Canadian Cincinnatus

Corporate Climbers and the GOP establishment

In a small organization, everybody cares about now it is doing. After all, it cuts their paycheck, so all the employees have a direct incentive to care for it. But the bigger an organization gets (and this is equally true whether it is private or public), the less important the immediate survival of the organization becomes to each employee. Its continuity and health is more and more taken for granted as the prospects of bankruptcy become ever more remote. Instead, what looms larger and larger in everybody’s mind is their individual place in its hierarchy. It is much more lucrative to be an executive in a large ailing company, than to floor sweeper at a corporate success story.

This leads inevitably to the flourishing of a particular type of creature: the corporate climber. This person doesn’t give a whit about how the outfit he works for is doing, but is solely focused on the next rung in the org chart. The proliferation of corporate climbers is a problem for all organizations that are successful for too long. The danger is magnified because the company can do well for a long time – coasting on its laurels – before the moral rot becomes apparent. Unfortunately, often by the time it is noticeable, not only will the CEO have become a self-interested striver, but also was the man he replaced, and the man that man replaced.

The best example of this is Rick Wagoner, the former CEO of General Motors. He ran the company from 2000 until nine years later, when GM went bankrupt. In 2007 – the year before bankruptcy, his salary was $1.5 million, with a total compensation of $14.4 million. After the company failed, he retired with an exit package worth $10 million. In other words, if the rot is deep enough, it doesn’t even matter if the organization fails completely, the man most responsible for its failure will still draw generous benefits.

According to Wikipedia, “Wagoner stated that the worst decision of his tenure at GM was axing the EV1 electric-car program and not putting the right resources into hybrids. ‘It didn’t affect profitability,’ Wagoner claimed, ‘but it did affect image’". The company lost $85 billion while he was at the helm, but he thought the most serious mistake he made was over something that had nothing to do with making money. In unrelated news, Wagoner was named one of the worst CEO’s of 2008.

When I think of the people running the GOP, I think of Rick Wagoner. I suspect the RNC is filled with corporate climbers of dubious actual talents. In my mind, I can imagine one climber remarking to another in the lineup at the RNC cafeteria that he had been in the same room with the Great Man, Reince Priebus, and – gasp – Priebus had actually smiled at him. Now you and I know that Reince Priebus is a third-rate, incompetent hack, but that is only because we don’t work at Republican Headquarters. Because politics is only a hobby for us, we can think what we want. But if we were cashing a GOP paycheque, it would be different. We would have to suck up to all the mediocrities ahead of us in the Establishment Republican career path, just like the two staffers whose conversation I just imagined.

That I am right about the dominance of climbers in the Republican Party can be seen by the way the party fights Democrats vs. how it copes with internal threats. Against Democrats, whether it be McCain and Romney vs. Obama, or Boehner and McConnell vs. the Congressional Democrats, the Republicans are at best lethargic, uninspiring, and timid. And at worst, well, let’s just say they can be a lot worse. But if some Tea Party insurgent like Chris McDaniel challenges a party institution like Thad Cochran, you see their animal spirits suddenly come to life. The Republican Establishment springs forth like a cheetah and bounds after its pray with lightning speed and cat-quick reflexes. They suddenly exhibit a level of ruthlessness and vigor that was wholly lacking in their struggle against President Obama – their stated enemy. Even more ominously, you also get a sense that there is a lot of mutually beneficial bipartisan back-scratching going on inside the beltway between them and their Democrat counterparts.

For this reason, I see that the Republican Party has only two possible fates. Either the insurgents ruthlessly take over the GOP and conduct a thorough purge from top to bottom, or the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs (or more recently Canada’s Progressive Conservatives). There is no Plan C.

How the Conservatives got stuck with Gerry Bance

By now everybody knows the Gerry Bance story, a now-former Conservative candidate in Scarborough - Rouge Park who was caught on film urinating in a coffee cup a couple of years ago when he worked as an appliance repairman. The obvious question is how could such a man end up as a candidate for higher office. As a resident of the Scarborough – Rouge Park riding, let me shed some light on the matter.

I attended the Conservative nomination meeting, which was held this spring, in order to support my favoured candidate, Paul Egli, a retired and distinguished businessman. In the contested nomination flight, Egli sold about three hundred memberships and felt pretty good about himself. In contrast, Bance sold over a thousand memberships and most of them showed up that night to vote for him. Egli was buried. The attendance at nomination meeting was bigger than at any nomination meeting I have ever attended – by an order of magnitude.

Gerry Bance, you see, is that character that should be familiar to anybody who has ever been involved in riding-level politics: the ethnic fixer, somebody who wields mysterious power over the people in his own ethnic community. In a democracy where the guiding principle is one man, one vote, somebody who can mobilize a thousand voters out to a nomination meeting is a powerful man indeed. Gerry Bance is (or was) such a man in the Tamil community.

At this point one can ask what’s wrong with that. In the strict legalistic sense, nothing. Bance followed the rules. His only sin was playing the game better than his opponent. As well, it is often argued that a contested nomination battle - with both sides selling memberships - is good for the health of a riding association. It is also often argued that ethnic outreach is also a good thing. These two assertions are correct, but we should not let this blind us to some questionable tactics that these two goals enable. For instance, how good is it for the health of the riding association to allow one-time members to determine the nomination? By allowing such a practice, the riding association concedes one of its most important decision – the nomination of its candidate - to unknowns whose allegiance to conservative principles is, to say the least, tangential. Disenfranchising your core support hardly boosts morale – or results in judicious decision-making.

For all the Liberals out there who might be reading this, I want to caution you against too much smugness. This sort of politics is relatively new to the Conservative Party. It blossomed with the ethnic outreach Harper has done in the past ten years. In contrast, such tactics have been going on in the Liberal party since time immemorial. A great example was the March 6, 2004 nomination vote in Hamilton East – Stoney Creek. Newly elected Liberal Party leader, Paul Martin was trying to oust Sheila Copps from the party. Both sides resorted to ethnic mobilization tactics. The resulting voter turnout was so huge (2,804 to 2,491) that even our dimwitted political reporters noticed. An alternate headline for this post could have been ‘Liberal tactics come to the Conservatives’.

So, if such tactics are more entrenched in the Liberal party, why does it seem to hurt the Conservatives the most? That is an excellent question. As a partial answer, it is interesting to note that the CBC made this video in 2012. The CBC website noted that the CBC only became aware of the identity of Gerry Bance from a tip sent to them just this Sunday night. Really? Bance was a failed Conservative candidate in 2006 and 2008. He was nominated again in May of this year. So, they only found out about it in the middle of a Federal Election? A cynic might wonder if they knew about it all along and were sitting on it until the most politically opportune moment to influence the vote. If the opposition parties had done this, that’s fair game. That’s how politics is played. But the CBC is a publicly funded broadcaster that has a legally mandated duty to be objective and impartial. They are not a private broadcaster who can slant their news anyway they want.

So, what should the Party do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? My solution is to raise the Party’s membership fee to $50. At $10, it is entirely too cheap. At $50, you still enable candidates in contested nomination fights to recruit new members and it is still possible for the grass-roots to wrestle boards when the sclerotic old guard needs to go. But by raising the membership fee so that it is no longer insignificant, you also inhibit backroom mechanics from making a complete mockery of the democratic process. 

Christine Elliott: sore loser

On August 28, Christine Elliott, the widow of Canada’s legendary finance minister Jim Flaherty, announced her immediate resignation as Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP). She was most recently re-elected to represent the riding of Whitby – Oshawa in the Provincial Parliament on June 12, 2014. Ontario’s next election is scheduled for Oct 4, 2018.

For a year, she had been running to succeed Tim Hudak as the new leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. The leadership vote was on May 9 of this year. She lost to Patrick Brown. According to the newspapers, she has not been seen inside the provincial legislature since her defeat. The new party leader Patrick Brown had, apparently, “reached out to her numerous times” but according to The Star, she has only been in text or e-mail communication with him.

In my opinion, by resigning barely a year into her four-year term of office, she is doing the constituents of Whitby – Oshawa a disservice. She was elected to represent them in the provincial legislature until the next election. Barring some unforeseen circumstance, she owes it to her constituents to stick it out. Losing a leadership bid does not count as such a circumstance - becoming party leader would have simply been icing on the cake. There are plenty of MPP’s in Queen’s Park who are able to serve their constituents perfectly well without becoming party leader. I know that she had also recently lost her husband, but as his death - April 10, 2014 - was before last provincial election (June 12, 2014), she had the opportunity to drop out. Her loss also did not prevent her from subsequently seeking party leadership. As a result, she cannot now plead personal grief as an excuse for resigning form politics.

Another example of such behaviour occurred after former Prime Minister Paul Martin lost the 2006 Federal election to Stephen Harper. After the loss, he rarely showed up in Parliament. Then-NDP leader Jack Layton was right when he called Martin out for his selfish behaviour. Because, in spite of his personal setbacks, he still represented the federal riding of LaSalle – Emard until Oct 14, 2008. The good people of LaSalle – Emard deserved better than a sulking, absentee MP. Incidents like this demonstrate that many elected officials care more about their own career prospects and personal vanity than they do in representing their constituents.

The gold standard for how an elected official should behave when he loses comes from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. He represented the Division of Bennelong the Australian House of Representatives from 1974 to 2007. He was the Australian Prime Minster from 1996 to 2007. He is the second longest serving Australian Prime Minister ever and was elected Prime Minister for four terms. On Dec 3, 2007, he not only lost the election to Labour, but he lost his own seat.

His concession speech was one of the most remarkable I have ever heard. Instead of being downcast and gloomy and bitter, like many, he cheerfully thanked the voters of Australia for the privilege of allowing him to serve the good people of Bennelong and Australia.

It is said that in hardship, the true worth of one’s character comes out. On Dec 3, 2007, John Howard demonstrated that his character was made of gold. Too bad many of our elected representatives are made of less noble stuff.