From 2008 to 2013 I worked on Parliament Hill as a legislative assistant for a Conservative member of Parliament. Those were the Harper years. Elected on the heels of the “Unite the Right” movement of the late 90’s/early 00’s, it was clear to Stephen Harper (and to any conservative-minded person since 1993) that party discipline was the only way to stay in power in Canada, especially in a minority Parliament. Since then, the polarization of the electorate and the difficulty of building political coalitions has led to successive minority Parliaments with strict caucus discipline. But back in 2013, Prime Minister Stephen Harper broke ground on a “take no prisoners, make no compromise” political approach that Pierre Poilièvre is now turning into an art form.
A minority government is in constant campaign mode. Campaigns are like acute stress: unavoidable but supposed to be temporary. When acute stress becomes chronic, the body starts to fall apart. In representative democracy, you need the time and space between elections to do the work of governing. To govern effectively, you need to make unpopular decisions in the pursuit of a greater vision for the country. The pursuit of that vision does not always take shape in a succession of popular measures. A campaign is a sales pitch on a car lot. It’s fundamentally different from driving and maintaining a car day by day. As a political assistant in a minority government, you have to churn a constant supply of sales pitch, working campaign slogans and partisan attacks into everything you write. For me, it was soul sucking. When I left Parliament Hill, I promised never to work in party politics again.
10 years later, the Ottawa City councillor who first hired me from 2018 to 2020 asked me if my Conservative affiliation would conflict with his more progressive approach. I had the pleasure to inform him that this was precisely why I had left federal politics. In municipal politics, every vote belongs to you. You get to decide how best to represent your constituents on a case-by-case basis, based on your own judgement of what is best for your community. You get 4 years to carry forward the vision that got you elected and at the end of the term (which is never shortened by a “minority council”) you get to run on your own record. You answer for your own decisions.
Since the absence of political parties drew me to municipal politics, you might understand my consternation upon seeing Ottawa City Council organize itself around voting coalitions reminiscent of a party system.
The existence of a voting coalition supporting the mayor’s agenda started drawing attention on social media following the controversial Chateau Laurier vote in the Summer of 2019. By the beginning of 2020, “Watson Club” had become a slur thrown at councillors who voted with the mayor, regardless of their reasons for doing so. Digital snapshots of vote results started being shared on Twitter, as if a simple record of yays and nays told the whole story about a vote. As someone who worked for two suburban councillors often reputed to be part of the Watson Club, the implications always hit close to home: both councillors put a lot of time and consideration into their votes, whether they aligned with the mayor’s or not. It was frustrating for both of them to be remembered only for the way they fit a partisan narrative.
More thoughtful takes have noticed that Mayor Watson’s coalition was not so much a coalition doing what Jim Watson told them to but a coalition of suburban councillors pushing similar files in similar directions. Ottawa is a city who grew in what I call “leaps and bounds.” A Greenbelt managed by the National Capital Commission was created in the 50s to limit urban expansion. Not only has it not worked to limit suburban expansion, it has made urban expansion reach far and wide around Ottawa’s original urban envelope. Suburban growth “leapt” over the Greenbelt and created a dispersed urban geography making urban and suburban interests almost diametrically opposed. When one pulls, the other one pushes.
I find transportation (roads) the most striking example of this dynamic. The urban core of Ottawa is mostly walkable and its residents want to make cycling and walking safer and more convenient. They want to limit parking in their neighbourhoods and invest in transit. Ottawa suburbs were designed for car ownership: few things are walkable, parking lots are generous, and residents tend to drive into the urban core for work, requiring more parking on wider roads. Low population density has made frequent transit difficult to provide and challenging to use. Car-dependence doesn’t only inform how we get around, it also informs how we build our streets, how much space we allocate to other modes of transportation, how we keep everyone safe (or not), and the population density of a given area. When you build a community where everyone needs a car, you need to build a community where every car has a space to park at home, at school, at the store, and at work. It’s a fundamentally different proposition than what makes a walkable neighborhood: narrow, short streets and proximity, which demands much denser neighborhoods.
In cities like Paris and Montreal, the same urban/suburban tug-of-war happens but the suburbs of Paris and Montreal are not part of the same municipality. When suburban residents around Montreal threatened to vote Valérie Plante out of office over the pedestrianization of major arteries like Rue St-Denis, Rue Ste-Catherine and Avenue du Mont-Royal, she scoffed and doubled down, secure in the widespread support of her residents. In Ottawa, the opposing interests of urban and suburban residents compete for the same council votes. So when urban core councillors ask for more stringent parking restrictions or against urban expansion, they must garner the support of their suburban colleagues representing a constituency asking for better and easier parking, wider roads and the low residential density that offers everyone the space required by their personal vehicles.
Is it surprising then that voting coalitions would form over suburban versus urban interests in Ottawa?
These voting coalitions become politically relevant in the context of a polarized council. Between the urban core and suburbia are 6 wards that represent the original suburbs of Ottawa. Located inside the Greenbelt, these wards are called “outer-urban” and the issues they grapple with are sometimes aligned with those of the urban core and sometimes with those of the suburbs. Finally, Ottawa has 4 rural wards whose interests and needs are unique but more naturally aligned with those of their suburban neighbours, if only due to their proximity and preference for low density neighbourhoods.
Without ideological polarization around the council table, the so-called “outer urban” wards provide a balancing vote to the see-saw of urban and suburban votes. The problem with ideological polarization is that these votes are subsumed by political considerations. When your first question is “what is the mayor’s position on this vote?” and not “what is in the best interest of my residents?” you are governing from a place of political self-interest over the representation of your residents’ interests, and this goes whether your default position is to support or oppose the mayor.
Critics of the political coalition supporting the mayor have often pointed out how suburban councillors always vote with the mayor, as if support for the mayor was their political objective. In reality, the coalition happened the other way around: in order to pursue his political agenda, the mayor has to secure the support of a majority of councillors. Since his political agenda – keep taxes low and services stable – aligned more closely with the conservative values of suburban residents, he systematically courted the vote of suburban and rural councillors and effectively alienated the core.
During the current term of council, Ottawa had 5 inner urban wards, 6 outer urban wards, 8 suburban wards, and 4 rural wards. If you consider my analysis from above, inner urban and suburban votes are mostly at odds with each other, rural votes align with suburban votes and outer urban votes are a bit of a crapshoot on an issue-specific basis. If you are a mayor trying to pursue a specific agenda, you would be well-advised to secure suburban and rural votes first before seeing if you can rally a few more outer-urban votes, rather than securing 5 inner-urban votes and trying to etch enough votes from the outer-urban councillors to win a razor-thin majority every time. It sounds exhausting.
When I hear someone say that suburban councillors “always vote the way the mayor tells them to” I chuckle because it’s more like the opposite: the mayor always makes sure that he has the support of a majority of councillors before he brings something up for a vote. Every vote that comes to City Council with a secure majority of votes has been workshopped in the background to earn these votes. I heard someone make a fantastic analogy when it comes to securing votes: if you’re going to ask an elected official to swing off a branch, you better make sure that the branch is solid. Not a single councillor will compromise their chance of re-election to support the mayor: the mayor doesn’t elect them. Their primary consideration is to get the support of their residents. That’s why in the last year of the term, we have seen increasingly divided votes at council: support for the mayor started being an albatross around some councillors’ necks and they sought to distance themselves from their association with “the Watson Club.”
“But Vero”, you ask, “What if the mayor sought consensus across the wards? Wouldn’t that be better?” Yes it would be, and that’s where I tell you that it takes two poles to polarize. While the mayor bears a lot of responsibility for the acrimonious tone of council, and he certainly did not lead by example, he was also facing political opponents with their own antagonistic and uncompromising views. You can only seek consensus where consensus wants to be found. The coming new council, with its new mayor and majority of new councillors, will show to what extent the mood of the last term of council was strictly a function of its composition or a reflection of current societal trends towards political polarization.