L. Ian MacDonald: Is it time to set term limits on our prime ministers?

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Canada has a history of long tenure in office by Liberal prime ministers. Sir Wilfrid Laurier served four consecutive terms as PM from 1896-1911.

In the modern era, Jean Chrétien won three consecutive majorities from 1993 to 2003 before the palace coup staged by the Paul Martin clan.

Pierre Trudeau won four elections in three decades in 1968, 1972, 1974 and 1980, losing only to the Joe Clark minority Conservatives in 1979. In all, Trudeau père spent 15 years as prime minister.

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Justin Trudeau came up on nine years in office last week. If his minority government endures until the fixed election date of Oct. 20, he’ll mark an uninterrupted decade as prime minister.

But he’s not there yet, not by any means. The Liberals, seething with internal strife in caucus and trailing the Conservatives by 20 points in consensus poll numbers, are in a bad place.

Imagine, at a party caucus last month, 24 Liberal backbenchers presented Trudeau a letter, names not disclosed, demanding an answer within several days on whether he planned to remain or move on. They didn’t have long to wait.

The next day, at a news conference announcing immigration reform, Trudeau shared his thoughts in no uncertain terms.

“We’re going to have great conversations about what is the best way to take on Pierre Poilievre at the next election,” he declared, “but that’ll happen with me as leader.”

The 20 or so ministers and MPs standing behind him broke into a round of spontaneous applause.

For the present at least, this is a house divided against itself. Whether or not it can stand remains to be seen.

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But here’s something we can borrow from our southern neighbour that could help the Liberals and the Canadian political process in terms of protecting the country from leaders overstaying their positive impact. It’s the 22nd amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Quite simply, it’s called term limits.

Adopted in 1951, the text is simple: “No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice, and no person who has held the office, or acted as President for more than two years to which another person was elected President, shall be elected to the office of President more than once.”

Until then it hadn’t been an issue. Founding father George Washington had set the example of two terms and out back in 1797.

The person Congress had in mind in writing “more than once” was Harry S. Truman, the vice-president who assumed the presidency upon Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in the spring of 1945. That gave Truman nearly four years of Roosevelt’s final term, plus four years on his own that he won in 1948.

How could term limits look in Canada?

Let’s say the Liberals decide that a leader with a majority could serve two four-year terms as prime minister and another as head of one minority government. Two terms and out. Three at most. That could work in the real world. And it might keep peace in the family; not now maybe, but down the road.

But if we’d had term limits previously, how would such an arrangement have worked?

It would have left Pierre Trudeau out of the picture after 11 years in office, after his minority government in 1972, between the two majorities in 1968 and 1974. And that would mean Canadians would have missed one of the major turning points in our history: Trudeau’s transformational patriation of the Canadian Constitution from London and the creation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

And there lies the conundrum. Keeping FDR to two terms could have kept the U.S. out of the Second World War at a time of a rising fascist threat in the country, just as limiting PET to his first three terms might have meant no Charter. And where would we be now?

It’s worth some thought. Until there’s momentum behind it though, we’ve got an uneasy Liberal caucus and an “I’m-here-to-stay” prime minister.

macdonaldlian@gmail.com

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