While Canadian politics is not a topic that extempers are accustomed to speaking about at great length, the last month has slowly began to change that evaluation. Loyal readers of the SpeechGeek HOTtopics services know that several weeks ago I wrote a topic brief concerning the outcome of the Canadian elections, elections which strengthened the Conservative Party but denied Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper a majority government. While analysts debated how long Harper’s government could hold on, and my earlier topic brief indicated that the government would last until the summer, just several weeks into its term the government has been thrown into a crisis, as opposition parties have unified to oust Harper and the Conservative government from power.
Due to the fact that extempers may not be as aware as the rules for a parliamentary government that would allow for such a change to take place and because this political drama is practically unheard of for Canada, I thought that it would be important to resist the Canadian political situation in this week’s brief. This brief will provide some background of what led up to this recent political crisis and what the latest developments are, how parliamentary procedure allows this to occur, and what the future of Harper’s current government looks like.
The New Political Crisis
In the last topic brief on Canada, I discussed how the parliamentary system Canada has long had is currently under strain. The system currently has five competing parties, with one, the Bloc Quebecois (BQ), only running for office in the province of Quebec. Governments that have been established in this century have been minority-led governments. In other words, the party that runs these types of governments does not have a majority in the Canadian parliament. Instead, they simply have more seats than other parties and rely on deals made with other politicians of different political flavors to help the government survive votes of confidence that could bring the government down.
Extempers should also take note of the election results that created the composition of the current parliament. In the elections, held on October 14th of this year, saw the Conservative Party, led by Stephen Harper, increased their majority in parliament by 19 seats, although that is still 12 seats shy of a parliamentary majority. The Liberal Party, the second strongest party in the country, saw one of its worst election showings, losing 27 seats. Stephen Harper was not happy about the election results, believing that he had been denied his majority government thanks to the BQ, who was able to use Harper’s mocking of artists in Quebec and attack on federal funding for the arts to maintain their edge in the province.
During the election, Harper was criticized for not presenting a solid economic platform to voters. Canada’s economy has been thrown into chaos due to its heavy reliance on trade with the United States, which is in recession. Economists are forecasting that global economic turmoil could cost Canada as many as 600,000 jobs next year, with the manufacturing industry being the most hard hit.
After the election, Harper and his conservative allies announced their economic plan for Canada to help it weather the financial crisis and this plan provoked part of the constitutional crisis. In laying out the nation’s finances, as The Christian Science Monitor points out on December 5, 2008 that Harper desired to revoke federal employees ability to strike, cut into pay equity laws, and then cut funding for political parties. This last part of the plan enraged all of the other parties in parliament as it disproportionately would hurt them and help the Conservatives. Seeing Harper trying to pass through such legislation that they believed threatened their very survival, the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP) joined in an alliance and received the backing of the BQ. This new coalition directly challenged Harper’s government and attempted to gain control of parliament by moving towards a vote of confidence of the Conservative government. Had this passed, Harper and the Conservatives would have been forced to resign and a Liberal-NDP coalition would have come to power, with Stephane Dion becoming the new prime minister, despite the fact that he put on one of the worst showings of any Liberal Party leader in recent memory. Interestingly enough, local papers in Canada are reporting that this dispute over political party subsidies amounts to a “coup over $1.95” since $1.95 is how much, on average, a subsidy translates into a vote for each political party.
To save his government, Harper appealed to Canada’s governor general Michaelle Jean to shut down parliament so that his government would not face a confidence vote. Harper was the first Canadian prime minister to request such intervention. Seeing the increasingly volatile political situation, Jean agreed and on December 4th, Canada’s parliament was temporarily shut down until late January. This will give Harper’s time to retool its economic plan before having to reopen parliament where it will submit a new budget. It is here that Harper’s Conservative government will either wither or be reinvigorated in the eyes of voters and of the parties that had unified to overthrow it.
Parliamentary Tricks
Parliamentary governments are interesting creatures, as any extemper who follows the Israeli political process knows. In a parliamentary system of government, voters elect members of parliament at the local level. After elections are finished, the party that wins the most seats has the opportunity to form a government, either by joining in coalition with other parties or by creating its own government. The goal is to have a majority government within one’s party so that concessions do not have to made to other sides. Also, the stronger the numbers a government has, the better off its chances of survival are.
The leader of a parliamentary government is the prime minister, who is usually selected from the largest party in the parliament. Keep in mind, voters in a parliamentary democracy do not directly elect the prime minister. Instead, it is an indirect voting process, much like if Barack Obama became President of the United States not because he won the Electoral College, but because Democrats won huge majorities in the House and in the Senate.
The parliamentary device that has allowed the current Canadian political crisis to develop is the ability for opposition parties in a parliamentary democracy to bring a vote of no confidence against the current government. In Canada’s parliamentary system, it is not constitutionally required that the government resign or call a new election if it loses a vote of no confidence. However, by tradition and convention, it is appropriate for the government to do so.
Votes of confidence traditionally function to show that the government can no longer govern with the confidence of the parliament. If a government can no longer govern and marshal support for its measures, it needs to be replaced for the good of the country. This is why in some parliamentary democracies, if the government fails to win a vote allocating money then that functions as a no confidence vote against the government because a government that cannot spend money is deemed to be incapable of leading.
Harper’s Survival
Stephen Harper’s government has the next month to retool itself and get itself together before the Canadian parliament meets again. The Harper government seems to want to reach out to other political parties and is reconsidering its earlier measures that provoked the political crisis.
For Conservative supporters, there are promising signs that the government might hold onto power. First, as was indicated in the last topic brief on Canada’s election, Canadian voters are growing weary of having to consistently vote. The October elections were the third time Canadian voters had to head to the polls in four years and if new elections get called so as to deny Dion and his coalition the opportunity to take power, it may backfire on leftist forces. Second, recent polls have indicated that the political crisis has increased support for the Conservative Party, partly because some Canadian voters dislike Dion and other because they do not understand how the leader who led his party to one of its election defeats in history deserves to be the next Canadian prime minister without winning an election. Finally, there are cracks that are emerging in the anti-Harper coalition. After the suspension of Canada’s parliament, there have been calls within the leftist coalition for Dion to step down. Parliamentary members believe that Dion does not have the political acumen to lead the coalition against Harper and newspapers are criticizing him for overreaching for power in this constitutional struggle. Also, Dion’s address to the country that rivaled Harper’s on the eve of the closure of parliament made leftist forces look “bush league.” Harper’s video showed a collected, resolved, and tidy administration that projected confidence while Dion’s video was of very poor quality, no attempt was made to subtitle his limited command of English, and there was a messy bookcase behind him with one book entitled Hot Air. Finally, the NDP and Liberals have a long history of political conflict and it remains to be seen how long they can be bedfellows to oppose Harper.
Of course, there is always the option that the Conservative Party might do a radical maneuver and try to depose Harper, but such a coup does not appear to be imminent. Canadian political observers have made the observation that the leftist forces are only held together by their hatred of Harper and that if he goes their coalition will most likely collapse. However, considering that Harper has been a shrewd leader of the Conservative Party over the last several years, it is unlikely that Conservative politicians feel the need to jettison him at this time. Finally, there will always be a lingering perception from this crisis that Harper overreached and provoked the constitutional crisis by trying to turn the economic situation into a political opportunity for Canada’s right-wing. This may not play well with voters in future federal elections, so whatever plan Harper devises to fix the economy, most likely a large economic stimulus check to placate voters and some opposition members of parliament, needs to be good enough to distract from this past mistake.