Extraordinarily, Brent Rathgeber simply did what people of principle do

Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber talks to reporters at a news conference on why he quit the Conservative caucus. Photo: Greg Southam / Edmonton Journal
Published: June 7, 2013, 8:17 pm
Updated: 2 years ago

It is tempting to describe the resignation of Brent Rathgeber from the Conservative caucus as an extraordinary event. And in some ways it is: It surely required extraordinary commitment to principle, not to say courage, to walk away from his party as he has. The consequences, in terms of personal friendships as much as career prospects, may be severe.

But in a larger sense, this is simply a return to normal. This is what people of principle do, when they find themselves in a position their conscience cannot abide: They resign. This is what normal politics looks like.

There is, ordinarily, a tension between the needs of power and the demands of conscience, between pragmatism and principle. Those whose interests lie mainly in power push in one direction; those more inclined to principle push back. That is one of the constraints that a prime minister, in particular, must usually take into account: the need to keep peace with the base, and with its parliamentary representatives on the backbench.

But for the longest time, there was no such tension in Canadian politics. The prime minister and the pragmatists around him pushed, and pushed — and no one pushed back. They turned Conservative policies inside out. They abandoned foundational principles on the fly, broke the most solemn promises, pandered and tacked about so recklessly that they ended up pursuing an agenda that was, not just uninspiring or indeterminate, but the very opposite of what they had once stood for: higher spending, bigger deficits, more regulation, more intervention. And the response was … crickets. The base was quiet. The caucus was compliant.

Perhaps it was the credit Stephen Harper had earned with them, through the long years in the wilderness when he was their guy, the conservative’s conservative. But that unquestioning loyalty seems to have unhinged him. He could, he found, do anything, almost literally anything — tax income trusts, appoint his horse proconsul, anything — and no one would object.

I think it went to his head, and those of his team. They became cartoon bullies, full of their own wisdom, contemptuous of the opposition, but contemptuous of their own supporters most of all. The worst insult in the Conservative lexicon became not “liberal” or “socialist,” but “purist.”

And so those early compromises of principle multiplied, and mutated, until over time they became compromises of a darker kind. It was as if they were carried along by their own momentum, unable to see where they were headed, or to stop themselves if they could. Until this spring, when at long last they pushed things too far.

The funny thing is how little it took to upend them. At the Manning Conference earlier this year, I marvelled how none of the conservative constituencies who filled its seminars was actually represented by this government: neither fiscal conservatives, nor social conservatives, nor democratic conservatives, nor any of them, really. And yet they still professed to support it. I wondered how long this “cognitive dissonance” could last.

A couple of weeks, it turned out. All it took was a single backbencher, Mark Warawa, who wished to have Parliament vote on a motion condemning sex-selective abortion. Or more particularly, it took the government’s unbelievably heavy-handed response, not only ordering the motion be set aside by the Standing Committee on The Fix Is In, but forbidding him even to object to this treatment in Parliament.

Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber


That opened the floodgates. First a raft of Conservative backbenchers, a sort of democratic caucus, took to Warawa’s defence, defying the whip in a series of speeches in Parliament and winning a favourable ruling from the Speaker on a motion of privilege. Then the social conservative movement outside Parliament began signalling it had had enough. This week the Canadian Taxpayers Federation added its voice to the din, with a harsh critique of the government’s fiscal and economic policies.

And how did the government respond? Did it learn from its mistake? Yes, indeed — and repeated it almost exactly. Rathgeber’s private member’s bill, requiring disclosure of senior bureaucrats’ salaries and opening the CBC’s books to public scrutiny, was eviscerated — a gross offence against a traditional prerogative of MPs, and done with the PM’s signature flourish of contempt. But plainly this was only the last in a long train of abuses.

I do not think they quite know what they have done. Rathgeber is not some loose cannon or disappointed office-seeker they can easily laugh off: He is an unusually respected MP, with a record of speaking, always in measured tones, in defence of basic principles of parliamentary government. His statement explaining the reasons for his resignation is respectful, cogent and devastating.

And yet I think his decision sends a message as much to his peers on the backbench as the “boys in short pants” in the Prime Minister’s Office. What it shows is that party discipline, as such, is a myth.

It isn’t the whips who force MPs to vote as the party tells them, to speak only when the party allows, to read out party talking points and jump to their feet applauding every time a minister burps. It’s themselves. The discipline is self-imposed. It is MPs’ own embrace of the “team player” mentality, their own hopes of advancement, their own readiness to stifle their conscience and rationalize their self-interest that has turned them into the proverbial “trained seals.”

What Rathgeber has proved is that MPs do not have to accept this humiliation. They can maintain their self-respect. They can stand up for their constituents and their principles. They have a choice, and if instead they end up as the leader’s footmen they have no one to blame but themselves.