In absentia

I'll be incommunicado for the next couple of weeks for work reasons, but here's some stuff you should all read in the meantime:

Paul Wells calls Jim Flaherty a crybaby and Calgary Grit calls him a hypocrite. Given the evidence, I'd say they're both right.

Steve at Far and Wide is hosting an interesting discussion about Dion's latest difficulties in Québec, with a local organization that's actively trying to oust him as leader. Yet again I find myself confused and bewildered by that strange Canadian custom of making the leader the scapegoat for every last one of a party's struggles while ignoring everything else that's wrong.

Worth The Fee to Read It has been offering up an assessment on all of the parties' current predicaments in light of the recent by-elections: the Greens, the NDP, and the Bloc, the Liberals, and the Conservatives. I don't agree with all of it, but it's thoughtful stuff that's, um, worth reading.

What makes for an effective opposition in a minority parliament?

Last winter after their leadership convention, the Liberals were filled with bluster. Every action they took dared Harper to call an election. After a while, people started accusing them of blindly knee-jerking to oppose everything Harper proposed--but their high polling numbers and the smell of power continued to compel them.

The NDP, on the other hand, tried something different. Instead of simply ranting about the Conservatives' bad Clean Air Act, they demanded that Harper send it to an all-party committee. The Liberals ranted and raved, accusing the NDP of "propping up the Tories," but I supported what the NDP was doing then--in contrast with the way the Liberals were behaving, they showed evidence of actually understanding how minority parliaments were supposed to work. And even though the resulting legislation was deep-sixed when the Conservatives prorogued parliament, I'm still glad they tried.

See, an effective opposition in a majority parliament is about making strong arguments against what the government is doing in order to make sure those opposing perspectives remain a current part of the national discourse. But in a minority parliament, an effective opposition is about using your leverage and your powers of persuasion to moderate the government, to make its legislation a little more palatable to you before it passes. And while the NDP may have been doing this last winter, nobody is playing that role at all so far in the current session.

Granted, when the Liberals decided to prop up the government by not voting down the Throne Speech, they paid lipservice to the "we want to make parliament work" meme. But the way for an opposition party to "make parliament work" in a minority government situation is to do the negotiating necessary to create joint opposition amendments that the government might be able to tolerate. The Liberals won't touch that with a ten-foot pole. Because they're not willing to share the spotlight with anyone, they would rather give up entirely on trying to be a strong opposition force and simply give Harper a free pass until the next election.

On the other hand, the NDP and the Bloc aren't doing much better. The Conservatives clearly want to govern, but given the reaction of the NDP and the Bloc to the Throne Speech, those parties are just as clearly willing to go to an election now if it comes to that. But instead of using the leverage that comes with that position to exert appropriate pressure on the Conservatives, they've taken on the Liberals' former role of knee-jerking into blustery "Harper bad" stances. With the NDP and the Bloc behaving like the opposition is supposed to behave in a majority government, and the Liberals acting like they're part of that majority government, all three opposition parties are essentially giving the Conservatives the single-party majority they've been coveting.

[Update: One request. Can we go with individual opinions only in the comments, please? I mean seriously, if you can't refrain from hyperpartisanship, it's not like there aren't plenty of other posts you can comment on instead.]

Why the Liberals should be secretly rooting for the Bloc

The Liberals may have lost three by-elections on Monday, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the big losers were actually the Bloc. Conservatives and New Democrats are understandably happy about this--they profited from it directly in Roberval and Outremont, respectively--but Liberals are claiming this as a silver lining, as well. Stéphane Dion said that he was "pleased" to see that "most voters voted for parties that believe in Canada," and Liberal bloggers are echoing this sentiment. When it comes to holding the country together, a strong Bloc is seen as the enemy of Canada, and so any federalist party will do in a pinch.

The problem is that when it comes to partisan politics, a strong Bloc is also the very direct enemy of Stephen Harper's Conservatives, and a weak or absent Bloc (counter-intuitive as it may seem) is a thorn in the side of anyone who can only stomach Harper as long as he's held to a minority. Why? Because it is the Bloc that is standing in the way of Harper and his pals being able to form a "majority" government.

Now, before the partisan Liberals start dragging out the faulty "vote Liberal to stop Harper" line, let me make it crystal clear that this isn't about them--this is about the way our voting system works. Our first-past-the-post voting system is designed to manufacture a "majority" government for a winning party that didn't actually get a majority of the vote, but with the Bloc seats removed from the national gameboard altogether, it's much harder for that system to do its job. Put those seats back into play for the parties that also have seats elsewhere, though, and first-past-the-post starts working as it's supposed to again. This means that if the Bloc vote really does collapse completely in the next federal election, it won't matter if a few of those seats go to Liberals, or to New Democrats, or both. Even dividing those seats up equally between the three federalist parties--an unlikely scenario at best--would manufacture a "majority" for Harper unless something goes desperately wrong for the Conservatives in the rest of the country.

I'm sure we won't be seeing any partisan Liberals openly supporting the Bloc anytime soon, but being the only party who didn't benefit from the Bloc's losses in Monday's byelection must put them in the strange position of secretly hoping that Québec sovereigntists manage to hold on to a good chunk of those seats. (Of course, there's always the alternative--but the federal Liberals have never shown much interest in pushing for that, now, have they?)

Harper's worst enemy: the Bloc Québécois

The Conservatives have been spending a lot of time bashing the Liberals and the NDP lately because those parties opposed their budget. The Bloc, on the other hand, supported the budget, so they've had to go easier on their old buddy Gilles. But you can bet that Harper knows that far more than the Liberals and the NDP, it's the Bloc he has to crush in the next election--and that's not about ideology, but about seat count. Seriously reducing the number of Bloc seats in Québec and replacing them with Conservatives is not just the Conservatives' best road to a majority--it may be the only realistic road at all.

Why? Well, it's about the way our voting system translates votes into seats. Now, the first-past-the-post electoral system is designed to magnify the seat count for larger parties and understate it for smaller ones. The result, if it works the way it's intended to, is to manufacture "majority" governments for a single party that didn't actually win a majority of the vote. This works well in political arenas that are strongly dominated by two big parties, like the U.S., or Canada before the CCF (the predecessor to the NDP):

As you can see, the actual percentage of the vote was very close in the 1930 federal election--so much so that if this had been a pre-election poll rather than the final result, the parties would likely have been polling within the margin of error of each other. But the First Past the Post electoral system did its job here, raising the percentage of the Tories' seats up past the "majority" mark and giving them 100% of the power all on their own.

However, it also works the way it's supposed to in three-party systems, as long as the smallest party attracts votes across the jurisdiction rather than being concentrated in one place:

In the most recent UK federal election, the vote was very much split three ways between Tony Blair's Labour party, the Conservatives, and the upstart Liberal Democrats. The result under their First Past the Post system is a terribly skewed election, but still one in which that system could do its job and massively manufacture a single-party "majority" government for Tony Blair.

The thing about current-day Canada is that our first-past-the-post system simply isn't working the way it's supposed to. And while part of the reason for that is the strength of the NDP--which, much like the UK's own midsized party, has shown an ability to win a good chunk of seats even with First Past The Post minimizing the impact of smaller parties--most of it is actually because of a party that got a much smaller percentage of the vote: the Bloc Québécois. You can see this easily in the results from the 2006 federal election:

Because the Bloc's vote is entirely concentrated in one region of the country, First Past the Post's artificial disfavouring of smaller parties falls apart, massively favouring what should be the smallest party in the House. This keeps those seats away from all of the national parties, and effectively removes them from the national game board entirely. Without the Bloc, the seat percentages would look a lot more like those in the UK, with a manufactured Conservative majority. But with a large section of Parliament's seats effectively set aside, the rest get split three-ways among two big parties and one medium-sized one, and nobody can manage to get a majority at all.

So Harper can and will attack Dion to keep the Liberal vote down, but there are enough safe Liberal seats across the country that he can't ever manage to squelch them completely. The same goes for the NDP, which can't ever be removed as a threat to their dreams of a majority, particularly in the West. So if Harper wants an artificially manufactured majority of his very own, those additional seats are going to have to come from the ones that the Bloc has taken out of play. And this has to happen without Harper losing any of the seats he already has in the rest of the country.

It's a lot more of a long shot than the conservative bloggers who are crowing over recent polls realize, given everything that has to go in Harper's favour without anything at all going wrong. But if the Québec election result taught us anything, it's that sovereigntist Québecers are willing to shift their votes from a sovereigntist party that's a little too far left for them, to a right-wing party that may not be sovereigntist per se, but is still willing to use some of the vocabulary. Since undermining the Bloc while suppressing the other two national parties just enough is Harper's only real chance, you can bet he's going to try the same tactic.

If I were a Liberal strategist preparing to battle the Tories in Ontario, or an NDP strategist preparing to battle the Tories in the west--or for that matter a certain well-known anglophone journalist who speaks fluent French and cares passionately about holding back the tide of the Québec sovereignty movement--I would be paying very close attention to what Harper says to francophone Québecers in the next election. And seeing to it that every word of it gets repeated in the English-language media.