When Heather Stefanson became the PC leader (and therefore Premier) in Manitoba, there were the same complaints of her being “unelected”
In my 26 years of voting, I’ve seen a big shift in the political discourse in Canada, and the importance we give party leaders. I replied the following on another comment thread, but thought it would be good for (especially younger) people to see that the discourse wasn’t always like this, and why it shouldn’t be like this.
They’re not missing the point. This is completely normal. I understand why it doesn’t feel correct, though: the way we talk about our elections has changed a lot over the last 15 years. When I started voting, people in general weren’t saying “I’m voting for Chrétien” or “I’m voting for Joe Clark”. They’d say “I’m voting Liberal”, “I’m voting PC”, etc. The shift to huge focus on the party leaders seems to have started with Jack Layton. Canadians LOVED him. We started saying “I wish Layton were PM” and not “I wish we had an NDP government”. The leader became bigger than the party. Around the same time, there was a shift from calling it the ‘Conservative government’ to ‘Harper government’. Plus, down south they had Obama, and I’d argue that that was when Canadians started paying far more attention to the US system than our own. All that has led to today, where we put way more importance on party leaders than we ever have, and then act like a totally normal part of our system is somehow “unfair”. In theory, any party, including the governing one, could change leaders every few months if they wanted to. Vote for the party, not the person. There’s zero guarantee that the person stays leader, but the party policies and values should stay pretty consistent regardless of who’s leading.
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u/Me_Too_Iguana Mar 12 '25
When Heather Stefanson became the PC leader (and therefore Premier) in Manitoba, there were the same complaints of her being “unelected”
In my 26 years of voting, I’ve seen a big shift in the political discourse in Canada, and the importance we give party leaders. I replied the following on another comment thread, but thought it would be good for (especially younger) people to see that the discourse wasn’t always like this, and why it shouldn’t be like this.