A LOOK BACK AT CANADA’S MOST ENTERTAINING POLITICAL CRISIS IN AT LEAST A DECADE
by Gregory Beatty, Paul Dechene, Stephen LaRose and Bernadette Wagner

Judging by the shrieking, wailing, screeching and shouting during the recent stand-off between the Bloc-backed Liberal-NDP coalition and Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government, a lot of Canadians are a tad confused about how our parliamentary form of government works.

That much was obvious from the outrage, in certain areas of Canada anyway, that accompanied the recent constitutional hullabaloo where Governor-General Michaëlle Jean granted the PM’s request to prorogue Parliament, to prevent his government from facing a non-confidence vote it likely would’ve lost.

“Our understanding of our constitution is very bad,” says University of Regina poli-sci prof Joyce Green. “I continue to see evidence of that in the media where polls are cited that indicate 45 per cent of Canadians support Harper. That doesn’t matter. This isn’t a question of whether he has popular support. It’s about whether he can [command] the confidence of the House of Commons.”

“The lack of understanding of the parliamentary system, and the lack of understanding of what was being proposed by the Liberals and NDP was amazing,” agrees University of Saskatchewan law professor John Whyte. “There was a fertile field on which to plant misinformation [about] the coalition somehow being a sneaky parliamentary move, and that it was connected to the Bloc Québécois.”

Part of the problem, Whyte says, is that Canadians confuse our system with the American one. “We don’t have a separation of powers between the legislature and the executive. It may not be the best structure of democracy, but it’s the one we currently have.”

“The bottom line is that in our system the government must maintain the confidence of the House,” says Green. “If parliamentarians do not support a government, then it must be replaced. There are two ways to do that. One is through an election, the other is for another set of actors [to present] themselves as an alternative government. At that point, the Governor-General can ask them to form a government.”

To recap: During the recent election, Canadians did not vote for Stephen Harper to be prime minister like Americans voted for Barack Obama to be president. What they did is vote for one of 308 MPs to represent them in Parliament. When the votes were tallied, the Conservatives had more seats than any other party — 143 compared to 77 for the Liberals, 49 for the Bloc and 37 for the NDP. But they did not enjoy a majority. That would’ve required 155 seats.

Thus, the only way they could govern was with the support of at least 12 Opposition MPs.

Rather than acknowledge this and deign to consult with the Opposition, Harper tried to ram through several contentious proposals in a style similar to how he’d governed during his first (minority) term. Possessing more seats in Parliament, the Opposition had every right to vote non-confidence and indicate to the G-G their preparedness, based on the coalition agreement, to form a government.

By making the request he did of Jean, says Whyte, Harper put her in a very difficult position. Technically, she is the head of state. “But don’t forget, the Governor-General’s sole source of advice about the good of the nation comes from her first minister, and she should accept his advice — period.”

Following Jean’s decision to grant the prorogation, constitutional experts fretted about the precedent that had possibly been set. While the current economic strife is a mitigating factor, says Whyte, it hardly justifies subverting parliamentary accountability.

“Harper breached the primary rule of responsible government, that one should not continue to govern if one does not enjoy the confidence of a majority in the House,” he says.

Looking ahead to Jan. 26, and the reconvening of Parliament, Green says, “if the House votes ‘no confidence,’ Harper’s got to resign. My sense then is that the Governor-General would ask herself, ‘Do I call an election? Or do I [turn to] the Opposition who have a reasonable likelihood of being able to form a stable government?’ It’s legal, it’s constitutional, and it’s democratic. It’s the way our system’s supposed to work as opposed to having another election just a few months after the last one.” /Gregory Beatty


RAGE IN THE REGIONS

Toonies to Timbits David McGrane wants to give a good chunk of the Canadian political chattering class — the parliamentary press gallery, talk show hosts, and the Conservative Foghorn Leghorns — a retroactive ‘F’ on their Grade 11 social studies. The price of our collective ignorance of how a parliamentary system works has been Stephen Harper’s constitutional crisis.

And it’s also left Canada more politically polarized than ever, save for the 1980 and 1995 sovereignty referendums in Québec. The Parti Québécois made a political comeback of sorts, with a stronger than expected showing in the recent Québec provincial election.

Harper’s efforts to marginalize the Bloc Québécois — by inaccurately braying about its role in the coalition — backfired in that province, which will probably deny the Conservatives a majority government as long as Harper leads the party. As well, Cons supporters claim that the coalition talk will doom the Liberals and the NDP outside of Québec, as they are no longer a federalist force (conveniently forgetting that the Tories and BQ voted alike 140 times since Harper became the Cons leader, and that the Cons had agreements to govern Canada, with the BQ’s assistance, in 2000 and in 2004).

“When Harper said that the coalition was undemocratic, I strongly believe that he was being disingenuous,” says McGrane, a political studies professor at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. “A coalition government or the governor general or king asking the opposition parties to form a government when the minority government falls, is as old a tradition in British parliamentary governments as the Magna Carta. “Either Harper doesn’t understand our parliamentary system, or in this case he doesn’t want to understand how our parliamentary system works.”

One could argue that the parliamentary style of government goes a long way to exacerbate Canadian political balkanization. Canadians don’t directly elect their prime minister: they elect their Member of Parliament. And if enough MPs are elected who feel the same way, then the guy they have chosen as leader becomes Prime Minister.

But they need a majority — and Stephen Harper doesn’t have that.

Like it or not, federal politics has balkanized more on regional lines than on class lines. Western Canada — especially rural Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia minus the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island — is a Conservative stronghold. The Liberals hold most of their seats in metropolitan Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal and Newfoundland.

As well, the parties don’t really run national campaigns. There are three regions — the B.C. Lower Mainland, the ‘905’ area (named for the area code for the region surrounding Toronto) and areas of suburban Montreal — that are the traditional battlegrounds. The best way of looking at Canadian electoral politics is to think of the ‘red state-blue state’ syndrome in the U.S., except that our electoral map is in a four-party gridlock and there’s no Obama or Obama-style electoral machine to overwhelm the other parties from all sides on the horizon.

So the basis of the Cons’ opposition to a coalition government, in essence, is that their power base — western Canada — would be on the outside looking into the corridors of power.

Would Saskatchewan have been silenced in a coalition government? Pshaw, says McLeod. If the coalition had established a government, Ralph Goodale (Liberal-Wascana) would likely have held a senior position, if only because he’s the only Liberal between Vancouver and Mississauga. As well, Goodale has held senior portfolios in the Chrétien and Martin governments.

“In comparison, you currently have disgraced cabinet minister (Battlefords MP) Gerry Ritz as Minister of Agriculture and he doesn’t serve on any important parliamentary committees,” says McGrane.

And what to the other 12 Saskatchewan Conservative MPs do for their salaries? Ummm…

As far as western alienation is concerned, Harper is displaying a true ‘dog in the manger’ attitude. Saskatchewan has been silenced in a Harper government, but he doesn’t want anybody else to govern, in part, because Saskatchewan would be silenced. Got that? Good. /Stephen LaRose


HARPER’S FUNDING CUT FLUB

There was much that was objectionable about Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s Nov. 27 economic update. But while the lack of any mention whatsoever of a stimulus package may have added to the impression that the Conservatives are out of touch with the concerns of Canadians, the plan to scrap the $1.95 per vote in public funding for political parties is what reinforced the idea that Harper’s brand of politics is mean-spirited, vengeful and petty.

A lot of ink was sprayed by the media over how threatening the public party funding was Harper’s undoing. Not only did it show his true stripes, it was what finally prodded the opposition into action. For two and half years, the Liberals especially had let the economy and environment go hang, but dare to touch their meal ticket and that gets them fighting mad.

Meanwhile, different stories emerged from each side in the debate. According to the Conservatives, the funding is welfare for political parties and by getting rid of it they will be leading the country by example through a period of economic constriction. To the coalition forces, it proves Harper is out to punish — even eradicate — the opposition parties by bankrupting them; plus, it is an attempt by the government to return us to the days when big-money donors owned the ears of our politicians.

Both sides claim they are trying to defend and enhance Canadian democracy.

According to Duff Conacher of the Ottawa-based group Democracy Watch, both sides are wrong.

“The $1.95 should be cut down to 90 cents,” he says. “That would be the democratic compromise.”

On the one hand, his group acknowledges that the public funding for parties enhances democracy in the country. Not only does it encourage people to vote, it redresses some of the unfairness in a first-past-the-post system by rewarding parties based on their share of the popular vote not their share of seats. It is, as he describes, “the only proportional part of our electoral system.”

But, he adds, “It’s currently at an undemocratically high level.”

“Most people don’t know the history of it,” he says. “Chrétien initially proposed it at $1.50 when he put forward the bill in 2003. The Liberals said, ‘That won’t quite do it.’ Some of the senior Liberals like Stephen LeDrew and others of the elite, old-guard insiders said, ‘We need it to be $1.75 to replace dollar for dollar all the corporate donations we currently receive.’”

(That $1.75 crept up to $1.95 over the years because the funding is designed to increase alongside inflation.)

Conacher agrees that cutting off the corporate donations was a good move as it restricted the ability of corporations to buy influence with shareholder cash. But at the time, his organization (and others) assessed how much the parties raise and what they spend, and proposed that the program should only provide them with a base level of funding and not make up the bulk of what they operate on.

“You want the democratic incentive that for the parties to prosper, they have to go and talk to voters and listen to voters and do things that voters like,” he says.

But, with the funding too high you wind up with political parties that try to be too likeable.

“All they have to do is put out a bunch of false promises during the election then break those promises. But all the voters they baited are giving them $1.95 until the next election.”

With the funding cut in half, parties could still get by with their broken promises, but they couldn’t grow.

But by trying to eradicate the system, “the Conservatives blew it,” says Conacher. Because the funding is progressive and thus proportionally benefits the NDP and Greens more than the other parties, completely ending it pleases no one but the Conservative base.

By cutting it in half, however, Harper might have been able to gain Layton’s backing.

“The NDP probably would’ve gone for it,” he argues. “And that’s all they need for it to pass. However in the same package they were saying they were going to freeze all pay equity initiatives and even though they’ve signed three year agreements with all public sector unions they’re going to bar them all from striking — which is an amazingly stupid thing to throw in because the NDP isn’t going to support [cutting party funding] because they gave them two other reasons to oppose it.

“I suppose they’ll bring the cut back,” he says, “and if they’re not so insular as everybody says they are, they’ll have seen my editorials or heard me on As Is Happens or seen me on CTV Newsnet and they’ll package it the way it should be packaged and it will corner the parties and split them, and the NDP will vote in favour of cutting it in half because they know it will hurt the Liberals and the Bloc more than it will hurt them.” /Paul Dechene


AN ANTI-WOMAN RAMPAGE


Intentional or not, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered another bitchslap to Canadian women in the economic and fiscal update his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, delivered on Nov. 27.

Sure, he took swipes at political parties and unions and promised to sell off public assets, too. And he also attacked women’s right to equal pay for work of equal value within the federal civil service.

Harper apparently hates anything to do with equal rights for women. As a result, women don’t vote for him. Maybe that’s why instead of wooing us, he takes extreme measures to further punish us.

Just look what he’s done in the past: he smacked down a national child care plan, killed off the Court Challenges program, attacked women’s reproductive freedom by supporting Bill C-484, axed jobs at Status of Women Canada (SWC) and eliminated the word “equality” from its mandate, silenced advocacy groups, shut down community-based women’s organizations and stripped money from women’s agencies and programs.

And the list goes on.

Now, he spins a pay-out of “over $4 billion in pay equity settlements” as an extraneous expense for government? Hello? That’s money stolen from women! Women who performed work equivalent to men in the federal civil service were paid less simply because they were women. It’s money they earned. The Canadian Human Rights Commission said so in 1984. That was 24 years ago! In 1999, after 15 years of legal wrangling, the Federal Court of Canada agreed women had been short-changed and ordered the government to cough up.

Some women have died waiting for their fair share. But Harper’s revenge would see those payments slow down. And their right to pay equity subjected to contract negotiations.

And their right to strike eliminated.

Gilles Duceppe was the first to stand up to Harper, accusing him of using the economic crisis as an excuse to attack women’s rights. “[The government] has decided to attack women’s rights by submitting their right to pay equity to negotiation,” he said. “Since when are rights negotiable?”

Since when, indeed! Some women I know want Gilles as PM. Others, including the Ad Hoc Coalition for Women’s Equality and Human Rights, say that “the prospect of a coalition government means that things are definitely looking up for women.”

No kidding! What would be worse for women than another day of Stephen Harper as PM? /Bernadette Wagner


ALL COALITIONS GREAT AND SMALL

Coalition governments, while rare in Canada, are not unheard of. During WWI, Tory leader Robert Borden, with the support of some Liberal and Independent MPs, led a Union government from 1917-21.

And in 1925, the Liberals under William Lyon Mackenzie King formed a short-lived coalition with the Progressive Party.

Provincially, Ontario Liberal leader David Peterson struck an agreement with the NDP under Bob Rae in 1985. While not a formal coalition, in that the NDP did not receive any cabinet seats, the pact did enable the Liberals to govern for two years despite having four fewer MPPs than the Conservatives.

And you’ll probably remember that from 1999-2001, the Saskatchewan NDP under Roy Romanow governed with the support the three Liberal MLAs, two of whom held cabinet posts.

While coalitions, until now, have not been common in Canada, U of R political scientist Joyce Green expects that will change.

“There are enough differences in the country — some of them ideological, some of them regional,” she says.

“The structural removal of 50 seats from the 308 because of the BQ means that another party has to win 156 seats out of the remaining 258, and that’s damn hard,” agrees U of S law professor John Whyte.

Just because they aren’t consistent with our political tradition, it doesn’t mean that Canadians should fear the prospect of more coalition governments. In Europe, in fact, only one major country — Great Britain — is not governed by a coalition. In countries as diverse as Germany, France, Ireland and Switzerland, parties campaign with their own platforms during elections, then forge alliances with other parties based on common interests.

Whyte, for one, isn’t a fan of that sort of horse-trading. “The trouble with coalition governments is that you’re governed by platforms and programs you didn’t actually vote for. I like majority governments. I like the idea of a party running things for four years. And what happens is the responsibility of a government as opposed to a bunch of deals that someone had to make but didn’t want to.”

When founded in 1867, Canada had four provinces — Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — with predominantly French and English settler populations. In the intervening 140 years, the country has gone through many changes. There’s now 10 provinces and three northern territories, we’re predominantly urban and multi-cultural. Aboriginal people aspire to self-government, and the West is a growing economic force.

Balancing all these interests will never be easy. For Green, a good first step would be to move to proportional representation as is common in Europe.

“Under the current system [our] differences are not well-represented in electoral outcomes. So if we want a measure of accuracy in terms of democratic representation we need to go to proportional representation.”

With PR, she concedes, we could expect to see frequent coalition governments. “But with that type of representative government I think our political culture would change so that the prospect of a negotiated compromise would be less surprising to people.” /Gregory Beatty