

I suspect that the biggest value from a local campaign is that it's something of a symbolic display of a candidate's connection with the community. A well-run one shows that an individual has the support of many competent people who feel inspired to work together as a team in order to do all the things that McArthur describes in this clip. It's like a West-Coast aboriginal Potlatch, a Roman Triumph, the investiture of a monarch, etc.  

This is a useful metric for voters, because if a politician cannot get a large number of local volunteers working together to raise money, canvass voters, put up signs, etc, there is a very low probability that she is going to be able to effectively form a government and rule the nation.

Cloudwalking Owl · Is Volunteering On A Campaign A Good Education

I will add to Brent's point about being involved in a campaign being a good introduction to project management that it's also a way to learn how government works. Being a good politician isn't just about having good ideas. It's also about knowing how to sell them to both the general public and the government bureaucracy. It's also about negotiating priorities and dividing up scarce resources. If a politician can't do these things, their term in office will be a disaster. And it's not only important for a candidate to show that they understand these points and can organize a team to deal with them, it's also important for voters to understand what a government MP has to do to be effective. Volunteering in a campaign is one way to find this out.

Cloudwalking Owl · How Important Are Political Parties

Cynics might suggest that policy doesn't come from rank-and-file members but instead from professional lobbies. I think that that's probably right in some cases. But I don't think that there is any reason why a political party shouldn't listen to industry representatives when they argue a case. The issue is whether or not they have undue influence---it's an issue of degree, not kind. And don't forget that the larger NGOs, such as Greenpeace, also hire professional lobbyists to convince politicians about the necessity of a certain type of action.

I do think, however, that it is certainly true that rank-and-file members are able to introduce new ideas into a political party. But the process of getting those ideas onto the platform and to the head of the line of government policy takes an huge amount of work and a very long time. Most ordinary members lack both the knowledge of how to do this, and, the time for execution. Political parties are like oil tankers---they take a very long time to change direction.

That can be extremely frustrating for many citizens. They don't want to devote their lives to promoting a piece of legislation. I get that, but it's important to understand that democracy isn't something that you do once every four years when you vote and then forget about. It requires a great many people working together on an on-going basis. That's the work of  the Electoral District Associations (EDAs) that McArthur is talking about.

Probably the greatest check on undue influence by paid lobbyists comes from how many people are willing to put in the time and effort required to control and keep real influence over their political parties. If this wanes, then the vacuum created will inevitably be filled by individuals who don't care about the public interest. At that point we still have the empty shell of a democracy, but the substance has been removed. I believe that's what Brent's father meant when he said that democracy is a fragile flower that needs to be carefully nurtured.

Cloudwalking Owl · What Should People Learn About Political Parties

I mentioned above that I wrestled with the idea of bringing someone from the Conservative party to this discussion. I also have felt some concern about being seen as "too cosy" with bourgeois political parties in this series. As I've gotten older I have tended to become more and more radical in my politics. Moreover, at least a few of my subscribers are pretty left-wing too. But as an acquaintance  recently said to me, if you get too picky about who you will associate with, you run the risk of ending up in a party with only one member.  

I agree with McArthur that the majority of people I've met in all political parties tend to be well-meaning. But having said that, I also believe that most of the problems that beset humanity come from misguided people who are trying to make the world a better place based on a very flawed understanding of how to get there from here. 

I square this circle by adhering to the idea of "the broad front". That's the idea that just because people aren't in the same organization and don't share the same particular short-term objectives, it doesn't mean that they aren't going in the same direction. For many contentious issues, people sit on a Bell Curve. Some people tend to be "outliers", who are either late figuring out an important point (they are at -3 in the graph below) or ahead of most people (+3), with the vast majority in the middle (clustered around 0). But they all exist on the same continuum and eventually almost everyone will get to the same point.

Bell Curve, from Lukion Taulukot, c/o Wikimedia Commons.

The thing about politics is that it is always important to have people who "lead the way" (+3) for everyone else. These people raise the outlandish, yet important ideas that eventually become "conventional wisdom". But to really change the world, it's necessary to bring along the majority of people (the 0s). I think that's a very good way of understanding politics. It's all about influencing the majority of citizens as a way of changing the society we inhabit. Can it be frustrating? Completely---if you think you can see something much better than we have now but most others don't. But I have yet to think of any other way of creating a better world.

If this holds within political parties, it also holds between most of them. (As I mentioned above, I have grave concerns about whether the modern Conservatives do fit into this framework. And that's why I wonder if maybe they no longer are committed to Canada as a democratic society.)

Cloudwalking Owl · Is There Anything Else You'd Like To Say

We are in an election now, which probably means that these articles will get a lot more readers than they would have otherwise. But I wish people would take what Brent says to heart. Politics keeps on between elections. And if you really do want to have a maximal influence, you need to volunteer during the campaign---but the time you will really have more sway is between elections when most of the other party members are no longer involved. I spent a lot of time in an EDA myself, although now I'm doing the journalism thing, (which means I try to keep a distance from partisan politics). But I think that citizens in a democracy should feel something of an obligation to be as involved as they can in the functioning of politics. 

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That's enough for one week. Keep your distance, wear a mask, get vaccinated if you aren't already, and, hope that the fourth wave will be much smaller than the last one. 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!