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Suddenly these are exciting times in Canadian politics.
It looks to me as though the Conservative government really is going to fall, and a coalition government of the Liberals and NDP will take power.
The legalities are perfectly clear. Accept no guff about this. If a government falls so soon after an election, the Governor-General's first choice should never be to dissolve the House; it is to appoint anyone who looks as though they might have the confidence of the House. The leader of the opposition would be an obvious choice, although it could also be another member of the government party. If, however, the leader of the official opposition can present a written coalition agreement, signed by an absolute majority of members, the GG really has no other choice but to appoint him prime minister, and see if he can survive a confidence vote. To do otherwise would be downright illegal. All hell would break loose.
There is also no reason why the parties forming the coalition agreement should feel obliged to put forward the current leader of the official opposition as PM. If they don't like Dion, they are perfectly free, among themselves, to choose any other individual, inside or outside the Commons. It could be Jack Layton, or Michael Ignatieff, or John McCallum, or Jean Chretien, or Rick Mercer, if they like.
Is it going to happen? Negotiating such an agreement is tricky. There is a reason why it has not been attempted since the First World War. But I suspect the opposition parties are so tired of being forced to back Harper against their will to avoid an election, that they really want to do this.
Will they pay for it at the next election? Probably. It looks grasping, and the Conservatives are sure to argue that they subverted the democratic process. In fact, they will have done nothing of the kind—together, the NDP, Liberals, and Bloc represent many more voters than the Conservatives do. But that's the way this sort of thing has tended to play in the past—as in the King-Byng affair of the 1920s.
But perhaps another bit of history must be served. Dion, without this, would be the first Liberal leader since Edward Blake never to have been PM.
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2 comments:
I enjoyed reading your post.
Do you think that Mr. Harper and his advisers were unaware or discounted the possibility of an opposition coalition and a confidence vote?
I guess it is possible but it seems very shortsighted to me. A significant miscalculation for a group supposedly engaged in a "long game" strategy.
I suspect that the Liberals, NDP and perhaps the Bloc were discussing these strategies before anything was announced by the government.
Was it the threat to party financing that galvanized a half formed plan by the opposition?
Why would the Conservatives put that proposal on the table and then remove it almost immediately?
They must have anticipated some significant response. The Bloc would have been the hardest hit by the loss of funding. Was that the point? To spur the Bloc into action?
It's all quite interesting but we really do need to do away with party focused politics for our own good long term.
doug newton
I think Harper and the Tories discounted the possibility of an opposition coalition, because it would require the formal cooperation of the BQ, and that would be political suicide in the rest of Canada.
And they may be right, in the end.
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