Canadian Politics X

Five years ago, when I first returned home to Canada from college in the United States to enjoy the Christmas holidays, I learned to my great surprise that former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin had taken over from his predecessor Jean Chrétien as Prime Minister of Canada a month previously. About two months later, when I returned home during our week-long holiday between semesters, I learned of the breaking of the infamous “sponsorship scandal”, in which—in a nutshell—hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars were wasted on a campaign to boost the federal government’s visibility and popularity in the province of Quebec. It was then that I realized just how much I had allowed my awareness of recent developments in Canadian politics to lapse during my studies at Princeton. I remember thinking to myself, “Damn—just as I leave to go to school in the States, Canadian politics decide to get interesting for a change!”

Now, having recently graduated from university and returned home for the foreseeable future, I no longer feel I am missing out on the action.

The aforementioned corruption scandal depleted the Liberal Party’s political capital to the point where it eventually lost power, in January 2006, to Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, which won a plurality of seats in the House of Commons—meaning more seats than any other single party—but not an absolute majority of seats. As a result, Prime Minister Harper has since then headed a “minority government”, in which his party composes the entire executive branch—the Prime Minister and his Cabinet—but is outnumbered in Parliament by the opposition parties, who have always had the power to unite at any time to defeat a piece of the government’s legislation. Under Canada’s British-inspired parliamentary system, this scenario demonstrates that the government has lost the “confidence” of Parliament, in which case the party in power must seek a new mandate from voters via a new election. Seeking to prevent such a turn of events, Harper called a snap election in early September 2008, hoping to win a majority of seats in the House that would ensure his ability to govern without legislative obstruction for another four or five years. Unfortunately, though Harper’s Tories did increase their seat total from 127 seats to 143, they fell short of the 155 seats needed to form a majority of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. Result: yet another minority government, with all the instability and uncertainty that comes with it.

This is where the situation becomes still more interesting. The Canadian political system boasts a so-called “first-past-the-post” system, in which candidates in each electoral district (or “riding” in Canadian parlance) need only win a plurality of popular votes within that district in order to win its seat in Parliament. Moreover, the party that wins the greatest number of seats in Parliament—whether this is an absolute majority of seats or a mere plurality—gets to form the government, composing the entire executive branch and generally driving the government’s agenda. Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, most governing parties in Canada, even when they do win a majority of seats in the House of Commons (which is usually the case), usually fail to win a majority of the popular vote. In other words, political power at the national level is almost always monopolized by a party that commands the support of a minority of Canadian voters.

Yet Canada also possesses a badly balkanized body politic, featuring not only the Liberal and Conservative parties but also the socialist New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Québécois (whose goal is the secession of the mostly French-speaking province of Quebec, and which therefore fields candidates only in that province). Each of these peripheral parties commands too little popular support nationwide to ever win enough seats to form the government by itself. However, each party still siphons just enough popular support away from the Liberals and Conservatives to make it extremely difficult for either of those primary parties to ever win an absolute majority of Canada’s popular vote. Moreover, in the country’s current political climate, it appears fiendishly difficult for any one party to even win so much as a majority of parliamentary seats. Canadians, you see, are generally a left-leaning lot, and hence remain wary of giving the Conservatives a majority government. Yet they continue to distrust the corrupt Liberals, whose arrogant sense of entitlement to political power has been legendary for decades, stemming from their having governed Canada for two out of every three years in the twentieth century.

Thanks to this twisted state of affairs, it remains unclear when Canada will see another stable, durable majority government. This poses a problem, for although whichever party wins the most seats in Parliament—even short of a majority—is supposed to form the government, that party will still lack the support of a majority of Canadian voters. In addition, the current Conservative minority government is outnumbered by the Opposition parties, who between them possess a majority of seats in the House and command the support of a majority of voters. Therefore, should those Opposition parties unite in a solid coalition, acting as a single political party, they will then posses a majority of seats in Parliament—and thus will have the right to force the Conservative minority government from power and form their own government.

This, of course, is precisely what took place earlier this week, for the very first time in Canadian history. The leaders of the Opposition Liberal and New Democratic parties and the Bloc Québécois shocked the nation several days ago by announcing their plans to force a vote of no confidence on December 8th to turf the Harper Conservatives from power. These opposition parties have already signed a written agreement to then take power as a unified coalition government. This flies in the face of precedent, for successful no-confidence votes in the House of Commons—which only afflict minority governments—usually result in the dissolution of Parliament and calling of a new election. This time, however, Canada’s Governor-General (who acts as the representative of the Queen of England and thus as the official head of state in Canada’s constitutional monarchy) would be well within her rights to approve the Opposition parties’ request to unseat the ruling Conservatives and form their own government—because that coalition would indeed possess a majority of parliamentary seats.

The Opposition parties’ rationale for staging this daring political power play is twofold. First, Prime Minister Harper, after sounding a conciliatory tone in his victory speech after last October’s election, violated the trust of the Opposition parties by announcing his intention to cut off public funding for election campaigns, thereby threatening to effectively bankrupt his political opponents. Second, Harper has thus far adopted a sort of “wait-and-see” approach to dealing with the ongoing global financial crisis, while the Opposition parties clamor for the passage of a massive stimulus package to boost Canada’s sputtering economy. By snatching the reins of power from Harper’s Tories, Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion claims, the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition can act to save the country from a grinding recession.

In reality, however, the Opposition’s case is irrelevant to the central issue around which the current political crisis revolves: the issue of democratic legitimacy. It has been decades since Canada has been governed by a single party that commanded the support of a solid majority of Canadian voters. Now a coalition of parties threatens to take power without having been elected to the position at all. It is disingenuous to argue that they derive legitimacy from their winning a majority of popular votes between them. In this fall’s election, the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes did not campaign as a coalition; rather, each party campaigned strictly on its own behalf, as in all elections past. Otherwise put, those Canadians who cast their vote for the Liberals, for example, did so in the hope and expectation that only that party would form the government; the same goes for those who voted for the NDP or the Bloc Québécois. Not a single Canadian voted to elect a Liberal-NDP-BQ coalition to power, for Canadians were never even given that option.

For all the democratic shortcomings of the Conservatives’ majority-lacking government, at least that party won more popular votes and parliamentary seats than any other. To bring to power a coalition for which not a single person in all of Canada voted, without requiring that coalition to seek a true mandate from the Canadian people, would be to effectively hijack the ship of state. As Winnipegger Reenan Keam told a CTV journalist the other day: “They don’t care what we said. We voted for a Prime Minister, and they’re saying, ‘You know what? That doesn’t matter—we don’t like him’…Then why did we have an election?”

Yet at the moment, the aforementioned hijacking remains a distinct possibility. Canada’s current Governor-General, Michaelle Jean, has cut short a trip overseas to return home to deal with this crisis, yet she has yet to signal publicly how she plans to do so; indeed, she may have yet to even make that decision. Her options at present appear to be threefold. First, and most obviously, she can grant the Opposition’s request and allow them to take power in the wake of next week’s no-confidence vote. Second, she can grant Prime Minister Harper’s likely request and “prorogue” Parliament—in other words, shut the whole circus down temporarily and reopen it next January, whereupon the Conservatives will submit a new annual budget for Parliament’s review. Third, she can react to the looming no-confidence vote in the traditional way—by dissolving Parliament and calling a new election.

The first measure, as already argued above, would be a sort of legalized, bloodless coup d’état. The second would likely only delay the inevitable, since the Opposition coalition, should it survive into the winter, could always topple Harper’s government then. If Harper can effectively use the intervening time to convince a majority of Canadians (many of whom already seem miffed at the Opposition’s shenanigans) of the wrongness of such a move, he might be able to intimidate his opponents into abandoning their planned power grab, on the grounds that Canadians would eventually punish them for it at the polls later on. Yet it is entirely possible that the Opposition parties would simply call Harper’s bluff, betting that they could ride out any storm of public disapproval that ensued, until ordinary Canadians simply turned their attention elsewhere, leaving the coalition government intact. This would not be an unreasonable calculation on their part.

The third measure is, in my view, the only one that would be both feasible and just. I am no more enthused than anyone else at the prospect of facing yet another election campaign, especially so soon after the last, useless, one. Yet if obeying the democratic will of the Canadian people is at all a priority in this situation, then that will must first be ascertained. There is at present no way to be certain how much popular support there is for a Liberal-NDP-Bloc Québécois coalition government, for no such scenario was ever presented to Canadian voters as an option in the last election campaign; indeed, numerous Opposition partisans denied its very possibility at the time. If the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes truly crave a government with democratic legitimacy as they claim, then they should not be averse to making their case directly to the people, this time campaigning for power as a coalition. As Winnipegger John Malek told CTV News recently: “I’d rather vote than be told, ‘Okay, I’m your leader now.’”

Should the Opposition coalition then collectively win a majority of seats under that aegis, let them by all means rise to run the show in Ottawa. To pretend, however, that they currently have a mandate to do so is ludicrous. It may be that every Canadian who voted Liberal, NDP or Bloc on October 14th would vote for a coalition of those parties in a new election; but that is a possibility, not a certainty. I, for one, strongly suspect that more than a few Canadians who balked at casting their vote for Harper’s Conservatives last time around would equally balk at voting for a coalition that includes Quebec separatists, whose goal it is to take Canada’s second-largest province out of Confederation forever.

Ultimately, if a duly elected minority government can be toppled so abruptly by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, without an election, on the grounds that the governing party failed to win a majority of the popular vote, then clearly minority governments, by their very nature, are so devoid of democratic legitimacy that they should not even be allowed to take office in the first place. Perhaps we could mandate that in the event of an election in which no political party wins a popular or parliamentary majority, there ought to be a second round of voting in which Canadians return to the polls to rectify the situation. In the event that another minority government ensues, the Opposition would be forbidden by law to carry out a vote of no confidence against the governing party, at least for a certain minimum time period. They would be allowed to vote however they like on individual bills, to be sure, and to defeat government bills if need be; but no such defeat could legally cause the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a new election, or the replacement of the government by an Opposition coalition, until a certain amount of time—perhaps 12 to 18 months, perhaps more—had elapsed.

The only alternative I can see to such a reform would be to institute a system of proportional representation in Canada from the get-go, along with the virtual guarantee of perpetual coalition governments that would come with it. Either measure would be preferable to a system in which an Opposition junta can seize power without the people’s consent.

As far as democratic legitimacy is concerned, there is an even deeper and more significant lesson to be learned from the current conundrum. The issue that underpins this crisis is the parliamentary “confidence” convention. As mentioned earlier, a governing party that fails to pass a key piece of legislation through Parliament is said to have lost the “confidence” of the legislature, and must therefore face a new election campaign. (Other than the annual budget, exactly what constitutes “key” legislation is pretty much left to the Prime Minister to decide.) This particular tradition is meant to enable Parliament to check the power of the executive branch of government. Closer scrutiny, however, exposes it as a poorly-thought-out paradigm that throughout Canadian history has actually had the opposite effect.

To be precise, the confidence convention inadvertently concentrates more power in the hands of the Prime Minister. When the latter knows that the failure to get his bills passed could result in his losing power, he is driven to bend all his energies toward the goal of ramming legislation through the House of Commons at any cost. In recent decades, this has led PM after PM to ensure the support of his own parliamentary caucus by threatening his MPs with expulsion from the party if they fail to toe the official party line. In other words, the executive branch is normally able to effectively dictate policy to the legislature—the exact opposite of the confidence convention’s original intent.

The exception is in the case of a minority government, in which the Opposition parties actually outnumber the governing party’s caucus in the House of Commons. This arrangement makes it much harder for the Prime Minister to bully Parliament; yet it also engenders its own set of problems. As we now know, it enables the Opposition parties to join forces and effectively usurp political power on the misleading grounds that it is they who command the support of a majority of Canadians. This scenario, always a theoretical possibility, has never before occurred because (a) the Liberals governed through most of Canada’s history, usually with a majority, and (b) Canada used to have a three-party system in which the Opposition—usually composed of right-leaning Conservatives and socialist New Democrats—was too ideologically polarized to ever unite to unseat the governing party, even a minority one. On those relatively rare occasions when the Conservatives ran things, the Liberals could usually expect to return to power before very long, and so felt no need to join forces with the NDP to overthrow the Conservatives. Nowadays, with five parties in Parliament—each attracting too little popular support to ensure itself a durable majority—and with an economic crisis providing the Opposition with a convenient casus belli, it’s a different story.

The “confidence” paradigm, then, is fatally flawed in all circumstances. It allows the Prime Minister of a majority government to ruthlessly crush dissent within his own party in order to be able to govern without constantly looking over his shoulder, fearing his caucus may stab him in the back. In times of minority government, it engenders instability and confusion; in extreme cases like this, it can even enable the Opposition parties to conspire to depose the duly elected government of the day, regardless of the democratic will of the people. Ladies and gentlemen, in the real world, this is no way to run a government.

Yet even if the confidence convention actually defeats its own purpose in practice, is it justified in principle at least? I, for one, think not. Exactly what is meant by “the confidence of Parliament” anyway? No legislature in any true democracy is a monolith; in every responsible government, Parliament is composed of at least two separate parties with opposing viewpoints on most issues. Does “confidence” then mean that the governing party cannot function without the approval of every party in Parliament? Obviously not; the minority parties are not called “the Opposition” for nothing. If anything, it is their job to be thorns in the government’s side. How silly it would be for the governing party to have to seek a new mandate from the people on the grounds that it could not convince the opposition parties to endorse its agenda!

Surely, then, maintaining the “confidence” of Parliament does not mean maintaining the confidence of the Opposition—unless “confidence” means merely a faith in the government’s basic managerial competence, rather than an agreement with all of their policy objectives. This, however, is a dubious stipulation at best; in Canadian politics, all opposition parties routinely accuse the government of rank incompetence, among other mortal failings. If “confidence” means “the assent of the governing party”, or even merely “the governing party’s faith in the executive’s administrative competence,” it is largely redundant at best. It is a bizarre political party indeed that willingly follows leaders who do not know how to run a government. And if a party’s leadership is revealed to be so incompetent, then that leadership needs to be sent packing by its own party’s rank and file—not toppled by Parliament in a no-confidence vote. (For more information, see Margaret Thatcher, circa 1990.)

The hell of it is that the very inventors of Westminster-style responsible government have moved on from reliance on the “confidence” principle, in practice if not necessarily in theory. The Brits clearly no longer believe that the defeat of a single government bill, or even several of them, necessarily means that the government has lost the confidence of Parliament and must therefore fall. As a matter of fact, every single British government since the 1970s has seen one or more of its bills slapped down by the House of Commons and survived. And quite frankly, why should they not have?

These British governments—both Labour and Conservative, both majority and minority—survived in part because Parliament recognized that occasional legislative defeats need not force a government to seek a renewal of its entire mandate. It simply does not logically follow that because Parliament rejects one or more particular bills sponsored by the executive branch, the people must therefore no longer trust the Prime Minister and Cabinet to govern competently or honorably. There is no reason why Parliament cannot reject a minority of the government’s bills while still approving most of them and maintaining the aggregate integrity of the government during the term to which it was, after all, democratically elected by the people.

Nor is there any reason why Canada’s Parliament could not do likewise. Yet even if Canada’s teeming political classes ever are truly awakened to the secret absurdity at the heart of responsible government, the chances of their acting on this enlightenment by relaxing their rigid adherence to the principle of parliamentary confidence are slim. First, clinging to the confidence convention gives impatient and domineering politicians in the executive branch of government the pretext they need to bully Parliament into doing their bidding. Second, equally cynical opposition politicians are only too happy to use any defeat of government legislation as a pretext to fell their opponents in a vote of no confidence. In short, the entire edifice of Canadian political power is built on a disingenuous foundation in whose perpetuation too many politicians have a vested interest. The unlikelihood of our ever seeing that foundation shattered in our lifetimes is all the more tragic because the shattering would be so relatively easy and painless.