Question for the more-informed-than-I

From this CBC piece:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has called a fourth federal byelection for Sept. 22 in the Toronto riding of Don Valley West, setting the stage for a possible general election later this fall.

How does calling a byelection for September 22nd "set the stage" for a general election this fall? If the byelection call is at all connected with the possibility of a fall general election, I'd tend to agree with Northern B.C. Dipper and deduce that this implies the opposite. What am I missing?

The Edmonton Journal speculates electionly

Hmm. I've been thinking Albertans might resist the idea of a federal election right now because we've already got our hands full with the ongoing provincial one. But the Edmonton Journal's editorial writers, at least, are ready.

As you might expect, by the way, this is my favourite part of that editorial:

If another minority were chosen, as polls suggest is the most likely outcome, another vote would surely be politically unacceptable for two or three more years. MPs would have no choice but to work together in good faith cobbling together policies a majority of Canadians could feel comfortable with.

(Come on, don't laugh! It could happen! In Europe they do it all the time, thanks to systems of proportional representation we'll have to consider seriously if our politicians can't learn to play together more constructively.)

I've been making this argument for literally years. Plenty of people used to laugh at me back then--it's not often you hear people saying that we need proportional representation to make things more stable--but I guess this many years of a minority government has brought at least a few more people around.

Anyway, what do you folks think? Election yay this time, or election nay? And if so, then when?

It ain't over 'til it's over

So the election speculation is done with, right? At least for now?

Mwahaha. That's what you think.

No spring vote? Think again.

The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson speculates in his latest column that because of the rising fortunes of the Liberals (and the declining fortunes of the Conservatives), there won't be an election anytime soon. The rationale, of course, is that the Conservatives certainly wouldn't go out of their way to engineer their own defeat if they're at all likely to then go on and be defeated altogether in the general election.

The problem with Ibbitson's logic is that he's assuming that the timing of the next election is entirely up to the Conservatives. It isn't. If Harper decides not to risk an election in light of these numbers, he can certainly make sure there isn't a confidence vote on anything until the budget next spring. But even Harper can't prevent the spring budget from being a confidence vote, at which point all bets are off. Ibbitson claims that the Liberals would benefit from another year in opposition, but by spring they'll have a shiny new leader, and there's no way they'll be feeling so timid that they'd allow themselves to be tarred with the brush of supporting the Tories. The Bloc Québécois has already named their price for supporting the spring budget: twelve billion dollars. And can you really think of anything that Harper would be able to offer Jack Layton in exchange for getting the NDP to support a Conservative budget? After all that's gone down this year? Yeah, I can't, either.

If the Conservatives rebound in the polls, Harper's going to want a spring election. If the other parties are strong, then they will want one. If somebody out there can show me a path that doesn't guarantee a spring election, I'm all ears, but at this point I haven't been able to find one.

The longest election campaign in Canadian history

So the Canadian government has survived a confidence vote, and has lived to see another day. How numbered their days are, however, is still an open question. The Toronto Star's Chantal Hebert calls today "the first day of the longest election campaign in Canadian history," and that couldn't be more apt. For weeks now, the major parties have been holding nomination meetings, choosing candidates, gathering funds, and candidates and strategists on all sides were poised and ready for an election to be declared for the end of June. And with the excitement and drama behind us now and Ottawa heading back to business as usual, I know I'm not the only one thinking: "If not now, then when?"

There are no answers to that; only more questions. In approximate chronological order:

* Conservative leader Stephen Harper filed a notice of motion last week that proposed a no-confidence vote on the upcoming May 31st opposition day (specific days on which the opposition is allowed to set the agenda in Parliament). He isn't required to stick to this, and almost certainly won't if he doesn't think he can win, but this is would be the next opportunity they have to attempt to bring down the government, and he still hasn't ruled that out. If the government fell then, we would be looking at an election in early July.

* In addition to the May 31st date, parliamentary rules dictate that there must be at least four other opposition days before the summer recess on June 26th. And as with the May 31st date, those days can be used to put forward no-confidence motions.

* The two budget bills that passed yesterday also still haven't reached their final stage; they still need to come back for the report stage and third reading. If the sands of opposition fortunes shift between now and then (for example, if they eked out a surprise win in the May 24th Labrador byelection, or if a Liberal MP could be convinced to cross the floor), they could use that opportunity to attempt again what they tried yesterday.

* Another confidence vote that will take place before the summer recess is the one where the House is asked to approve the regular government spending for the year.

* If the government survives until after the summer recess, there will presumably be more opposition days in the fall session that could be taken advantage of if the timing seemed right.

* At the very latest, Paul Martin has promised to call an election within thirty days of the final Gomery report, which is currently scheduled for release in mid-December. Presuming he would wait the full thirty days, that would give us an election call in mid-January, and an election somewhere around the end of February.

The election reprieve could therefore last anywhere from another few weeks to nine long months. Given the Liberals' strengthened position with Stronach at their side, however, the later dates seem likelier than the earlier ones. Then again, when was the last time anything has happened in Canadian federal politics that's been *likely*? Anne McLellan could still decide to run away and become a Buddhist monk. The Liberals could serve tainted salmon at a party fundraiser that could permanently indispose five or six MPs. Paul Martin could decide to divorce his wife and marry Cheryl Gallant, and she could cross the floor as a wedding gift to him. At this stage, I'd believe anything.

In the news: no to spring election, yes to proportional representation

A spring election grows less likely all the time. Chuck Cadman is now saying he'll probably vote with the government on a no-confidence vote, and if that doesn't work, Martin may try wielding the Sword of Senate Appointments:

Sunday on Question Period [the television show, not the parliamentary procedure], independent MP Chuck Cadman indicated he will likely vote with the Liberals and the NDP on a non-confidence issue. If two other independents -- both former Liberals -- also stick with the government, it's unlikely that a Conservative-Bloc Quebecois motion could pass. And there might be other moves in the works to deplete the opposition's strength. CTV's Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife reported Sunday that Liberals have been talking to four Conservative MPs about accepting Senate seats in the coming weeks.

And the Globe and Mail is indicating that even some Conservatives are starting to doubt the need to unseat the current government, and even their deputy leader Peter MacKay seems more chastened than anything:

Tory deputy leader Peter MacKay struck a similarly ambiguous tone . "I wouldn't call it inevitable," he said yesterday. "I think that the leader will still want to hear from caucus and get a cross-section of feedback from right across the country." Mr. MacKay noted that, given the balance of forces in Parliament and several cases of ill health among MPs on both sides, the Tories may not be capable of toppling the Martin government.

As if that weren't enough, there's been a flurry of interest in proportional representation over the past few days. Be still, my MMP-loving heart. Last night on CPAC there was a documentary called "A Fair Race" (including Ed Broadbent declaring that we'll probably have MMP here in Canada within two elections). The Globe and Mail is also doing a huge spread on it this week, and to kick things off, we've got an editorial arguing "if it's broken, fix it":

Critics say all this talk about voting reform is a waste of time. The voting system works fine as is. If it ain't broke, why fix it? In fact, our current first-past-the-post system has grave failings. It is time to change it. [...] Federal elections regularly produce wildly disproportionate results. In the 1979 Pepin-Robarts report, the Task Force on Canadian Unity observed that in every federal election since 1896, the winning party had ridden to power with more seats than its portion of the national vote would have suggested. Slight shifts in voting could translate into massive seat accumulations, as in 1935, when the Liberals nearly doubled their seats from 91 to 173 even though their vote shrank by half a percentage point.

In the same paper, Geoff Read argues that the alliances we're seeing among federal parties lately are how things *should* work, and are in fact actually what the public wants:

Despite the predictable outcry from Canadian conservatives, the present alliance between the NDP and the Liberals is, in fact, the logical expression of the electorate's will. Were the Canadian electoral system more truly democratic, utilizing a form of proportional representation, the seats held by the Martin Liberals would have been significantly reduced and the NDP's increased. The Liberals would then have faced a choice between forming either a coalition government of the centre-right, incorporating the Conservatives, or the centre-left, in co-operation with the NDP.

Voters in British Columbia are in the middle of an election that includes, alongside the main aim of electing a new provincial government, a referendum on whether to stick with first-past-the-post or opt for a form of proportional representation. Polls have shown that the yes votes are in the majority among people who know about the referendum, but since an astonishingly low number of people do know about it, it's seemed doomed to failure. Here's hoping this sort of thing serves to educate a few more people.

The best show in town

I realize that not all of you follow Canadian politics, but you might want to think about giving it a chance, 'cause at the moment it's the best show out there. You want action? It's right here. Intrigue? We've got it. Shady villains and sympathetic heroes, each marred by tragic flaws? Look no further.

Let's have a recap, shall we? Over the past year and a bit, the long-ruling Liberal party has been embroiled in the fallout from the discovery that more than $100 million of federal money has been diverted into party coffers (as well as the personal pockets of several of its supporters), via several pro-Liberal advertising agencies. We've known about this for a while, and the Liberals have even won another election since it first came out, but a few weeks ago some particularly juicy details were made public. A former ad executive testified at the public inquiry into the matter about how he was repeatedly asked to give cash donations to the party or put election workers on his payroll in exchange for lucrative sponsorship contracts. His testimony (which not only sounded like something straight out of the Sopranos, but which was also broken by occasional emotional moments where he actually cried on the stand) was shrouded in secrecy due to a brief publication ban, awakening the positively feline curiosity of everyone in the country that made absolute sure we would all know about it the moment the ban was lifted.

Since then, there have been rumblings of an early election, and as the governing Liberals are weakened by a minority of seats in parliament, it's quite within the realm of possibility that the opposition could bring them down less than a year after they assumed power. There are four parties in Ottawa these days: the centrist Liberals on the government side, and across the aisle in the opposition we've got the social democratic NDP, the right-wing Conservatives, and the separatist Bloc Quebecois, the latter two of which are gunning for an early election. They're claiming the moral high ground by saying that they're shocked, shocked to find that corruption has been going on in this establishment, but it seems more likely that they're salivating over polls that show them both in mighty fine positions: the Conservatives would likely win an election if held now, and the Bloc would be poised to pick up as many seats as they've ever had. Yesterday the leader of the Conservatives made it official: he's going to take the first possible opportunity to topple the government.

In every good story, though, there's got to be an obstacle to the protagonist getting what he wants, and in this one we've got plenty of those hanging about. The first glob of mud in the Conservatives' waters is the recent marriage of convenience between the NDP and the Liberals, in which the NDP has demanded that more money in the proposed budget be spent on the environment, social housing, foreign aid, and tuition reduction, and in return they'll prop up the government. The Conservatives and the Bloc are both gnashing their teeth, but we're not to "curses, foiled again" quite yet. There are 308 seats in the House of Commons, but one riding is vacant, which means that whichever side ends up with 154 votes is the one that wins the prize. The alliance between the Conservatives and the Bloc has 153 votes, and the Liberal-NDP pseudocoalition has 150, so both sides fall short of the magic number. Enter the Independent Members of Parliament, who are easily the most colourful characters in this particular epic. At the moment there are three of them, which means that the Liberals need the support of all of them to stay in power, while the Conservatives only need one. Needless to say, they're all being heavily courted. The most popular three people in Ottawa are:

Chuck Cadman, who was elected to Parliament as a member of the far-right-wing Reform party (which has since merged into the Conservatives), but in the last election, he lost his nomination, ran as an Independent, and squarely beat the official Conservative candidate into a pulp. True to the old Reform ideals, he has said that he would vote however his constituents want him to vote. Last week he was saying he would support the government, earlier this week he changed his mind and said he'd probably side with the Conservatives, and now this morning he's saying oh, well, maybe not. He also happens to be currently undergoing chemotherapy on the other side of the country for a form of melanoma, and it's not out of the question that he might be too ill to make it to the vote at all.

Carolyn Parrish, who gained some degree of notoriety (as well as a number of fans) a couple of years back when she was overheard by an open microphone saying: "Damn Americans ... I hate those bastards," and after last year's U.S. election referred to President Bush as "a warlike man" and stated that she was "dumbfounded that he won." Her most recent stunt last fall involved tossing a George W. Bush doll on the floor and grinding it under her heel on a satirical television show, after which the current prime minister booted her out of the Liberal party and she began sitting as an Independent. Parrish has said she'll side with the Liberals on this one, but there's definitely no love lost between her and the current prime minister, and her picture also happens to be in the dictionary next to the word 'volatile.' Who knows what she'll do.

David Kilgour, who was a member of the predecessor to the Conservative party until he switched to the Liberals in 1990, is a fundamentalist Christian who has disagreed with many of his party's stances, most notably same-sex marriage. However, it was the most recent revelations in the corruption scandal that finally got him to leave the party two weeks ago, at which point he also began sitting as an Independent. Kilgour is the biggest wild card in the bunch, since his defection is so recent and his indignation so apparent. He's currently out of the country and hasn't been able to be reached for comment, but his last word was that he was considering all of his options. He's abandoned both the Liberals and the Conservatives, so he doesn't have any party loyalties, and he's said he's not running in the next election, so he's free to do whatever suits his fancy.

And I haven't even gotten into the old feud between different factions of the Liberal party, recently rekindled by testimony from a man loyal to the *previous* prime minister alleging that the *current* prime minister was once personally involved in some *other* shady dealings in the awarding of contracts. Or the courtly old gentleman knee-deep in the corruption scandal who testified that due to his advanced age, he can't possibly remember all the details anymore. Or the unprecedented address given by the current prime minister a week ago, pleading for his political life. Or the resurgence of Quebec separatism threatening to break up the country. I mean, bring out the popcorn. You can't make this shit up.

Linkage

Someone's got to take the fall: Paul Wells may go on about Stars, but really, if today's federal Liberals need a theme song, it's got to be R.E.M.'s "Falls to Climb". When the movie comes out--you know, the one with Sean Connery as Jean Chrétien and Tom Selleck as Jean Brault--they're really going to have to get the rights.

To deal or not to deal: The NDP offered their support of the budget to the Liberals in exchange for the nixing of corporate tax cuts and funnelling that money into various underfunded programmes. Layton gave Martin twenty-four hours to make a decision (Paul Wells: "make a decision? you cruel, cruel man."). The first word was no, and then when everybody started talking about what a bad decision that had been, he changed his mind. (Way to make sure the Mr. Dithers label sticks *forever*.) My verdict: a big win for the NDP (though really, it would have been a win either way), a big sacrifice for the Liberals (as they've now made sure progressives will view the NDP as an alternative to the Liberals), a big annoyance for the Conservatives (as this may mean they can't call an election, depending on what the Independents decide), a possible big win for me, as I might be able to vote in this election yet. Good news all around.

Numbers, numbers: There's been a new poll since Martin's speech. Some high points: the majority of Canadians want to wait until the Gomery report for an election, the who-would-vote-for-whom data is unchanged, though the swell of Conservative support may have been stopped. Nothing too exciting here unless you're a polling geek like me.

Prescient idealistic pragmatists: This is what I wrote the day after the federal election last summer. Sometimes I scare myself.

Nice chewy data

A new EKOS poll is out. Some tidbits:

If a federal election were held today in Canada, the leader of the Conservative Party would become Prime Minister. If people were to change their minds, the second choice among most Canadians would be the NDP (social democrats). Fifty percent of Quebeckers would vote for the separatists, and the NDP is in first place in B.C. and the Prairies. Among Canadians who make less than $20K a year, the NDP is the first choice, and among Canadians who make $100K a year or more, the Liberals are the first choice.

Sixty-two percent of Canadians surveyed think an election call should wait until after the inquiry is complete.

Sixty percent of Canadians surveyed think the current Prime Minister was involved in the sponsorship scandal.

Social issues remain at the top of the list of important issues in the next election (even before "ethics and accountability").

Sixteen percent of Canadians surveyed have still not heard of the sponsorship scandal. (???)