Filibuster CartoonsTitle: A Canadian election puzzle (click to view)
Date: April 20, 2011
With less than two weeks to go until the 41st Canadian federal election formally concludes, we're still seeing very few signs that this campaign — which all the nation's parties were oh-so-keen to provoke — will actually be fought over anything substantial. Both the Liberals and Conservatives have promised to keep taxes low and cut government spending, while the NDP and Bloc have offered their standard mix of pie-in-the-sky promises they'll never be called upon to implement. Snore.
With all parties on-script to the point of banality, the only issue capable of driving up any level of substantial passion among the press, parties, and public continues to be the old "coalition government" chestnut, which stubbornly refuses to disappear from the headlines. Though Liberal Leader Ignatieff continues to deny he has any interest in displacing Harper by forming a three-headed Liberal-NDP-Bloc hybrid administration, he nevertheless managed to breathe new life into Conservative conspiracy theories Tuesday when he mused that he'd still be willing to serve as a minority Liberal PM someday, should the Governor General be willing to fire Harper and install him (
hint hint).
Unlike a coalition government, which has never been successfully attempted in Ottawa, the scenario Iggy is describing is a tad more precedented.
In the summer of 1926, Canada's then-governor general, the Viscount Byng of Vimy, unilaterally appointed Tory leader Arthur Meighen as prime minister following a vote of no-confidence against the incumbent Liberal premier, Mackenzie King. Byng's logic was that since Canada had just
had an election a few months earlier, it made more sense to just appoint the leader of the opposition PM, rather than subject the country to another lengthy campaign.
It was the last time in Canadian history that a governor general made an independent decision, and Lord Byng paid a heavy price for it. King allowed Meighen to serve as prime minister for only three months before non-confidence voting
him, and by that point an election was unavoidable. Using Harper-like rhetoric, in the ensuing campaign King argued ferociously that the opposition parties were conspiring with illegitimate royal authority to unjustly subvert a democratically-elected government. When the dust settled, his populist narrative had won him a healthy majority, and Lord Byng was forced to resign from office prematurely, his reputation as a distinguished figurehead tarnished by overzealous political "meddling."
I suspect that our current GG, David Johnston, likes his cushy job too much to get in the middle of a plot as complicated and controversial as the King-Byng affair, an episode that all Canadian students who take Politics 101 are explicitly taught to view as the chaos that can ensue when a governor general Goes Too Far. Yet the fact that there is still all this coyness and uncertainly floating around regarding who exactly gets to be prime minister following an election — a matter that never used to be particularly contested in this country — is nevertheless highly troubling.
To be fair, in a three party-plus democracy, voting for anyone other than the two strongest parties has always been slurred as wasted ballot, and an indirect vote for the guy you probably want to be in power the least. If you vote NDP in a tight Liberal-Conservative race, for example, you're clearly just splitting the left-wing, anti-Harper vote, and can thus be pretty fairly blamed when his party gets in. But until recently, NDPers (or Bloc voters) could always offer the plausible defense that, no, I have a right to a third option in the race for the leader of Canada, and a vote for my party of choice is a genuine expression of preference. Far from a fringe candidate, according to the polls, Jack Layton is actually an incredibly popular man at the moment, and his bid for the prime minister's seat has become far more aggressive and brazen than that of many NDP leaders past.
Yet paradoxically, the degree to which an NDP vote is actually a vote for Layton as PM has never been more unclear. Of all the party leaders, Layton's been the most unapologetic about being cool with the idea of a Lib-NDP-Bloc coalition, which, if true, means that a vote for the NDP may end up actually being a vote for Prime Minister Ignatieff. Similarly, many of the Quebecers who vote for the Bloc do so on the understanding that their party is a protest one, and won't affect the government of Canada one way or another. Yet if Mr. Duceppe comes out in favor of an all-opposition coalition, as he did in 2008, then suddenly a Bloc vote becomes a vote for Iggy as well.
Harper has done his darndest to exploit this confused state of affairs on the campaign trail, constantly spouting the line that Election 2011 is a simple and stark choice between a majority government for him, or the lunatic zoo of ringmaster Ignatieff.
I suspect Canada will probably end up getting neither; at this point I think the most likely outcome is just another Conservative minority that the opposition parties begrudgingly learn to live with — just as they learned to live with Harper's first two terms. The political and personal risks associated with any alternative arrangement are just too high, not only for Ignatieff, but also Layton, Duceppe, and the Governor General.
It's all the damn
uncertainly, however, that seems to have poisoned Canadian democracy in some fundamental way, and corrupted the once clear cause-and-effect correlation between elections and outcomes. Though no substantial policy issues may have been debated, it's still possible election 2011 will have marked a fundamental change to Canada's political culture from which there will be no turning back.
CKA Uber 
