David T. Jones is a retired State Department diplomat who was political counselor in Ottawa and is coauthor of Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs (John Wiley & Sons, Oct 2007).

How has the ice matron of the North morphed into an Arctic soap opera drama queen? Is it accurate to accept the observation conveyed by a diplomat to the effect that Canada, bureaucratically situated in the State Department’s bureau of Western Hemispheric Affairs, has finally adopted the chaotic politics of the rest of the bureau, i.e., Central/South America?

Certainly the events of this November-December are out of the norm of blandness frequently attributed to Canadian politics. On the one hand, they are sufficiently unprecedented to spark major political upset within Canada. On the other hand, they are, if not quite Parliamentary Politics 101, hardly extraordinary.

Current Circumstances

On December 1 two opposition parties, the Liberals and the socialist New Democrats (NDP), announced a coalition that with the support of the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) designed to defeat the newly elected Tory minority government at the December 8 session of Parliament. Their assumption was that the coalition could govern as a majority for at least 18 months with no need for an election. However, the government quickly asked the Governor General to prorogue (suspend) Parliament until January 26.

Although the coalition opposed such action, the Governor General granted the government’s request—which prompted further turmoil among the opposition. On December 9, Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberal Party, accelerated his departure as leader (previously scheduled for the party convention in May). He was replaced on December 10 by Michael Ignatieff, a widely identified alternative almost from the time Dion was elected leader. Thus, when Parliament resumes, PM Harper will face a new opposition leader.

The fate of the coalition, which generated tremendous negative reaction by Canadian federalists due to its reliance on the separatist BQ, is now unclear. The Tories probably will present an economic stimulus budget when Parliament resumes; that move will eliminate the ostensible rationale for the coalition's plan to defeat the government. Nevertheless, it could still win a confidence vote and demand that the Governor General accord it a chance to govern. Presumably, the defeated Tories reciprocally would demand an election. There is precedent for either course, but the latter—even if would mean calling a winter election less than four months after the last campaign—is more likely.

Background

After a short (35-day), bitterly fought election, the Tories won an enhanced plurality on October 14, gaining 17 seats to hold 143 in a 308-member Parliament. More importantly, the Liberals were crushed, falling to their lowest seat level (77) since 1984 and their lowest ever vote percentage. Socialists improved their standing, gaining seven seats that brought them to 37; the Bloc gained a seat (bringing it to 49), and the Green Party, although receiving approximately 950,000 votes, didn't win a seat.

The prospect appeared to be for a stronger, albeit still minority, Tory government with the Liberals facing a leadership race to replace the failed Dion, who frequently appeared to be a hapless “Mr. Bean”as the foil for PM Harper as “Mr. Mean.”Dion is not a tragic figure, but rather a classic illustration of the Peter Principle. A well-regarded Quebec intellectual professor, an energetic defender of Canadian federalism, author of the “Clarity Act”which puts difficult obstacles in the path of any future Quebec sovereignty move, and a respected environment minister, he was selected as Liberal leader in December 2006. Almost immediately, however, Dion bungled his chance to make a good first impression with the Canadian electorate by suggesting that the unpopular national goods and services tax, reduced by the Tories, should be raised. It went downhill from there, accentuated by his opaque English (both professorial in complexity and heavily accented) and his promotion as the basis for the Liberal electoral platform of a complex energy/environment “Green Plan”that proved impossible to characterize briefly but easy to caricature as a “tax on everything.”

As a consequence of the campaign failure, in which the Tories were able to depict Dion as not up to being PM while the Liberals regarded him as the “Montreal Mistake,”there was immediate pressure for him to resign. He announced that he would step down as leader as soon as the Liberal general meeting, scheduled for April-May in Vancouver had selected a successor. Within a week of the election, Dion was already a shadow of a cipher—more a lame mouse than a lame duck.

Tories Overplay Their Hand

Having operated skillfully and successfully with a weak minority for two years, the Tories were convinced that with a significantly enhanced plurality and an apparently comatose Liberal party in the throes of a leadership campaign, it would be able to work its will in Parliament.

Thus when they presented an interim updated budget on November 27, it temporized on stimulus spending, hypothesizing against general economic judgment that Canada would not need deficit spending (but really serving as a placeholder awaiting details on U.S. government economic plans). It included a variety of conservative pet causes. The most unpalatable of these was the elimination of government funding for political parties (accorded on the basis of $1.95 per vote), ostensibly to save $30 million in a recession. The reality, however, was that ending public support for political parties would eviscerate the financial base for the opposition.

While technically the Tories would lose the most money (having received the most votes in the October election), they have more effectively mastered private, small-donation fundraising of the Barack Obama style; they received only 37 percent of their total revenue from public funds, while the Liberals (63 percent), NDP (57 percent), BQ (86 percent) and Greens (65 percent) are far more heavily dependent on public funding.

The Coalition. Decades ago, California power politician Jesse Unruh said that “money is the mother's milk of politics.”The howl of protest of a nursing infant pulled from the teat is akin to politicians being pulled from the public trough. Or, as one Canadian observer put it, anyone who tries to take a bone from three hungry Rottweilers should anticipate a snappish response.

So on one level, the creation of the coalition was a predictable, defensive, status quo reaction by politicians faced with long-term damage to their political prospects. But that was only one facet of its evolution.

Indeed, it appears as if the NDP had been exploring, at least tentatively, the possibilities for a coalition with the Bloc even before the election. As the BQ is essentially a socialist/labor-supported party (its leader, Gilles Duceppe, was a communist as a young man), other than its commitment to an independent Quebec, it can be viewed as philosophically compatible with the socialist NDP.

For the Liberals, smarting under their October defeat and still convinced that they are Canada's “natural governing party,”the coalition concept appeared to be an adroit, perfectly constitutional mechanism to obtain power. After all, throughout the world, a democratic, parliamentary election simply gives the leading party the opportunity to attempt to assemble a governing majority—an exercise that can take longer than the political campaign and result in revolving-door governments with mayfly lifetimes (see France's Third Republic and current Italian, Belgian, and Israeli politics).

But equally obviously, the combination of the Liberals (77) and NDP (37) did not constitute a majority of the 308-seat Parliament; the support of the Bloc (49) was necessary. But how to justify governing with a party dedicated to the destruction of Canada? The answer was a Bloc agreement to support the coalition in “confidence”measures for 18 months (the coalition was committed to govern for thirty months) with promises, the details of which remain unknown, for greater support of Quebec desires—presumably more funding and local autonomy. Announced on December 1, the rationale by the Opposition for such a dramatic action, less than two months since it had been individually and corporately defeated, was the argument that the Tories were not taking sufficiently dramatic action to resolve the economic crisis.

Clearly the objective was power: for the Liberals, a return to governing; for the NDP, a first-time-ever chance to govern; for the Bloc, greater national legitimacy, renewed validity as a power for the Quebec electorate, and more “booty”for Quebeckers in their long march to independence. The penalty was principle: Both the NDP and Liberals had rejected the concept of coalition during the election; both were ostensibly national federalist parties that had excoriated separatists. But better men had sacrificed greater principles (“Paris is worth a Mass”), and even at its inception the coalition and “crass”shared more than the letter “c.”

But the coalition also depended on speed, momentum, and shock. The government must be immediately defeated in a confidence vote before the public could react; the coalition would present itself instantly as the new government. Given 18 to 30 months in control (and betting on a shallow recession), it could then go to the electorate arguing that it had “saved Canada”from Tory incompetence or, if the economy were still struggling, argue that without the coalition's economic pump priming, it would be even worse.

The Empire (Government) Strikes Back. Realizing that it had overreached (and underestimated), and catching wind of the evolving coalition, the Tories quickly moved to postpone the confidence vote by a week to December 8. Then they crawfished; backpedaling on all of the obvious pokes-in-the-eye, and particularly dropping the provision to eliminate federal funding for political parties. Additionally, the finance minister moved up the official budget presentation from February to January 27, and the prime minister implied that the government would consult with the opposition in constructing the budget. But the opposition smelled blood and vowed to defeat the government on December 8 when Parliament resumed—regardless of any effort to placate it.

Although the coalition was beginning to wobble, with more than a few of its MPs hearing from constituents furious over a deal-with-the-devil with the separatists, the government desperately needed time to rally public opinion (and give the coalition's internal contradictions time to push second thoughts to the fore). It became clear that PM Harper would request the Governor General to prorogue (suspend) Parliament until late January.

On December 3, Harper addressed the nation, stating that the coalition’s efforts to overturn his government were inappropriate so close to the last election and its dependence on separatist votes would damage national unity. He implied that he would ask for parliamentary suspension. On December 4, he met with Governor General Michelle Jean, who had returned from Europe to respond to the crisis, requested that Parliament be suspended, and was granted the request.

The suspension was both routine (a GG had never refused such a request) and unique (a suspension had never been requested to avoid a confidence vote). But the suspension changed the coalition's momentum and simultaneously destroyed Dion's hope of avoiding becoming only the second Liberal Party leader not to become prime minister.

Indeed, one can argue that Dion sought through the coalition mechanism (and his sponsorship of it) not just to become prime minister temporarily, but to repeat Pierre Trudeau's historic maneuver in 1979. At that juncture, following a Liberal defeat, Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader and removed himself from politics. Then the minority Tory government was defeated in a confidence vote over its budget and called an election. As the Liberals had yet to elect a new leader, they recalled Trudeau—who led the Liberals to a majority victory. 

But Dion is not Trudeau, and never was this more evident than in his response to Harper's December 3 speech. He sought to reinforce a coalition letter to Jean urging that she not agree to Harper's prorogue request with a national address of his own. Unfortunately for his objectives, it more resembled a YouTube production than studio professionalism. Politically it was unconvincing—no more self-serving than Harper's, but no less so. Viewing it, Liberals were even more convinced that they could not wait until May to confront Harper with a new leader.

Defenestration No Longer Deferred. There is never a good time to replace a leader, and unless one dies in office, departure is rarely truly voluntary. Following the election catastrophe, permitting Dion to condition his departure pending selection of a new leader at the May Liberal conference was procedurally polite rather than preferred policy. Thus Dion was bluntly informed that he would resign. He did so on December 8, and after a brief internal tussle over how to nominate his successor, on December 9 selected Michael Ignatieff as “interim”party leader—but most certainly leader of the opposition.

Ignatieff is no Dion. To begin with, he “looks prime ministerial.”Additionally, he is a sophisticated, highly educated, cosmopolitan author, journalist, and TV personality—at least as fluent in French as Harper. The downside is that virtually all of this experience has been in the UK and U.S., where he spent all but three of the last 33 years. Carpetbagger comes to mind and, while he has paid some dues immersed in the Canadian political system during the past several years, his Canadian credentials are still suspect for some. He has, for example, more visceral appreciation of the shards of former-Yugoslavia than of the mechanics of the Quebec sovereignty movement. Moreover, his massive literary production and journalist commentary has proved a goldmine for political adversaries. Ignatieff's descriptive writing reveals him as having been intermittently nasty to friends and family and invariably egotistical. Nevertheless, he will be a far more effective foil for Harper in parliament and political debate, comfortable as a former telejournalist with TV repartee, and highly experienced in foreign relations from having spent virtually all of his professional life abroad.

What's Next for Canada? First, Canada must address its share of the global economic crisis. While circumstances are less dire and unemployment is lower than in the U.S., all elements of the eco-political world know that the Canadian economy is fragile and cannot avoid the reverberations from U.S. economic problems. The perception of doing something will be almost as important as what is done. Consequently, one can assume that the government, which is and will continue to consult with Opposition members, will produce a “stimulus”package in its January 27 budget.

What Then for the Coalition?

The Coalition Disintegrates. That it was a construct of convenience sparked by desperation has always been recognized. Other than in Francophone Quebec (where more “booty”from Canada is a genetic objective), the coalition's support from the separatist BQ has been massively unpopular. Tory attacks on the separatists—and efforts to rally public support against a “coup”—have polarized the electorate and revived, at least for the month, Quebec nationalism and reciprocal anger west of Ontario. Even including Quebec, polls suggest that upwards of 60 percent of respondents oppose a government depending on BQ votes for its creation and/or survival. And even at inception, there were clear indications that “blue Liberals”were unenthusiastic over being bedmates with the BQ. Consequently, if forced into a confidence vote, there is a reasonable chance that the Tories could coopt sufficient doubting Liberals and Independents (or persuade them to be absent for the vote).

The Coalition Declares Victory and Remains in Place. This is the path of least resistance, especially since the Tories have been in precipitous retreat from their previous economic and politico-social proposals. Harper has met with Ignatieff, and the government has promised consultations on the budget, with provincial premiers as well as the Opposition. Currently, the NDP has also muted its rhetoric and only the BQ (with the most to gain) continues to contend that a coalition government now would be the best solution for the economic crisis. While by definition, the Opposition will oppose any budget proposal, it can easily contend that it has forced the government into minimally acceptable action—and then demand that more be done.

There is little enthusiasm for a winter election. The polls are running against the opposition/coalition. The Liberals are financially strapped, and Ignatieff needs time both to gain full control of the party and to benefit from official endorsement as leader at the May Liberal party conference. In such a scenario, the coalition continues pro forma, with the option to pull the plug on the government at a time of its convenience—presumably if Canada's economy spins into freefall (along with the U.S. and the rest of the world).

The Coalition Pulls the Plug and Defeats the Government Over the Budget. This would definitely be a high-risk, high-gain strategy. Politically, it would be hard to justify defeating a budget that was presumably designed as an economic stimulus; however, if the government is regarded as insufficiently forthcoming or unresponsive during discussions through January 26, when Parliament resumes, public opinion could turn hostile. Nevertheless, if the Tories lose a confidence vote, Harper will doubtless call for an election—and the coalition will demand a chance to govern without an election.

This would return Governor General Jean to the classic 1926 “King-Byng”political crisis when Governor General Byng refused the request of Prime Minister King for an election, turning instead to the political opposition to form a government. That government was quickly defeated, an election ensued, and King—campaigning partly against Byng—won a majority. The political imbroglio destroyed the credibility of the Governor General—and never subsequently has a GG refused a request for election. 

Lessons Learned. The Canadian electorate is not ready to embrace—or even really appreciate—the technical political realities of minority-government coalition governance. The continued viability of the BQ, which holds upwards of two-thirds of Quebec's seats, makes it difficult for either Liberals or Tories to assemble a parliamentary majority. It is probably harder for the Tories, since its natural constituency appears to be approximately 35-40 percent of the electorate. When upwards of 65 percent of the voters are frustrated by an election outcome, particularly if this deadlock appears to be protracted, even a “strange bedfellows”coalition will become more attractive.

Nor has this been a period of glory for PM Harper; he has been granted a stay of execution, but it is still to be determined whether it is protracted past end January. Moreover, his personal partisanship—exacerbated by toxic media relations—has squandered the opportunity to build further on his October 14 election victory. He will never be a “warm and fuzzy” politician and Canadians blame him—as well as the coalition—for this unwelcome holiday season imbroglio. Faced now with Ignatieff, he will probably be the only person in federal politics that will miss the inept Dion.

Creating the coalition, however, has also dashed hopes by both Tories and Liberals that Quebeckers will eventually be swayed by the argument that votes for the BQ are “wasted”since its MPs have no influence in Ottawa. Now the Bloc can claim that it holds the balance in Canadian governance (currently with the Liberal-NDP combine, but potentially with Tories)—a balance it will use to promote Quebec interests otherwise subsumed in Ottawa. Retrospectively, the Liberals may rue the day they agreed to the coalition. The photograph of Liberal and NDP leaders shaking hands along side the BQ leader leaning forward with his hand outstretched upward in a “pay me”stance will be an enduring image, with the cost for Canadian unity an open question. Pay me now—and pay me later.