Membership Participation in Policy-Making in the C.C.F.

Abstract

The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.) claims to open all its policy-making agencies and channels to its dues-paying membership. This very claim runs counter to what is usually considered the proper operation of political parties. Most groups of active supporters, if they enrol in a party at all, do so primarily for the purpose of closer identification and to lend more substance to their support, but not in order to determine the party's affairs. Even in the case of the major U.S. parties where voters enrol as members with the purpose of helping to nominate candidates, and of those interest-based parties such as the British Labour party and the Mouvement Republicain Populaire, where the party consists of constituent organizations with dues-paying members, the claims of the members to participate in the direction of party affairs receive little support from party theorists. And even where the legitimacy of an assertion by members of a right to participate in policy-making receives consideration, we find at once an insistence that apathy toward public affairs on the part of most people renders widespread membership participation in policy-making nugatory, and that parties, engaged as they are in a struggle for political power, demand in their operations secrecy, flexibility, and unity, none of which permits the kind of open policy-making in which lay members can freely participate.Policy-making in the two major parties in Canada follows the traditional parliamentary pattern. The parliamentary leader is responsible for the initiation and execution of policy, which he discusses with advisers of his own choosing.