Preston Manning is a former member of Parliament and served as leader of the Opposition.
The 2022 NHL draft puts on display the most talented up-and-coming hockey players in the world. How those players got there – possessing the knowledge, skill and ability to play our national game at the highest level – is a story with a lesson for Canada’s political parties.
My wife Sandra and I have 14 grandchildren, a number of whom play hockey (some now at a high level.) Like most hockey parents and grandparents, we have been to an infinite number of games and practices where we have often noticed several fellows sitting in the back row of the bleachers with clipboards. It turns out they’re hockey scouts – in some cases, for teams with NHL connections – assessing players as young as 12 to see if they might have the aptitude, motivation and skills to become a professional player.
For those players who appear to have what it takes, a system exists to ensure they get the attention, training, experience and coaching needed to make them candidates for playing in the NHL.
My question is: Where is the equivalent of this system in the democratic political arena? It is increasingly acknowledged – even by staunch partisans – that we need to be recruiting stronger and more qualified candidates, people of outstanding character, competence and commitment, to run for elected office. But where is the system for identifying them, recruiting them and preparing them for democratic office – not six months before an election, but 10 years upstream, when they are more idealistic, reachable and teachable?
The truth is that no such system exists, and the first step to creating it is to establish a political scouting process. That will involve finding and operationalizing political scouts with a love for democratic politics, experience in the political arena, knowledge of what to look for and connections with the environments where potential candidates might be found. Those environments could include political families, interest groups and conferences, charities and not-for-profits, political organizations, professional institutions, business and labour organizations, academia and even the civil service.
The second step, once such potential candidates are identified, is to provide them with training and experience at a level and of a calibre that will prepare them to provide exceptional service and leadership if elected to public office. What is needed is not better guidance on how to get elected – that is already available. What is needed is in-depth training to enable them to provide outstanding service after they’re elected – training that, in Canada, is still woefully inadequate or missing altogether.
The training effort required of hockey players aspiring to play in the NHL is exceedingly demanding. On-ice practices once or twice a week, hours in the weight room, strict dietary regimens, hundreds of games at the pee wee, midget, junior and semi-pro levels. Is anybody prepared to make that kind of effort to equip themselves to play the democracy game at the highest levels? If not, what needs to be done to encourage and incentivize such a commitment?
The scouting and training system just described will have succeeded in its purpose when the party or parties developing and supporting it have a choice of talented candidates to run for public office on par – with respect to talent, experience and dedication – with the choices available to professional hockey teams at the NHL draft.
Years ago, I toured three of the training campuses run by the Communist Party of China to prepare its members for duty at the local, state and national levels. Attendance by those designated for such service was compulsory, and the investment of time, money and effort in preparing them for their roles in an authoritarian government was enormous. I came away wondering, even then, how democratic countries were going to compete. Our ad hoc, poorly organized, ambition-driven system for securing and preparing elected officials has made its weaknesses even more apparent in recent years.
Canada remains ascendant in hockey because of the strength of our scouting and training systems. We should be much more dedicated to the scouting and training of our candidates for public office. Does not the exceptional talent on display at the NHL draft – and knowing what it has taken to find and secure that talent – have something to teach us about the future of democracy?
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