Review by Ian Brodie
No ‘I’ in Team: The Politics of Party Discipline in Canada, Alex Marland et al. University of Toronto Press, 2025.
Originally published in the print edition, Autumn 2025, pp. 55-57.
VERY LITTLE GETS done in politics unless one is part of a team. A political system where a single person’s view prevails is a dictatorship. Along the way, team participation transforms individuals. There may be no “I” in team, as the title of this book says, but there is certainly a transformed “me.” Legislators who enter caucus with strong personal or local agendas discover that other caucus members also have personal and local agendas. Working together, and making the necessary compromises, means being socialized into a broader political community. Echoing Tocqueville’s view that local political participation fosters democratic virtue, party membership can foster civic maturity. This makes people better people.
Journalists and academics find the lesson hard to swallow. They find civic virtue and maturity boring. Neither trait sells subscriptions and neither trait is transgressive. Expressive individualism and authenticity, products of the romantic mind, seem heroic by comparison.
There is a persistent puzzle of Canadian parliamentary democracy: why do federal and provincial legislators remain so loyal to their political party despite the cost? Given the need for constant ritual demonstrations of loyalty to party and leader, the requirement to recite canned talking points, and the pressure to vote against both their personal views and the interests of their constituents, why do they bother?
Alex Marland, professor of politics at Acadia University, and his team identify institutional drivers of party loyalty such as the dynamics of party structure and Westminster-style governance. They also highlight political factors, including the individual calculus of career advancement within a caucus – going along to get along. Social pressures, such as the strong norms of solidarity and the need to maintain cohesion, are addressed alongside technological forces, especially the omnipresence of digital media that reinforce conformity and penalize deviation.
From these dynamics, No ‘I” produces a typology of legislator orientations toward party loyalty. Most parliamentarians are “team players” who consistently support the party line, always voting at the party’s call while seldom thinking for themselves. Yet there are always exceptions.
Successful teams are not composed of faceless, interchangeable cogs. Team leaders seek out talented individuals, and success often hinges on the performance of “clutch” players who thrive under pressure. The Yankees of yesteryear depended on the clutch power of Mr. October, Reggie Jackson. Political parties depend on clutch parliamentarians to take on the highest profile public roles in Question Period, major debates, and media encounters. Think of John Baird or Dominic LeBlanc.
The mavericks make for some of the book’s more interesting passages. Some resist orthodoxy without leaving or being given the boot. Think of Judy LaMarsh, John Reid, and Svend Robinson. Those who cannot work within the strictures of party unity become leavers, either exiting voluntarily or being expelled. Think of Brent Rathgeber, David Kilgour, or Alex Kindy. Or they might become switchers and change parties entirely or start a new one. Think of Lucien Bouchard or Jenica Atwin. The case studies in each category illuminate the benefits and limits of loyalty.
The authors focus on the costs of remaining on the team. For academics used to working alone or in small groups those costs seem acutely high. But people in other lines of work find working in a group is reassuring: there is strength in numbers; no one will laugh at you for getting something wrong if everyone on the team made the same mistake. And given that team members have different interests, any one member can contract out his thinking on a topic he or she finds dull to a colleague who cares.
IN THE EARLY days of the Harper government, the Conservative caucus ejected one of its own – the MP for Halton, Garth Turner. Mr. Turner could have been simply a Conservative maverick had he wished. He had a short personal agenda of policy issues like the better protection of property rights that few other MPs cared about but which he cared about deeply. At the time, many MPs had blogs they used to advocate all sorts of niche concerns. Mr. Turner was adept at using on-line video to promote himself (YouTube, Twitter and Facebook were just being invented and had not yet taken over political communications). He sharply criticized Mr. Harper’s bipartisan decision to appoint David Emerson to his cabinet, despite or maybe because of the way it broadened the Harper coalition. The end came when he used his video platform to attack his caucus colleagues as the “horse and hats crowd.” Once he had been ejected, dozens of Conservative MPs used a portion of their bulk mail allowances to drown his city block with their promotional materials. Behind his back, some of his former colleagues jokingly praised Mr. Turner’s Question Period performance as Kim Campbell’s Revenue Minister (the Campbell government never had a Question Period).
Political teams operate in a different kind of competition than business or sports teams. The business teams behind Coke and Pepsi share a lucrative market. They battle over fractions of a point of market share but both prosper from it. Only two sports teams in any league make the playoffs and only one of them takes home the trophy, but once the cup is awarded the season is over. In politics, the winning team wins power, an achievement that requires extraordinary cohesion and discipline. The rewards of power far outweigh the costs of party unity. Few politicians give a second thought to the constraints of unity if that is what is required to win and maintain power. “The worst day in government is better than the best day in opposition,” as the saying goes. Work as a government side backbencher is often better and more rewarding than work as an opposition frontbencher.
Bobbi Ann Brady, the Ontario parliamentarian who was elected and then re-elected as an independent, is a colourful, engaging, and maybe even heroic character, standing as a small-town conservative against the machine politics of Doug Ford’s PCs. She enjoys the freedom of being able to speak her mind and, judging by the election results, her constituents support her in her mission. She works hard since she cannot rely on the machine to supply her with talking points or campaign materials, but the bigger price she pays is exclusion from the halls of power. And in some ways, that is selfish. She leaves the tough decisions, and accountability for them, to others. She is free always to criticize and never needs to take responsibility for the public good. When Ford passes from the scene, will her mission still be a vital one? A relevant one? A successful one?
And what will happen when she falls on tough times? Team players are expected to take care of team players when they need a hand. The team player who fumbles in Question Period or is embarrassed in a media interview finds understanding and support from caucus colleagues. Since in politics sooner or later everyone screws up, eventually everyone feels the comfort of colleagues’ sympathy. Party networks step in to help when a parliamentarian is defeated or must resign for unfair reasons. Party unity is insurance against the valleys of political experience.
Anyone thinking of running for Parliament on a party ticket make a careful study of the mavericks and leavers in Marland’s book, especially the quitters. In parliamentary life, everything is structured by your membership in a party caucus. Your campaign lawn signs and literature, your Parliament Hill office, your cell phone, your website, your work schedule, your parliamentary assignments, the timing of your re-nomination campaign, and even permission to travel home for anniversaries and family birthdays – all these things are managed by the party whip or the national campaign manager. There may come a moment when the price you pay for party unity becomes too high. No ‘I” in Team will force you to think about that moment, ideally before you even throw your hat in the ring. Even team players can benefit from thinking through the pros and cons of party life before joining the fray.
A follow up volume could take a closer look at the pressures on each party’s team players. Both the Liberal and Conservative caucuses include pro-life MPs, for example. Both leaders have been imposing steep career costs on any MP who discusses abortion policy in public for at least a decade; Mr. Trudeau took the hardest line on the topic, banning pro-life talk altogether in the Liberal caucus. Someday, an enterprising and sympathetic researcher could ask these serving and retired MPs how they puzzle through the cost of treading so carefully on such a fundamental issue.
Originally published in the print edition, Autumn 2025, pp. 55-57.