The trouble with a party leadership campaign is inevitably the interchangeability of the candidates. It’s not a criticism, it’s an inevitability, you have a group of people who all fundamentally agree on several core things, which is why they’re all in the same party.
The thing I find interesting is how the further right a party gets, the more people want the leadership.
On a provincial level, you see that in the Saskatchewan Party having six total candidates versus the NDP’s two. You saw it to a more pronounced degree federally, where fourteen people made a stab at the Conservative leadership to the federal NDP’s four.
Provincially, part of the reason could be due to the size of their respective organizations, but I think that point of view does play a big part in why you inevitably get more people trying to run in a right-wing party.
In effect, the right-wing tends to put a push on individuality, while the left likes to emphasize the team. That’s also part of the reason why unions skew heavily left. That means that the right has an environment that encourages people to strike on their own and try to take over, after all it’s their individual goal to take over and become the person in charge. The left, meanwhile, doesn’t have as much incentive to take charge, it’s much more about the collective effort. There are naturally people with different ideas within the party but taking the top spot is not the priority for everyone, and as a result you have fewer people grasping at the leadership position.
Which is not to say that a conservative party can’t work together, they are constantly making alliances with each other and merging with other parties. Nor is it to say that people in the left do not have the same ambition, because the parties certainly do, they just use their ambition in a different way.
It’s up to voters whether the relative unity of a smaller field is worth the relative lack of choice when the leader is chosen. For both parties, the hope is going to be that whoever is in their field, the winner is going to be the one that inspires the rest of the province.
It just shakes out that the different point of views tend to lead to a lot more leadership candidates for one side than the other. And both methods have their pros and cons, a bigger field can potentially lead to a better candidate, but larger divisions within the party after the fact. A smaller field might not divide the party, but you don’t have a ton of options at the end of the day and you might be stuck with candidates everyone merely tolerates and can’t win an election.
It could be argued that the worst possible result from both approaches to a leadership campaign have been evidenced by the most recent election south of the border, where both parties managed to field the worst possible alternative they could have, leading to an election that the entire world is still suffering from. On the left, having two viable candidates lead to a party choosing one that they thought was mostly fine but wasn’t inspiring. On the right, as all of the reasonable choices battled it out and traded barbs with each other, the party somehow accidentally voted in an angry toddler. That the angry toddler bested the resigned sigh says something, but nothing good.
That will not be the case following the Saskatchewan leadership campaigns. No matter how big the field is in general, both parties’ alternatives are experienced, qualified politicians, the difference being entirely whether or not you agree with them. Saskatchewan won’t have to bury their heads in shame and ask passing tourists to escape in their trunk because of the result of this vote, which is a bit different from the result south of the border, and the reaction I received as a tourist there this summer.
It will be interesting to see how the races of both parties shake out over the next few months, but whoever wins they’re fitting within a long-established pattern.
