What does it take to subvert Canadian democracy?
No grand conspiracies or secret plans are required. Foreign powers don’t need to create misinformation bots, embed sleeper agents or engage in other deep-cover subterfuges. They don’t even need an internet connection. All they need is a school bus or two.
As the Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions (aka the Foreign Interference Commission) revealed last year, in September 2019 busloads of Chinese international students mysteriously arrived at the federal Liberal nomination meeting for the Toronto-area riding of Don Valley North to support candidate Han Dong. None of the students seem to have actually lived in the riding and all were likely foreign nationals. Intelligence reports cited by Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue strongly suggest China’s Communist government was behind their appearance.
“Individuals associated with a known People’s Republic of China proxy agent provided [the students] with falsified documents to allow them to vote,” Hogue’s executive summary states. After narrowly securing the nomination thanks to the sudden appearance of his youthful supporters, Dong went on to easily win two consecutive general elections in what has long been considered a safe Liberal riding.
While Hogue’s report admits it is impossible to determine what exactly went on at Dong’s nomination meeting and who paid for the buses, the mysterious event constitutes a key part of her conclusions. This includes the observation that, “Nomination contests may be gateways for foreign states that wish to interfere in our democratic processes.”
Even without allegations of clandestine foreign interference, run-of-the-mill nomination meetings have long been the weakest link in Canada’s democratic system. The rules surrounding their operation notably lack transparency and consistency – allowing unaccountable party insiders, many of whom are hostile to public scrutiny or participation, to control the process. Not only does this discourage general voters from paying attention to nomination elections, it shifts the attention of current and aspiring politicians away from the opinions of their constituents and towards that cabal of operatives in the party leader’s office who run the show.
If Canadians want their country to have a flourishing and accountable democratic system, parties need a better way of deciding who gets to represent them on the ballot. And the best solution can be found outside Canada, in the chaotic-but-effective American primary system. It may look messy, but it works.
How does Canada’s nomination system negatively affect the selection of democratic candidates?
The process used by Canada’s political parties to select candidates is often unfair and untransparent. Leaders of both the Liberal and Conservative parties have used their power to disqualify candidates or install insiders without a vote. For example, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre recently appointed Parm Gill as the Conservative candidate in Milton, Ontario, over the objections of a nearby riding association. And in 2017 the Liberal party imposed a retroactive cutoff date for new members at a nomination contest in the Ontario riding of Markham-Thornhill, disqualifying all of Juanita Nelson’s supporters; this paved the way for a victory by party insider Mary Ng.
“Unfair and Undemocratic”
What sets Canada apart from other “Westminster”-style parliamentary democracies such as the UK and Australia is the extreme centralization of power in the hands of party leaders. Leaders can exert enormous control over elected MPs. This includes the authority to make appointments within caucus and to various House of Commons committees. The allocation of speaking time during debates and Question Period is another means of control. And then there’s the ultimate sanction: expulsion from caucus. As a result of these many levers, Canadian MPs of all stripes vote along party lines a stunning 99 percent of the time. This centralization of power also extends to the nomination process, prior to anyone ever becoming an MP.
To stand in a nomination contest, a candidate must be pre-approved or “green-lit” by their party. This process is disturbingly opaque. A party leader can disqualify any candidate he or she chooses, for whatever reason, or no reason at all. The leader can also forgo a nomination contest entirely and simply appoint a favoured candidate against the wishes of local party members. Since political parties in Canada are private organizations, there is no legal barrier to prevent parties from doing this; but it nonetheless subverts the interests of democracy.
In some cases, a leader may choose to disqualify all other candidates, leaving their preferred choice as the only one standing for election. Or they can allow an incumbent to retain their status as official candidate without the bother of another nomination contest. According to a report by the Samara Centre for Democracy following the 2019 federal election, of 6,600 candidates studied, only 17 percent had to win a competitive nomination contest. The others were either directly appointed by a party leader or ran for the nomination unopposed.
This is a significant problem among all major parties, both federally and provincially. In 2017, for example, Nelly Shin was “parachuted” in as the federal Conservative candidate in the B.C. riding of Port Moody-Coquitlam. This came after Shin was pushed aside from a riding contest in Ontario after former Liberal MP Leona Alleslev crossed the floor to become a Conservative. Since the party’s leadership still wanted to put her on the ballot somewhere in Canada, the Conservative Party mysteriously disqualified another candidate for the nomination in the B.C. riding.
After having signed up 1,600 new members, Liberal nominee-candidate Juanita Nathan was forced to drop out of the race when all her new members were declared ineligible. This left the victory to Mary Ng, a former staffer in Trudeau’s office and currently a federal minister.
In similar fashion, last year former Ontario cabinet minister Parm Gill was handed the Conservative nomination for the Ontario riding of Milton without an election. This came over the objections of the nearby riding association in Wellington-Halton Hills (which will be partly subsumed into the redrawn Milton riding in the next election), which called Gill’s appointment by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre “both unfair and undemocratic”, as reported by the Toronto Star.
And while recently-resigned Liberal leader Justin Trudeau came to power promising free and open nomination contests, his party has since perfected the art of blocking other candidates so that preferred members of Trudeau’s inner circle can sail through nomination contests virtually unopposed. This is essentially appointment by another means.
Prior to a nomination contest in the Ontario riding of Markham-Thornhill in 2017, for example, the Liberal Party imposed a retroactive cutoff date for new members, thereby limiting the voting pool to just 200 members. After having signed up 1,600 new members, candidate Juanita Nathan was forced to drop out of the race when all her new supporters were declared ineligible. This left the victory to Mary Ng, a former staffer in Trudeau’s office and recently federal Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development. Trudeau also intervened to bar Christine Innes from being a Liberal candidate in any Toronto riding, presumably to protect the nascent campaign of star candidate (and future Finance Minister) Chrystia Freeland. While Trudeau may not have directly appointed any candidates, his office has often stage-managed the success of a favoured few.
Even the recent coronation of new Liberal leader and now prime minister Mark Carney was marked by controversy and allegations of backroom manipulation, given that leadership candidate Ruby Dhalla was disqualified by the party prior to the final vote. Dhalla claimed to have signed up 100,000 new Liberal members, enough to make her a viable challenger to Carney, who won the contest with 131,000 votes.
The Liberals are also notorious for running extremely short nomination contests – creating another advantage for incumbent MPs and candidates preferred by the party brass. The Samara Centre study cited above found that the average Liberal nomination contest lasted just 10 days. (Shorter than some of the former prime minister’s beach vacations.) Note that these brief contests violate the Liberal Party’s own rules that stipulate nomination contests should be open for at least 14 days. By comparison, the average Conservative contest lasted 33 days, while the NDP averaged 200 days for their nomination votes.
The above examples highlight the many shady deals and murky rules used by party leadership to push aside qualified candidates and ensure “insiders” win nomination contests. As a result, prospective new candidates are incentivized to focus their attention on pleasing the leader and his or her staff instead of their constituents. In this way, the interests of local party members, let alone the wider voting public, are undermined or ignored.
Was the recent Liberal leadership race open and transparent?
The recent victory by new Liberal leader and prime minister Mark Carney was marked by controversy, given that leadership candidate Ruby Dhalla was disqualified by the party prior to the final vote. Dhalla claimed to have signed up 100,000 Liberal members, enough to make her a viable challenger to Carney, who won the contest with 131,000 votes.
The Rules, Such as they Are
Each party sets its own rules on who can vote in a nomination contest. In general, this means being a party member and living in the riding in question. Party memberships are typically available to those 14 years of age and above, although the NDP accepts those 12 years and older in some provinces. As for the price, it varies: federal Liberals can join the party for free, while the other main parties charge between $5 and $15 per year.
The parties also impose some form of residency requirement. For the Conservatives and NDP, one must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to join and vote. The Liberals have a much slacker standard, requiring only that a member “ordinarily live in Canada.” In all cases, proof of a Canadian address is the only evidence required to get a membership. Despite the lack of strict criteria, however, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest fewer than 5 percent of Canadians are paid-up members of any political party at any one time. This severely limits the potential pool of voters in nomination contests. Paradoxically, however, since only adult Canadian citizens are allowed to vote in municipal, provincial or federal elections, many individuals who do participate in a party’s nomination process are not even eligible to vote in the actual election.
Given the overall low level of participation in the Canadian nomination process, when a contest features more than one competitive candidate, the system heavily favours those who are able to mobilize small groups of family, friends, activists or members of their religious or cultural communities. Convincing these folks to buy a membership and come out on a weeknight to vote is often all that’s required to win. Such a system disadvantages candidates who might attract a broad range of support across the general public but lack a specific, highly-motivated power base that can be mobilized. The busloads of Chinese international students who vaulted Dong to victory in 2019 offer stark proof of this.
Given party leaders’ overwhelming power to select new candidates and control MPs, the only effective check on their authority is the threat of voters abandoning the entire party en masse. This was notably the case in the historic collapse of the federal Progressive Conservatives in 1993 under Prime Minister Kim Campbell, and of the federal Liberals in 2011 under leader Michael Ignatieff.
There is a better way to restrain the authority of leaders and shift control back to party members and voters. And for this, we need to look south of the border, where nomination contests known as primary elections are often open to all voters and any citizen can register for free. The result is a vibrant and frequently-boisterous display of local democracy specifically designed to keep the power of party bosses at bay.
The American Solution
The United States Constitution gives individual states broad authority to conduct congressional and presidential elections. And yet it is silent on how candidates for those elections should be chosen. As a result, states have adopted a wide variety of different systems. The earliest form of candidate selection was the post-revolutionary caucus system beginning in the late 1700s. Caucuses were essentially town hall meetings in which local voters gathered to decide who amongst them should stand in upcoming elections. Often these meetings concluded with a show of hands or with supporters of various candidates moving to different parts of the room to reveal their preferences.
Primaries became the dominant system for selecting Democratic Party candidates in time for the 1972 Presidential and Congressional elections – often considered the first ‘modern-era’ U.S. election.
In some states, the caucus system evolved into an early form of direct primary elections. (Iowa, Wyoming and Idaho have retained the caucus system to this day.) These early primaries allowed larger groups of voters to decide on their preferred candidate for state or federal office using secret ballots in multiple locations. As with the original caucuses, the primary’s purpose was to ensure that local eligible voters were the ones deciding who would represent them in an election, preventing distant party leaders from imposing favoured candidates on the ballot. In most states, however, deals cut in the proverbial “smoke-filled backrooms” by party power brokers at political conventions became – and remained – the dominant method of selecting candidates throughout the 19th and most of the 20th centuries.
This creaky and undemocratic system was finally transformed following an uproar in 1968 when Vice President and former Senator Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic presidential nomination at a national convention without bothering to contest a single state primary or caucus – essentially ignoring local voters in every state with a direct selection system. To address the resulting controversy, the Democrats formed the McGovern-Fraser Commission which in 1969 recommended that all state-level party organizations hold transparent primary contests to select presidential candidates.
Primaries thus became the required means for selecting Democratic Party candidates in time for the 1972 election – what is often considered the first “modern-era” U.S. election. As a 2018 report by the Brookings Institution explains, “The cumulative effect of the McGovern-Fraser reforms was to transform the modern nominating system into a system where mass persuasion replaced elite persuasion.” In watching the success of its rival democratize the nomination process, the Republican Party eventually adopted these changes as well, producing the current system in which all states use either primaries or caucuses to allow registered voters to select their party’s candidates in all federal elections.
Given the latitude states have in managing their electoral systems, today there is a boggling array of different primary forms and procedures. No two states appear to have identical policies. Eight states, for example, apply different methods for presidential and congressional primaries. In six states the Republican and Democratic primaries have different rules. Some states hold both parties’ primaries on the same day, while others don’t. Despite these complications and quirks, the many dissimilarities between states provide a valuable “laboratory of democracy” – revealing what works and what doesn’t.
Closed, Semi-Open, Open and Non-Partisan – Oh My!
The most common type of primary is “partisan”, meaning it is run by either the Democratic or Republican party to select its own candidates. Partisan primaries fall into three broad sub-categories: closed, semi-open and fully open. The distinctions lie in who can participate, given that Americans can declare a party affiliation when they register to vote; they can also register as independent or unaffiliated voters.
In a closed primary, only registered party members can vote in that party’s primary. This tends to deliver winners with the most polarizing positions, since they appeal exclusively to their party’s committed base. Thirty-one percent of state primaries were closed in the 2024 voting cycle.
Among different versions of semi-open primaries, voters who are registered as independents are allowed to participate alongside registered party members but with certain limitations. This enables so-called “swing” voters to have some influence on a particular party’s slate of candidates. Semi-open primaries accounted for 25 percent of U.S. primaries in 2024.
In open primaries, any eligible voter who wishes to participate in a nomination contest can do so, regardless of their registered party affiliation or any other criteria. This provides the clearest insight into a potential candidate’s overall appeal as all voters may participate. This can occasionally result in “raiding”, in which voters from one party attempt to promote a perceived weak candidate as the other party’s candidate in order to boost their own candidate’s electoral prospects, although this is rare. The much more frequent result is that an attractive candidate from one party will encourage voters from the other party to participate in its primary process, creating a cross-over effect. In 2024, 29 percent of state primaries were fully open.
The final category is the “non-partisan” primary. This is a relatively new innovation used by five states (California, Nebraska, Louisiana, Washington and Alaska) for a variety of different elections. It involves a single ballot in which candidates from all parties are grouped together and all voters can participate. The top two or four from each party can be promoted to the final ballot, or there can be a run-off among all comers; sometimes, this can result in a general election being a competition between two members of the same party. Since it is designed to encourage broad participation from all voters, the non-partisan primary can be considered an alternate version of the traditional open primary.
What is the origin of the U.S. primary system?
In the post-revolutionary period, U.S. voters held local caucus meetings to pick who among them should stand for election. In some states, this evolved into a primary system that selected candidates across the entire state. In most states, however, backroom deals by political powerbrokers were the deciding factor. This corrupt system came to an end in 1968 when members of the Democratic party revolted over how U.S. presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey was selected. Beginning in the 1970s, both the Republican and Democratic party switched to primaries in all states to select their candidates.
The Benefits of Open Primaries
The most significant piece of data from this enormous American experiment is that primaries encourage greater voter participation. The overall turn-out rate among registered voters for all U.S. primary elections is approximately 20 percent. While comparisons with Canada are complicated by a lack of reliable data, recall our estimate that fewer than 5 percent of Canadians are even party members and therefore eligible to vote at a nomination meeting. The share of Canadians who actually vote in nomination contests is therefore likely to be a tiny fraction of the American rate. By encouraging greater participation, primary elections shine a spotlight on the entire nomination process.
As for which primary system is best, research by the Washington, D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center backs open primaries. It finds that states switching from a closed or semi-open primary to an open primary tend to see a small but noticeable 5-percentage-point increase in voter turnout. Open-primary states also feature a smaller gap in participation rates between a primary and general election. The biggest effect is on independents. “More open and nonpartisan primaries see higher participation from unaffiliated voters, and the primary electorate’s composition is more representative,” the report concludes. “In other words, more open and nonpartisan primaries do not just make it easier for unaffiliated voters to participate—under these circumstances, voters actually do participate at higher rates and in a way that better reflects the general electorate.” If a goal of democracy is to encourage the widest possible public participation, open primaries appear to be the best way to achieve this.
Open primaries also make elected officials more attuned to the general public. This allows for the possibility of new ideas and greater turnover among candidates. In the run-up to the 2022 mid-term elections, for example, several high-profile incumbents lost their nomination contests, including Congresswoman and noted Donald Trump-foe Liz Cheney. In 2014, former House majority leader Eric Cantor, a Republican, famously lost his primary against a candidate promoted by the populist “Tea Party” movement. This was considered a signal moment in the Republican Party’s evolution, as grassroots members made themselves felt as well as heard.
Open primaries also incentivize candidates to connect with the broader community beyond their particular in-group of friends or cultural adherents, since winning nominees must appeal to an audience more reflective of the electorate-at-large.
Restraining the ability of incumbents to dominate nomination contests allows outsider and perhaps maverick politicians to thrive within the party system. Enterprising candidates can use open primaries to establish themselves as moderates, extremists or even anti-establishmentarians, and in this way deviate from their party’s position on certain topics. Such a thing is all-but-impossible in Canada. Here, MPs must toe the party line to win a nomination. Then again, few Canadian mavericks would ever get to the nomination stage, as their candidacy would likely be neutered by the party brass long before a contest was even scheduled.
Open primaries also incentivize candidates to connect with the broader community beyond their particular in-group of friends or cultural adherents, since winning nominees must appeal to an audience more reflective of the electorate-at-large. In Canada, this means MPs would finally become representatives of their community to government, instead of the other way around.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, competitive primaries garner substantial media coverage. There’s clearly more drama in a real and transparent race between multiple credible contestants than in a stage-managed affair with one favoured candidate. This extra media coverage further encourages public participation. It also discourages parties from making shady backroom deals. Parties that attempt to parachute-in a preferred candidate or disqualify other candidates would face much greater scrutiny and blowback. And it raises the profile of the legitimate candidates involved.
Note that the ample media attention garnered by the Democratic Party in its mandatory primaries of 1972 played a large role in convincing the Republican Party to make similar reforms. This also led states to think strategically about the timing of their primaries, resulting in such media-friendly innovations as Super Tuesday, in which multiple states hold their primaries on the same day.
Turning Canadian Nomination Meetings into Open Primaries
Given the compelling benefits of creating an open nomination system in Canada that would be broadly similar to the U.S. primary system, how do we get there? There is no particular conflict with Canada’s Westminster-style system of Parliament. In fact, the Conservative Party in the UK experimented with open primaries beginning in 2009. The initial contest was the brainchild of then-Conservative leader (and later Prime Minister) David Cameron. It was meant to increase voter engagement and encourage a broader range of candidates prior to the general election of 2010.
It was a roaring success. A mail-in ballot in the riding of Totnes in Southwest England saw a response rate of 25 percent among the constituency’s 69,000 eligible voters. As Prime Minister, Cameron added more open primaries in subsequent years. Despite the many benefits, however, the Conservative Party discontinued the practice after he stepped down in 2016, as (misplaced) fears of direct democracy grew within the party in the wake of the Brexit vote. The Republican and Socialist parties in France also experimented with open primaries during that country’s 2017 presidential elections. But this was generally seen as desperate moves by failing parties, and neither is a significant political force in France today.
Turning Canadian nomination contests into open primary elections would not be technically or legally difficult. All that would be required is for a party to change its rules to allow any eligible voter – in this case, all Canadian citizens – to participate.
Some proponents of nomination reform propose that Elections Canada be given the power to regulate this process, since the federal body already exerts authority over nomination contest spending and donation limits. The 2019 Samara Centre report discussed earlier argues that, “It’s entirely appropriate that Elections Canada play a greater role” in such oversight. While this might seem logical to proponents of greater centralization and bureaucratic control, it would not drive reforms at the provincial level, and it is antithetical to the real lessons of the American experience.
Recall that the modern primary system was born out of complaints from within the Democratic Party about the 1968 election process. And the Republican Party soon followed when it saw how successful these reforms were. The U.S. experience also illustrates the powerful benefits of diversity across states, including the recent innovation of non-partisan primaries. Creating a single bureaucratic regulator in Ottawa would achieve none of this. And, given how few areas under federal authority are competently or efficiently managed at present, expanding the power, staff and budget of yet another Ottawa agency is unlikely to yield good results.
It would be far better for Canada’s federal and provincial political parties to impose fairer and more transparent rules on themselves without any additional government oversight or micro-management. Changes should be allowed to occur organically and experimentally, as was the case in the U.S.
Proof of concept: Conservative MP Michael Chong’s Reform Act, 2014 demonstrates it is possible to limit the power of party leaders. (Source of photo: Mark Blevis, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
As for how this process might be initiated, we should look to the precedent of Conservative MP Michael Chong’s Reform Act, 2014. Chong’s innovative legislation, introduced when he was a backbencher in the government of Stephen Harper, is meant to limit the power of party leaders by enabling individual MPs to call a leadership review via secret vote. To do so, however, the caucus must have previously opted-in to these procedures following the most recent federal election. To date, only the Conservatives have ever done so. But the mechanism has already proved its worth. In the aftermath of then-leader Erin O’Toole’s poor performance in the 2021 federal election campaign, Conservative MPs used the Reform Act to trigger a leadership review. O’Toole was ousted and Pierre Poilievre won the subsequent leadership contest.
The Liberal caucus did not opt-in to the Reform Act procedures following the 2021 election, which helps to explain how Trudeau was able to remain leader throughout the disastrous years that followed. No doubt many Liberals MPs spent much of 2024 wishing they had adopted the Reform Act when they had the chance.
Significantly, an earlier version of Chong’s bill introduced in 2013 would have amended the Canada Elections Act to also strip party leaders of the authority to approve or disapprove individual candidates for nomination contests. This power would have been given instead to the nominating officer of each party’s local riding association, who are answerable to local party members. Unfortunately , this proved too controversial for both the Liberal and Conservative parties’ leadership and Chong was forced to drop the provision to get his bill passed.
Politicians tend to act in their own best interests. Knowing this, we ought to create a system that aligns their interests with those of their constituents and democracy in general. Shining a bright, public spotlight on nomination contests via open primaries would do just that.
Despite this disappointment, the Reform Act stands as a proof of concept. It is possible to create a system in a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy in which individual parties make their own decisions on how to reform their nomination processes. And that reform could include open primaries. In a competitive political marketplace, the best idea should eventually win out. But parties will only change if voters have an appetite for it. This means party members themselves must demand reforms that put an end to our broken nomination system.
What lessons can Canadian political parties learn from the U.S. system of open primaries?
An open primary allows supporters of all parties to participate in a nomination contest. This ensures that local voters are the ones selecting the candidates who will represent them in an election – rather than party leaders or backroom political operatives. Open primaries in the U.S. emphasize transparency, increase voter participation, garner additional media coverage and limit the power of party insiders.
The Way Forward
Canada’s existing nomination process is riven by controversy and a lack of transparency. In all major parties, backroom deals and the leader’s diktats continue to overrule the interests of true democracy. This subverts local processes, ignores the interests of party members, misaligns the interests of nominees, benefits incumbents and discourages broader voter participation. In other words, Canada today is where the U.S. was in the 1960s.
We now know there is a better way. And it can be found in following the U.S. experience – by moving to a transparent, open primary system that encourages the broadest possible public engagement in the nomination process.
Politicians tend to act in their own best interests. Knowing this, we ought to create a system that aligns their interests with those of their constituents and democracy in general. Shining a bright, public spotlight on the Canadian nomination contests via open primaries would do just that.
Jake Melo Valinho is a political communications consultant majoring in finance & economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
This article is an expanded adaptation of Mr. Valinho’s Second Prize-winning entry in the 2nd Annual Trottier-Morgan Student Essay Contest.
Main image: Election Scene. Statehouse in Philadelphia 1815, by John Lewis Krimmel (1815).
