Ignatieff: Alienating supporters of electoral and parliamentary reform one stupid declaration at a time

So, responding to Harper's latest skillful bit of bait, Michael Ignatieff has declared he will never enter into a coalition government.

Delightful. In an era of perpetual minority governments, and deeply fragmented voter intentions, Ignatieff has decided that making a working parliament that actually reflects the spectrum of voter opinion is a bad idea.

If he wanted to alienate supporters of electoral reform and voters who actually think a Liberal-NDP coalition might be a good thing, he's done a bang-up job.

I wonder who the NDP and Green candidates are going to be in Guelph...

ETA: I miss Jean Chrétien.

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Proroguing and Partisanship

In typical fashion for historians, I want to wait a bit before posting more on the significance of the last five days. But in the meantime, I'm trying to think about this issue beyond my own partisan leanings.

One issue that seems to be cropping up regularly as an argument for why Michäelle Jean should not have granted Harper's request is the fact that since Parliament has been prorogued until late January, this will give Stephen Harper over six weeks to spend Conservative money on advertizing to bash the coalition partners and perhaps fragment their alliance. I don't doubt that this is true. But is this really a valid, non-partisan reason to oppose Governor General Jean's decision? If the other parties were not deeply in debt and unable to spend, would this be an issue? I doubt it. For all that I loathe the Harperites and the way that they use their money, they have proven extremely adept at grassroots fundraising. And to my mind, that's not a reason to oppose proroguing.

Now, using his position as Prime Minister for the next two months to enact policies and make government appointments when he lacks the support of the House - that's a completely different bucket of fish heads...

The Liberals may yet find that the Governor General has given them a gift. But will they take advantage of the next two months to get themselves a new leader and some post-Green Shift direction? For their own sakes, they had better hope so!

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Supporting the 62% coalition - but with tepid enthusiasm

Comment boards, blogs, news sites and talk radio are all completely abuzz with the drama on Parliament Hill. Tomorrow morning Stephen Harper will meet with the Governor General - perhaps to request that she prorogue Parliament, perhaps for some other reasons. I hope that if the request is made, it is denied, and that the three parties representing the other 62% of Canadians who cast votes in the election will have a chance to form a government - and that they will actually advance constructive policies for our country.

But to be perfectly honest, I feel a bit like I've been sleepwalking through the past five days. I have been following the debates and reading the news sites, and thinking about precedents. But I have felt little of the excitement that most people around me seem to have - history is potentially being made, and it leaves me feeling oddly empty. I suppose that ultimately what it comes down to is this - I would rather have a team of orangutans in government than the mean-spirited Stephen Harper and his team of (mostly) neo-cons (there are some notably exceptions in his caucus). But I also do not see a coalition made up of Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe as my dream team. Far from it - I voted in the last federal election with a bit of a shrug as I picked the best of some mediocre options. And while mediocrity is better than mean-spirited politicking during an economic slowdown, it also isn't the stuff that great history is made of. Our country is facing a global economic crunch, and it really needs a more constructive approach than we've been witnessing.

To be honest, when I heard that Jean Chrétien and Ed Broadbent were working on brokering the coalition deal, my reaction was "Great, now can the two of them come back into political life to actually head up this coalition?" Our political leadership is failing us right now, and there isn't much on the national scene which gives me cause for optimism. And so, while I support the coalition, I believe that they have a legitimate right to try to form a government, and that it would be within Canada's constitutional law to offer them that chance, I'm not doing the dance of excitement as I wait to see if they will pull this off. I'm just hoping that it will be better than the vindictiveness that Stephen Harper has been demonstrating for the last three years.

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King-Byng: Lessons from History

I guess it's time to break my silence on the issue of the current who-hah in Parliament. I'm amused watching pundits spin on the issue of what the Governor General can and cannot do, and even more amused at Stephen Harper's denial of his own position of a few years ago. It would have been a lot of fun for me to hash this out in my Canadian political history seminar, but we had our last meeting on Wednesday - so I guess the blogosphere will get my ruminations.

Just for a bit of fun, let's take a walk down the path of history. Picture it: Ottawa, 1925 (It's more fun if you imagine Sophia Petrillo delivering this monologue). A federal election has just returned the following results: Liberals 100, Conservatives 115, Progressives 22, Labour and other: a Few. A younger, psychic-consulting Mackenzie King's Liberals have fallen to second-place in the House of Commons. Who forms the government?

If you guessed Arthur Meighen and the Conservatives, you'd be wrong. Mackenzie King, who governed from 1921-25 with the support of the Progressive and Labour members (and more Liberal seats than the Conservatives) decided to try to make a go of a second term. Lord Byng was offended by what he saw as a lack of sportsmanship on King's part, but constitutional convention allowed King to continue governing, as long as he had the support of the House of Commons. Which he did... for several months until a scandal lost King the support of the Progressives. A vote of non-confidence was slated, and King seemed doomed to lose. At that point, he asked for dissolution of Parliament.

Byng, who thought that King should have given Meighen first crack at forming government after the 1925 election, refused and offered Meighen the opportunity to form government. However, lacking any support from the other parties, Meighen's government fell on its first significant vote. King craftily denounced British interference in Canadian politics (Byng was not a Canadian citizen), and won a majority in the 1926 election.

What lessons, if any, does King-Byng teach us? Well, first of all, it shows us that the party with the largest number of seats in the House - but not a majority - need not be the government (hello Stephen!). Second, it shows that the Governor General need not follow the current Prime Minister's advice all the time. Third, it does show that if you're going to take a shot at replacing an existing minority government, you'd better have the ability to survive a vote in the House, or you may just face some nasty political blowback from the electorate.

It is this third criteria that should be first and foremost in the minds of the Liberal-NDP-Bloc team. If they stab each other in the back too quickly, it will allow the Conservatives to cast these actions in whatever way they see fit, and probably fool the electorate into buying their version of events. However, if the alternate minority can survive for a year or so, it will allow the other parties to spin a better narrative - at least if they are able to develop some constructive policies in the meantime. The question is whether they have learned anything from Harper's last week, or whether they too will be tempted to engage in some ill-advised partisan (or inter-party) bickering and coalition blackmail.

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