The Q&A: "If you are not getting along with your leader, you’re going to want to leave your party"

Political scientist Alex Marland on his new book about loyalty and party discipline

There are a thousand ways to be a political scientist, but Alex Marland, who’s the Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership at Acadia University, has made a career studying the practical considerations that inform the daily practice of modern elected politics in Canada: branding, message control, party discipline. I’ve often quoted his 2016 book Brand Command as an authoritative statement on the perceived importance of message control in today’s politics.

Marland’s latest, published Tuesday and co-edited with the University of Alberta’s Jared J. Wesley and Mireille Lalancette from the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, is No I in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics.

Why is loyalty such a paramount virtue in Canadian politics? Why is it almost always freely given by junior members of a political party, and harshly enforced when withheld? That’s the ground Marland, Wesley, Lalancette and their colleagues explore in this new book. This interview with Alex Marland has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Wells: I like the idea of a formal study of loyalty in politics. I’ve written about it as a quality in politics, or a value, and when I look around, I don’t see a lot of my colleagues writing about it. To do a whole elaborate study seems like plowing useful new ground. Tell me about your book.

Alex Marland: Normally what happens when we look at Canadian politics and Canadian politicians, is that we accept that everybody votes in lockstep with their party. We don’t even question it. But you have to question: what kind of democracy does Canada have when that’s the case? More than that, during election campaigns, we don’t really pay much attention to candidates unless they’re with the right party. As we get closer to election day, all the conversation is about the parties that are ahead and how the leaders are doing.

Everything, it seems, about our political system turns on political parties now. It wasn’t designed that way, and maybe it shouldn’t be that way. I’m not suggesting there aren’t good things about political parties, I’m just saying that there are consequences when everything is vested in a party.

For decades, political scientists have been studying elections, and they study voter behavior, and they’ve shown that a lot of people, including Canadians, have a deep attachment to party, and that’s how they’re going to vote. But we don’t get a good understanding of candidates and politicians. Why they are so loyal to parties? There’s a lot of people who have examined data about how people have voted, because you can generate roll-call data and division votes. But not a lot of people are sitting down and having conversations with politicians, looking at other things, and trying to understand what is going on here. Why is the default position to always support your leader?

The thesis that I’m advancing with my colleagues is that we live in a world where party discipline has evolved into message discipline. And that means we need to change the way we look at Canadian politics. It’s no longer just about what happens in the legislature itself, and how people are voting together. It’s now asking: are they all moving in lockstep outside the legislature, as well as what they’re saying in all different forums. The idea that opposition members are nobodies once they leave parliament—to borrow from Pierre Trudeau—isn’t true. They are somebodies — because if they say something that causes trouble, they suddenly become a somebody really fast in today’s media environment.

PW: They are either brand amplifiers or brand…muddlers.

Marland: Well, they’re changing the agenda that the leader might have for any particular day. They’re disruptors. They’re troublemakers. And they weaken the brand, potentially.

PW: I immediately think of “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes”, the Conservative Party mantra under Poilievre, or “The middle-class and those working hard to join it”, under the Liberals. Is that the sort of thing that you’re talking about, where discipline descends to the level of what you say and how you phrase it?

Marland: Yes, but I’d say it’s more insidious than that. I would take it to the next level. Think about Mark Carney coming in, taking over the party when he hadn’t run an election campaign. Yes, he ran a campaign to become leader, but had not gone through an election campaign, and he immediately gets rid of the signature policy of the Liberal Party of Canada, the price on carbon, that so many Liberal MPs and ministers had to adamantly insist was the way forward. With the stroke of a pen — a theatrical pen, I might say — it was gone.

How many Liberal MPs did we hear squawking about it? How many left the party? We just live in a world now where elected representatives appear to be loyal to their party and their leader, before they are loyal to their constituents, and the ability to speak in a forthright manner in a public forum.

PW: This makes this book a sequel to earlier writing of yours, including Brand Command, which was about message discipline. Is it conceived as sort of the next chapter in that study?

Marland: It’s the same theme, and I had another one after that called Whipped about party discipline in Canada. Brand Command looked at the way things were in the government of Canada under Stephen Harper, but it was really about public administration and how message coordination has penetrated through deep levels of how the bureaucracy operates.

Then Whipped came out, which looked at how this has penetrated throughout the legislature. This new book is different in a number of ways. First of all, because I’ve got co-authors now who are great: Jared Wesley and Mireille Lalancette. They’ve brought different perspectives. We’re all based in different parts of the country, which I think helps. And more than that, we’re now looking at just the phenomenon generally, so we’re not reserving it to the legislature. We’re expanding it into any public forum, trying to understand: what is loyalty in Canadian party politics? Why does it exist? Why is it so strong? And then more than that, we’re trying to build a portrait of people who push boundaries of loyalty. If the idea is that most people are team players, what do we know about people who we sometimes consider party mavericks? And how have mavericks changed over time? What used to be a maverick at one time is different than what we would consider to be a maverick nowadays.

But what about if we go further? What about people who leave a political party and become an independent, or more than that, even commit the treachery of changing political parties and switching parties. The idea that we’ve come up with is to really capture the essence of what it means to be a team player in Canadian party politics, and what is party loyalty. You have to understand all the other variations of pushing back against authority.

PW: You’ve actually undertaken a systematic study. You’ve talked to all the floor-crossers, or all the ones you could get to.

Marland: I talked to a lot of them. There was one very prominent person who is still prominent and said they couldn’t talk because they were afraid of legal repercussions of revealing what had happened in crossing the floor. We interviewed 90 people, including party leaders, political staff, many people who crossed the floor, federally and provincially. In addition to interviewing people, we conducted a massive review of over 3,000 news stories since 1980, so our focus is on the 1980-to-2021 period. I looked at transcripts from the Samara Centre, who did their exit interviews with MPs. I was able to get a hold of all sorts of other data.

PW: What did you learn about loyalty from the people who decided that at some point they could no longer show that loyalty?

Marland: Well, mostly that by the time somebody snaps publicly, whether it’s a leader who says, “That’s it, you’re gone,” or a parliamentarian just leaves, it’s an escalation of a lot of things. It’s rare that you get a case where it’s just one thing that happened. We’ve seen some of that happen in the news every now and then, where it seems to come out of nowhere, and that’s because something happened, somebody got into some incident involving the police, or whatever the case may be. Those are the exception. What I’m looking for here is where it’s more of a philosophical thing. There’s a policy dispute, or there’s a confrontation that’s occurring with the leader, and usually what we find is there had been a series of escalating circumstances that eventually boil over.

When you talk to those people after they’ve left the party, they say they are so glad to be gone. They just couldn’t operate anymore under the constraints that they were feeling. Generally, those constraints are about not agreeing philosophically with where the leader is going. In some cases, it has to do with their own ambition. There are people interested in becoming leader themselves, and they have a hard time dealing with a leader who they think isn’t doing a good job.

As you get closer to an election, people are looking at their electoral prospects and may decide to move around. But it really comes down to differences with the leader within your party. We tend to look at things in political science and ask: Is it a question of policy? Is it because of the quest for office, or is it because you’re looking for votes? And we looked at our cases through all those questions, and we decided, no, in Canada, it’s about the leader. If you are not getting along with your leader, you’re going to want to leave your party.

PW: That makes sense, to the extent that our politics has become a cult of personality. If you can’t handle the personality, it’s hard to stay in the cult.

Marland: We know from voting behavior, and even just from news coverage, that everything turns on the leader. In an election campaign, all the imagery, including by the specific party, is about the leaders, so it can be really challenging if you feel that you just cannot abide by a leader, your party loyalty will fall by the wayside. Other people grin and bear it, and they just think, well, this will pass, and I’ll outlast the leader until the next one comes along.

PW: It seems to me, if I was a member of the Conservative caucus and a Liberal crossed the floor to join me, the first thing I would know about that person was that they were a lousy team player. Does that make it hard to join the new team?

Marland: Yes, it does. And there are negotiations that occur, because when somebody crosses over, they don’t want to be told you’re going to be a nobody, you’re going to be a backbencher, they want to get into cabinet. For a leader, that creates all sorts of problems, because there’s an unofficial seniority list. You can’t just bypass all the loyal soldiers and come in and take that position. So internally, it can mess up things, and leaders have to be careful, because, of course, inducements can get them into a lot of trouble.

The thing that happens a lot of the time— especially in big parties or larger jurisdictions— is that you’ll essentially have agents, delegates, sentries, having conversations, and you leave the leader out of it. After those conversations, eventually it gets brought to the leader’s attention. There’ll be a meeting, maybe at their house, or somewhere private, and then the deal will be constituted. They then spend time trying to figure out how to make the announcement. When somebody crosses the floor, they try to time the announcement in a way to inflict maximum carnage against the party that’s being left and vacated. These are not things that are done quietly, these are things that are done for calculated political reasons.

PW: I think we skipped a preliminary step, which is to answer the question why loyalty is of value in politics. You can see why leaders like it. You can see why leaders’ offices like loyalty. It reduces the amount of…noise in the system for them. But what’s in it for the person who puts their judgment in a blind trust and simply repeats what they’re told to repeat?

Marland: Any member of a caucus who is part of a team will tell you that it’s really important to have each other’s backs. A lot of them see themselves as part of a family. They go through battles together, they have far more in common with each other than they usually do with the other side. So, they want to be able to move policy forward. They want to be able to support their constituents. And they have their own convictions. In any group environment, you can’t always get your own way, so you need to make sure that sometimes you will give something up — and in return, you expect other people to give things up. The loyalty is to the team construct, to the group as a whole, and that extends to election campaigns.

A misunderstanding that people may have, is that we hear about “party discipline,” we hear about how powerful the leader is and we tend to think, oh, well, you know, they’re going to exert all this power and throw their weight around and scare everybody into submission.

In many ways, that’s not at all what happens. Loyalty is so embedded in Canadian politics that the expectation is from other members of the team that you had better get onside with us. The pressure that occurs from your counterparts— especially if you’re in neighboring ridings, and near each other— is immense. For the most part, it’s very much a self-discipline rather than an imposed discipline.

PW: Garth Turner was a Conservative MP who was ejected from the caucus early in the Harper years, and everyone concerned has always maintained that it wasn’t the Harper PMO who made that decision. It was the caucus that got tired of this guy and kicked him out. I assume you’re in the business of keeping confidences… but that would be an illustration of the notion that loyalty isn’t always enforced from the top. It’s in the culture of the caucus or the team.

Marland: Yes, Garth Turner has written about it in his book, Sheeple. There’s quite a bit in there about what happened. And generally— with him and with others—it’s senior members of the caucus who are trying to sort these things out. There’s a large group of people around [the leader] trying to keep the leader focused on a lot of other things at any given time, and caucus management is like human resource management. It can be so draining, there’s so much time and effort that needs to go into it, and there’s not much advantage to getting the leader distracted by those things. So, you need the leader to be out and focused on Question Period one day, and maybe going to G7… there’s so many things happening, and that’s why you end up having the chief of staff, the party whip and others, who are involved in these conversations.

PW: Are the imperatives of loyalty becoming stronger over time? And are they stronger in Canada than in other political cultures? We’re often told that in Britain, an MP can think for him or herself, whereas, in Canada, apparently that’s not allowed.

Marland: It’s hard to compare systems, and even with the exact same leader, it can vary over time. You can look at Justin Trudeau and how he handled criticism at earlier points in his career compared with the very end of his career. Comparison and quantification are difficult.

But what I will say is that over time, what is considered to be independent thinking has evolved. It used to be common, especially when there were powerful regional ministers, that they could say all sorts of things, and they were given a lot of leeway. And increasingly now, do ministers even say things? They just don’t have the same soapbox that commands public attention. They might have social media and other outlets, but they are not the same prominent figures that they were.

To answer your question about putting Canada in comparative perspective, I’ve just collected data for another project and asked hundreds of scholars in 21 parliamentary democracies around the world about party discipline in their systems. Malta was the one that came out as the most strenuous, with very strict party discipline, but Canada was right behind [Malta]. The perception is that Canada is very, very strict. Interesting, compared to before, experts’ opinions of Canada’s party discipline has actually gone down. I was surprised by that. I think it can be rationalized by the fact that the amount of power that a prime minister has federally now is limited by the fact that they are often getting minority governments, compared to the 80s and 90s, when it was far more common to have majority governments where it was easier to throw your weight around.

PW: It seems to me that floor-crossing as such is becoming less common. I feel like it’s almost a decade since we had a good floor-crossing at the federal level.

Marland: Well, in our book, we have a chart that shows it’s actually been increasing. Part of that is related to big events that occurred like BC United collapsing, and all of a sudden, nobody has a home, and they needed to find other political parties. Also, The Wildrose incident in Alberta, where you had a mass floor-crossing over to the then-Progressive Conservatives. Those can kind of skew the data a little bit.

PW: Maybe it’s because loyalty is becoming so strong that it’s actually… hard to change political parties, but what we are seeing is an uptick in the number of people leaving parties.

Marland: It’s becoming more of a norm for somebody to be banished from a party, because they did something that is going to cause brand reputation problems for the party. Now, there was a time—and I’m not suggesting we go back there— where “you’re innocent until proven guilty” held true. If you had a criminal charge against you, you were allowed to stick around in the caucus because the idea was you hadn’t been convicted of anything. Now it’s the other way around. Now it will be, No, you’re not going to be part of our caucus, you’re going to sit as an independent. If you’re cleared, then maybe we will bring you back. It’s almost like cancel culture, right? The idea is, it’s not worth the trouble to have you around. [If I can interject in for a second: David Smith, the longtime federal Liberal organizer for Ontario, used to tell sketchy candidates who protested their legal innocence as he was kicking them out of a campaign, “This isn’t a court of law.” — pw] The exception is if you are in tight with the leader. If you are very close to the leader, the leader will go out of their way to find a way to keep you.

PW: Why is this tight party discipline and… cult of loyalty… in the formal practice of politics a problem in the broader society? It seems to me that it may be kind of alienating to ordinary folks who aren’t sure where they stand on a bunch of issues and are presented with the spectacle of these blocs of certainty in Ottawa or in their provincial capitals. Is that part of the problem?

Marland: There are a lot of benefits to party loyalty. There are a lot of benefits to political parties that provide clarity, they provide organization, legislatures wouldn’t function very well otherwise. There are all sorts of reasons why parties are useful. But you’re right, the challenge here is when it becomes a degree of message discipline that does not allow free expression of thought and debate out in the public eye.

And this kind of farce of leaders and others saying: Well, the right place to have these conversations is in caucus. We’re not inside the caucus room, but what people tell us is, that’s also not true, because when you’re in a caucus room, it’s often very formulaic, there’s no interest in having a big, thrash-it-out conversation and disagreement. Then they’ll say, Well, the place to do this is at regional caucus, and maybe that’s the place, but you’re increasingly removed from spheres of power… the whole point is, you’re not doing this out in public.

That becomes a problem because people who are electing their representatives increasingly have a perception that politicians care about themselves, care about their parties, care about their leaders, and are essentially plastic politicians who repeat scripted lines that are provided to them by the center. One of the openings that that creates is for populism. A populist who says it like it is and behaves as an anti-politician — but who also tries to tear down elite structures that have been there for quite a while as part of their anti-politician ethos — can be quite damaging to liberal society. I think the happy middle ground is for politicians to know when they can speak up and how they can advocate in a respectful manner.

When you start interviewing senior politicians, they start explaining how this works. The problem is that Canada has a very strong history of amateurism in its legislatures. At each election, there’s a huge turnover, either because of people retiring, or because elections have resulted in new people coming in. People are busy drinking through a fire hose, trying to understand how the system works, and before they know it, they might no longer be in that position. I really think the only way to address this is to have better training for aspiring parliamentarians. But, of course, the political parties are not interested in that. So it becomes a question of how we would ever be able to accomplish it.

PW: Are these trends sort of unidirectional ratcheting actions? Does it only ever get more intense, whether it’s the brand imperative or the loyalty imperative? Or do you see any chance or any evidence of a return to older ways of practicing politics?

Marland: I think the trend is towards centralization, message coordination, and brand reputation management. I can’t see that going in a different direction. The question is, at what point do we say that it’s not the end of the world for a politician to disagree with a leader publicly? And for that person not to suffer serious consequences, not to be socially ostracized, or demoted off a committee, or not allowed to travel somewhere. All of these sorts of things happen.

The real challenge that I see is that any change, if it’s going to happen, has to come from elected officials themselves. It must be a group of backbenchers in particular who say we need change. We need to change the standing orders that govern how things work in the legislature. We need to come up with new ways to make sure that we’re able to have private time with the leader when staff aren’t present. This gets back to education. Unless we have politicians who know about these things, they’re not going to find it very comfortable to be able to push back against institutional norms.

PW: There’s a bracing pragmatism to the stuff you choose to study. How rare is it that political scientists actually study the practice of politics?

Marland: I’m of the view that where you see political scientists [studying the practice of politics] they themselves often had a job outside of academia before they became academics. There are several people I could think of who have worked in parliament at some point as an intern early on. Jared [Wesley], for example, worked in the government of Alberta. I worked in the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, and I worked briefly in the government of Canada, and I worked in different political parties’ offices when I was in Ottawa and volunteering there.

Jared calls himself a “pracademic.” And what he means by that—and it’s a term—is somebody who combines practitioner perspectives with academic perspectives. I think that matters because you can be more grounded. It’s one of the reasons why I like talking to politicians and journalists. They have an understanding of how things are working and the real constraints. It moves you away from speculating and hypothesizing. [The stuff I choose to study] is motivated, I think, by a fascination of the human condition.