Stephen Harper can almost taste a majority. More than a decade of work to unite the right and make the new Conservative Party more palatable for Canadians has reached a point where the party has, as of mid-March, polled its highest ratings. With an election on May 2nd, Harper is very close to fulfilling his dream of majority rule.
Unless of course he falls short and the opposition parties form a coalition government.
Harper hates this possibility, naturally. He more than anyone recognizes the viability and inevitability of coalition governments.
During the 1990s when the politically fractured right were figuring out how to take on the Liberal majority, Harper and his future chief-of-staff Tom Flanagan mulled over all options available to them, including coalition governments.
Back then, when they were touting themselves as purveyors of all things populist, Harper and Flanagan bandied about the concepts of coalition governments, elected senates and free votes as antidotes to the perpetual Liberal majority, what he and Flanagan referred to as the benign dictatorship in a paper published in the winter 1996/97 issue of Next City.
Harper pressed for democratic reform when the chips were down. Once in power, his populist notions such as free votes and senate reform took a backseat. Indeed, he has since kept a tight reign on Conservative MPs and broke his own law of fixed elections in 2008 when he felt his chances of winning a majority were good.
That 2008 election handed him another minority. His promises to work with the opposition lasted a little more than a month. Flaherty presented the House with a "fiscal update" on Nov. 27, 2008 that failed to adequately address the economic crisis but promised to undermine the rights of federal civil servants and female federal employees, and end subsidies to political parties. That's when all hell broke loose.
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Rather than send Canadians back to the polls, the Liberal's Stéphane Dion and NDP's Jack Layton drafted an accord to form a coalition government, with Bloc support on confidence matters until the end of June 2010.
Suddenly the term "coalition" became a bad word.
Once the champions of coalitions, Harper and Flanagan banded together to hammer out what constitutional expert Peter H. Russell calls "Harper's New Rules." The rules went as follows:
• Parliamentary elections result in the election of a prime minister.
• The prime minister cannot be changed without another election being called.
• A coalition government cannot be formed unless it is announced as a possibility in the election campaign.
This was an extraordinary turnaround from their earlier visions of parliamentary reform, and completely antithetical to the rules of our parliamentary system. Canadians elect members of parliament, not prime ministers. Not even governments. Coalitions can form after an election, and be presented as an option if a minority government loses the confidence of the House.
In an effort to maintain power, Harper and his Conservatives are meddling with the rules of our parliamentary democracy. Constitutional expert Peter H. Russell does not take this situation lightly.
"Trying to operate our parliamentary system as if it were subject to Harper's rules would severely restrict the options available to Canadians in an era of minority governments," warns Russell in a the 2009 book he co-edited with Lorne Sossin entitled Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis, about the aftermath of the 2008 election.
So here we are in another election, a situation engineered by the Harper government in an effort to land a Conservative majority.
Behaving badly to the point of being held in contempt of Parliament and presenting a budget no opposition would support, the Harper government lost the confidence of the opposition parties, which could ill afford an election given their own low poll ratings. Harper's approval rating was 43 per cent in a March 11-15 Ipsos Reid poll.
While Harper's Conservatives have the most to gain, they also have the most to lose.
On March 26, day one of the election, Harper came out swinging. He warned Canadians that unless they vote for the Conservatives, "a stable, national majority," Michael Ignatieff would form a "reckless" coalition with the NDP and Bloc Québécois.
Harper is banking on a disengaged and ill-informed electorate for his political success. He accuses the opposition of forcing an election on Canadians, who clearly do not want it or understand the magnitude of the contempt of Parliament charge; and he presents a Conservative majority as the only stable solution to the dysfunctional Parliament that his government has orchestrated over the past six years.
If his party is handed another minority, what then? The contempt of Parliament charges and past indiscretions have made it impossible for the opposition to work with it. The only alternative is a coalition government, and Harper knows this.
Caving into Harper's vilification of coalitions and accusations of Liberal-NDP scheming, Ignatieff promised Canadians that his party would not form a coalition government. By doing so Ignatieff has lent credence to Harper's claims and painted his Liberals into a very tight corner.
Where does that leave us if the Conservatives win a minority? Back to the polls?
If the Canadian electorate are sick of elections every few years, they better start warming to the idea of coalition governments.
Everything Harper has worked hard for is in danger of taking a hit. He will not go down without a fight. Caving into his anti-coalition tactic will neither serve the left nor democracy. It's up to the engaged electorate to give the Liberals and NDP the political will to stand up to Harper and do what they must do to restore stable governance.
A group of citizens have formed Canadians for Coalition to educate the public on the validity of coalition governments, and provide the Liberals and NDP with the political will to consider this option should the Conservatives win a minority on May 2nd. Canadians are encouraged to visit canadiansforcoalition.ca and sign an open letter to Ignatieff and Layton urging them to consider the coalition option.
Cheryl McNamara is a member of Canadians for Coalition.
I really hope a coalition works out, that lots of people are able to convince Ignatieff and others that its the best current possible alternative
given where people are at, the horrendous destruction of a Harper majority, or even an ongoing Con-Lib functional coalition. Steps can always be taken in future towards goals, but not if there's few with capacity to take those steps because of ongoing devastations.
No coalition with Liberals. Fight for socialist policies!
Vote NDP on May 2!
The defeat in the House of Commons of the most hated federal government in a long time triggered the fourth election campaign in seven years. Voters across the Canadian state go to the polls on May 2 to choose their pill for the continuing economic maladies. With unemployment at nearly 8 per cent officially (double that figure if one includes discouraged workers and the chronically underemployed), with each person on average $100,000 in debt, with homeless shelters and food banks strained to the breaking point, voters have much to ponder.
The Stephen Harper-led minority government Conservatives, mired in election financing and deceit scandals, booted from office for being found in contempt of Parliament for refusing to disclose the cost of their corporate tax cuts, and their plans for new prisons and stealth combat jets, are asking for a majority. Harper began his campaign in full attack mode, hyping the threat of "a coalition of free-spending opposition parties". He portrayed his agenda of social cutbacks, war spending, and gifts to the rich and powerful as "staying the course" -- this in the midst of a dismal economic 'recovery'.
The Liberals under Michael Ignatieff donned populist vestments. While skewering Harper's (twice) undemocratic suspension of Parliament, Ignatieff championed support for more child care spaces, and for more aid to students burdened with rising tuitions. He claims to be for stronger public pensions and health care. His hope is that the electorate will forget, or at least forgive the Liberal sponsorship scandal, the severe social cuts of Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin in the 1990s, and Liberal decisions to send the Canadian military and police to Afghanistan and Haiti.
Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Quebecois advanced its demands for more federal transfer payments to Quebec, downplayed the Bloc's commitment to bourgeois sovereignty, and put a 'progressive' veneer on its pro-system perspective.
The Green Party's Elizabeth May concentrated on trying to win a first seat for the party. Her policies would force working people pay for the mess created by capitalism, with a regressive carbon tax, and measures that favour 'greening' of the private sector. Notwithstanding her platform, exclusion of May from the TV leaders' debate, which is posed again, would be outrageous.
Jack Layton and the labour-based New Democratic Party thus had a golden opportunity to offer a refreshing and radical alternative. But Layton started off with the totally uninspiring slogan "take the strain off your family budget, make everyday essentials less expensive".
It is commendable that Layton wants to help seniors, extend the ecoEnergy Retrofit programme for homeowners, remove the federal sales tax on home heating bills, and put an 8 per cent cap on the interest that can be charged by credit card firms. But this is comparatively light work. The timidity of these proposals reveals something else -- that the labour party brass is unwilling to reverse the huge tax concessions to big business of the past twenty years; that it lacks the courage to challenge the agenda of capitalist austerity. The NDP campaign shies away even from proposing to dismantle the country's war budget and end Ottawa's participation in US/NATO aggression. Sadly, this is reflected in Layton's decision to back the western intervention into Libya (see article below).
Given the failed state of globalized capitalism, the need for an alternative is evident. Instead of 'strained family budgets', the NDP should decry the one-sided class war being waged from the top down. It should stress the need to fight back with bold socialist measures, instead of paltry reforms. Workers who vote NDP in their millions have the power to shake up their party, toss away its Liberal-look-alike policies, and make the NDP fight for society's vast majority, the working class and the poor. Direct involvement in the NDP campaign now is critically important to that end.
Participation in a coalition government would be a dead end for labour and the left. Nonetheless, coalition is perfectly legal in Canada and common around the world. Harper's attempt to demonize the notion of coalition government is a crude attempt at self-preservation by exploiting political ignorance and anti-Quebec chauvinism (although the BQ has never actually been proposed as a coalition partner by any party). The fuss he's made over a possible Liberal-NDP coalition is doubly hypocritical because Harper proposed an alliance of Conservatives, New Democrats and the Bloc as an alternative to the faltering Paul Martin Liberal minority government in 2004.
Socialists oppose coalition for a radically different reason. Coalition with the Liberals, or with any capitalist party, would seriously undermine the tenuous organizational independence of the NDP as a party of the labour movement and working people. As a partner in a Liberal government, the NDP would have to carry the can for austerity and corporate bail-outs at home, and for imperial wars of occupation abroad.
The central issue today is neither the morality nor the behaviour of the Tories (repugnant as they are). It is the continuing capitalist crisis and the assault on working people. The answer is to make Capital pay for the crisis it created. If the goal is a just and sustainable society, it only makes sense to institute a steep tax on wealth, to reverse the corporate bail-outs, and to democratize the economy.
Instead of trying in vain to tame an irrational system, it is time to break the logic of the capitalist business cycle, to get off the tread mill of endemic waste and oppression. It is time to put an end to profit from war and environmental destruction. It is time to dump the whole G20 agenda overboard.
To that end, Socialist Action advocates a number of concrete measures, policies in the interest of working people and the vast majority of NDP voters, which the NDP should be pushed to advance:
Put people, and the preservation of nature, before profits. Nationalize the banks, mining companies, Big Oil and Big Auto. Create jobs through public investment, public ownership, democratic planning and workers' control. Convert industry, transportation, and homes to green energy efficiency. Rapidly phase-out nuclear power and tar sands development. Repair our disintegrating roads, bridges, railways and port facilities. Make Employment Insurance more generous and accessible. Raise the minimum wage to $17/hour. Shorten the work week to 30 hours without loss of pay or benefits. Double the benefits in the Canada Pension Plan and Guaranteed Income Supplement. Abolish student debt. Make all education free. Fund health care and the arts. No corporate bail-out. Open the company books. Steeply tax corporations, speculators, and the rich. Abolish the HST. Uphold aboriginal land claims and local self-governance. Abolish the Senate and institute direct Proportional Representation in Parliament. Stop the deportations, full rights for migrant workers. Impose boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli apartheid. End the occupation of Afghanistan and Haiti. Hands off Libya. Reduce the Canadian military to a disaster-relief and rescue force. Get Canada out of NATO now!
Capitalists complain about low productivity. It's a lie, and a diversion. It is also a delusion to think that economic expansion will fix everything, that there is a market solution to the recurring crises of capitalism. There is no market solution. The capitalist market created the problem. Only a social revolution can solve it. Only by taking control of the major means of production, only by instituting broadly participatory, democratic planning, only by effecting a rapid green conversion to meet human needs, fully in tune with nature, does humanity have a hope of survival.
That means challenging the pro-capitalist direction of the labour and NDP leadership. It means fighting for an NDP government committed to socialist policies. It means opposing an NDP coalition with the Liberal Party or with any capitalist party. It means fighting for a Workers' Agenda and a Workers' Government, and organizing to win that programme inside the unions and the NDP. It means fighting for freedom for oppressed nations, for eco-socialism, feminism and LGBT liberation.
None of that is possible without a leadership committed to doing it. Indispensable is the building of a campaign for fundamental change, everywhere and everyday. Central to that is the forging of a new leadership of the working class and oppressed nations that can win.
So, please don't wait for the next economic crash, or for the next environmental catastrophe. Isn't the situation dire enough? Rebellion is in the air, from Egypt to Wisconsin, from Venezuela to Palestine. Socialists, working with labour, social movements and NDP activists can make this happen. Together we can make the world a place fit for humanity.
A coalitiin has certainly not been good for the UK's LibDems who are in one with the Tories. The reason: Government cuts in the UK are very umpopular and the LibDems are being blamed by their own supporters for being a partner in policies that the party strongly opposed in its pre-election campaign. As a result, Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader has seen his party's support evaporate in the nine months since joining the Tory-led coalition.