For Alberta, the coalition can only have an ill effect
Kate at Small Dead Animals is headlining a story by a Liberal blogger here in Edmonton, who notes (correctly) that the proposed Liberal-NDP-Bloc Quebecois coalition will not be well-received in the West:
This will play extremely BAD in the West. EXTREMELY BAD. I’m talking NEP BAD. Steven Harper and the Conservatives are the embodiment of the West overcoming decades of alienation and frustration. This coalition will rob them of this. They’ll be pissed (PISSSED). Everyone has basically acknowledged that for the party to be relevant in the future and truly be a national party, we need to be competitive in the West (wealth, people, power heading here). This puts us back another 20 years. For the sake of Liberals in the West DONT DO IT.
The coalition is now a reality, with an agreement signed yesterday. They could potentially topple the government and insert themselves as the nation’s ruling body as early as next Monday (December 8th).
Yes, what the opposition parties are doing is, strictly speaking, legal. That said, coming so closely on the heels of an election in which the Conservative Party of Canada won a clear mandate to govern from all across Canada, the optics of the move can’t help but be bad. It looks like a power grab, probably because it is a power grab. It looks like Stephane Dion making another bone-headed decision to plow ahead in pursuit of a poorly-thought-out strategy (an alliance with the Bloc?) that will only serve to diminish his party’s already poor reputation with voters. And even worse than that, it looks like Dion acting out of pure self-interest to wrest the Prime Ministerial seat away from the man actually elected to be there, so that he can spare himself the humiliation of being only the second Liberal Party of Canada leader in history to go down without ever holding the nation’s highest elected office.
Moreover, it communicates a very ugly, dangerous message to Canadians. The coalition’s plans to seize power in a way that circumvents the need for an election, in addition to being something of a slap in the face of democracy (although such things are not, strictly speaking, new or news in Canada these days), sends the message that in the eyes of those who desire to be our government, we the people made the wrong decision. Yes, we legally and legitimately elected to power one political party over all the others…but we were wrong, you see. We should have voted differently, and since we didn’t, those for whom we did not vote will simply have to take matters into their own hands, to correct our wayward voting habits.
From a Western perspective, though, the optics are even worse. Because whereas the Conservative Party enjoys fairly broad electoral support all across Canada, including in Alberta, the opposition parties enjoy very little support in much of the West. This is especially true of Alberta, in which only one opposition member holds office — Linda Duncan, the NDP MP for Edmonton-Strathcona.
This gets back to what the aforementioned Liberal blogger was noting: it sets the stage for East-West relations in this country to end up being set back a good couple of decades, by reducing the West from the status of equal participant to the status of…non-entity, really. We go from being a legitimate participant in the nation’s governance to being the backwater resource pit, to be exploited in whatever way suits the whims of those in power out East.
And while no sitting government would be so stupid as to formally revisit something like the NEP, it should be noted that the two men most in power in the coalition — Stephane Dion and Jack Layton — are committed to the idea of implementing a carbon tax.
Someone on the radio this morning (didn’t catch his name) was arguing that in this time of economic downturn, the coalition wouldn’t move to implement a policy that would prove even more detrimental to the nation’s economy. To that, I wanted to respond that in general, one can’t seem to get either the Liberals or the NDP to even acknowledge that a carbon tax would have a negative impact on the economy…and also that even if one could get them to acknowledge that fact, they wouldn’t care. The stock market dipped over 800 points because of the inherent instability that this coalition situation causes in the nation’s governance, and yet all three parties to it are moving “full steam ahead, and damn the torpedoes” to ensure that they complete their attempt to wrest power from the party the people of Canada actually handed power over to.
What’s a little carbon tax on top of that?
And because of the nature of this coalition, it will be the West that bears the brunt of the economic burden of such a policy. Quebec will get away free and clear; Gilles Duceppe[t/ag] will make sure of that and will almost certainly tie his continued participation in the coalition to the expectation that Quebec won’t be subjected to anything which might potentially have a negative impact on its economy. Likewise the Liberals really only have significant electoral support in [tag]Ontario — they’re not going to step too heavily on industry there.
The coalition parties don’t enjoy broad support in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or British Columbia either, although at least they have a few representatives in each province (14, for example, in B.C. alone). It’s really just Alberta that’s the “odd man out” here…and the sole MP we do have from one of the coalition parties is a staunch, just barely sub-rabid environmentalist.
If this “undemocratic seizure of power” (to use Harper’s words) goes forward, Alberta could be in for a very rough ride indeed.
The glimmer of hope in all this is that the coalition is not exactly stable — the Liberals and the NDP don’t have enough seats to form the government absent the Bloc, who (as mentioned previously) will depart the coalition if at any point the interests of Quebec are either threatened or, as Steve Janke points out, served by throwing the Canadian government into turmoil. It also helps that the Liberal leadership — and thus, the Prime Ministerial seat — is currently in turmoil; Stephane Dion will only be around until May.
It will be interesting to see what Harper’s next move is…but one hopes, and then as an Albertan, that his shrew political sense does not fail him in making it.
Man, this is exactly what I was afraid of coming into this past election. Nobody leading the parties in this country have any idea how to operate in a minority government situation. Every time this happens whoever’s not in power spends the entire time threatening to vote no-confidence and bring down the government if they don’t get their way. (Layton was particularly bad for this; for a long time the NDP found themselves in a tie-breaker position and kept trying to shoehorn their own pet legislation through by threatening to vote down the government.) Guh.
Meanwhile the party in power — Harper now, but this happens every time — keeps behaving like they’ve got a majority government and they don’t have to listen to anybody. They just write their budgets and their legislations and whine when, strangely, the opposition parties are opposed to it. As if they couldn’t see that coming. They don’t want to work in a minority government, even though the people of Canada said that’s what they want to see running the country. It’s so petulant.
And of course Harper complains now about this “undemocratic seizure of power”. Coalition governments are only okay when he’s in them. Hypocrite.
Why are they all so much more interested in power than in, say, governing?
To answer your last question first, I will say two things: 1) there’s this old Roman adage, and 2) concupiscence.
I have to admit that I find it difficult to blame Harper entirely for this. Consider, for example, that the man just came off of a two-and-change year stretch of facing down a lame-duck opposition that made a lot of noises about toppling the government without ever actually voting to do so. The impotency of the opposition prior to the last election allowed Harper to govern as though he had a majority. And half the time, he didn’t even have to grant the concessions that were being demanded of him.
So I can’t really say I blame him for coming back to Parliament with an even stronger minority (against a diminished and financially strapped opposition) and thinking that it was business as usual — the faces across the chamber from him haven’t really changed, except for having diminished in number. All the same ducks were there, for the most part — what indication was there that they had overcome their lameness?
Have they overcome their lameness? This coalition reeks of instability, especially since it relies on the convenience of the Bloc to keep it together.
Raising the issue of Harper’s proposed coalition in 2004 is interesting, but the situations aren’t exactly the same. Looking back, it seems to me that the principal concern in 2004 was ensuring the stable governance of Canada — one recalls that Paul Martin was on his way out, and the prospect of the country electing a government without even knowing who would be leading it is still not an appealing thought, four years after it didn’t happen.
Plus, the 2004 coalition really only ever existed on paper, and in a few pipe dreams. There were talks, but never a formal arrangement — I don’t imagine the CPC could have lived with itself if it had been forced to placate the Bloc in such an arrangement.
And consider what the present coalition is proposing, which in a sense is the exact opposite of what the 2004 proposal was getting at. Whereas in 2004, the interest was stable governance and non-volatility in the Prime Ministerial seat, the interest now in 2008 runs exactly against that: the Liberals would ride to power with a lame-duck leader who is on his way out, and we’ve no idea who will replace Stephane Dion when that happens.
There was some merit to the 2004 proposal, in other words, even though it never went anywhere, and proved to be unnecessary. The only reason this coalition is going through, basically, is because Stephane Dion doesn’t want to go down in history as one of only two Liberal leaders to have never occupied the Prime Minister’s office. It’s not quite a coup d’etat, in that it is being effected through perfectly legal means, but the intention behind it seems to be in that neighbourhood.
Steynian 293 « Free Canuckistan! (December 4, 2008, 11:30 am).
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