Pearls from Wells (with one small correction)

I am extremely thankful to Paul Wells for his insightful commentary on yesterday's German federal election:

The cheap talking point of the next few days in Ottawa will be that Germany just switched from a coalition of the centre-right and centre-left to a coalition of the centre-right and the slightly-righter, and nobody freaked out. It’s such a cheap talking point that I’ve already used it, tonight on CPAC. The slightly higher-value talking point is that this coalition didn’t advertise itself before the election. Angela Merkel’s choice of coalition partner remained her prerogative, and contingent on the returns, until after everyone had voted. So the Tom Flanagan argument, that coalitions should only be valid if they advertise their makeup before everyone gets to vote, wasn’t followed in Germany. And nobody’s freaking out.

In fact, I'm so thankful to him for saying this that I'm almost reluctant to say that he's not quite right. But he isn't quite right. It's absolutely true that the new German coalition partners didn't "advertise" their future coalition, but I follow German politics pretty closely, and what both big parties did do (and always do) is "signal" their desired coalition partners during the election. That's why a government could be formed right away instead of only much later, after lots of negotiation.

Here's how "signalling" works in Germany: The centre-right big tent party (the CDU) campaigns on their own and tries to win over as many people as they can. And the centre-left big tent party (the SPD) of course does the same. But at the same time, they also mention in their speeches and in interviews which other (usually smaller) party they each would most prefer to cooperate with in parliament. So the CDU, for example, will say something like this: "A strong CDU needs a strong coalition partner in the FDP!" and their supporters will cheer. And the SPD does the same with the Greens.

Sometimes, though, you get an election where it doesn't quite work out that way for either coalition (i.e. where the CDU and the FDP together don't add up to 50%, and the SPD and the Greens together don't add up to 50% either). This means that what the parties signalled ahead of time to the voters isn't going to be possible any way you stack it. And that's when the Germans do freak out a little bit. We know this very well, because it's exactly what happened during the Germans' last federal election in 2005, when both preferred coalitions fell short of 50%. Back then, after literally weeks of negotiation, the two big-tent parties finally decided to solve the problem by reluctantly forming a government together (what they call a "Grand Coalition", which is essentially the equivalent of the Canadian Conservatives and Liberals sitting on the same side of the aisle in the House of Commons and sharing cabinet posts and otherwise working as a unit). The German form of "freaking out" is closer to grumbling and moaning about why the voters didn't give one or the other of the preferred coalitions 50%, of course (rather than party leaders accusing other parties of treason and clueless idiots chanting in the streets about coups), but whenever parties end up having to form a coalition that didn't get signalled in advance, it's there all the same.

But the basic point behind what Wells said is 100% right, and that's that parties in Germany--and in the rest of the democratic world, for that matter--don't advertise together and run together as a block when they think there might be a particular coalition after the election. Why? Because that would be freaking presumptuous! It's up to the voters to determine which potential coalition governments can and can't form a majority, and nobody knows that for sure until after the election, once the voters have had a chance to have their say.

One of several options

Was the Governor-General wrong to prorogue? Hell if I know. It seemed like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" sort of situation, and there really was no good choice. Harper should not have asked for it, that much is certain. But what's done is done.

One thing that a lot of people--including a lot of people I like and respect--don't seem to be getting right now is that decisions about government on that level aren't about policy. They aren't made based on the idea that a Harper-led government is going to be better on the economy, or a Dion-led government is less likely to cut much-needed social programs. Decisions on that level are about nothing more and nothing less than giving the Canadian people a government that works based on the parliament they voted for. We're not going to get that because our voting system doesn't actually give us the parliament we vote for, but we still have the possibility (and, I would argue, the responsibility) to form as democratic a government as we can based on the parliament we do have.

By that token, I support the proposed minority-coalition-plus-support-agreement not because I think it would enact better policy than a Harper-led government, but because it's an option that would a) reflect more than 50% of the elected parliament, b) be willing to compromise and work together across party lines, and c) be willing to commit to governing for a particular time period, creating more stability than we have had in years. But here's the rub: it's not the only option that could provide those things. The current government has lost the confidence of the House--but they could regain it. They could commit to leading a minority government that governed for a particular length of time, and consulted with at least one other party in the House on every piece of legislation they propose. They could even propose a different coalition, or a minority government that had an agreement with one particular opposition party, with the same kinds of "majority of the House", "compromise", and "durability" terms that the Dion-led coalition would have.

If we're talking about what I personally want, of course I would like to see Harper out of the Prime Minister's chair. I think he's been a terrible prime minister on the democracy end of things, and his policy preferences are not mine, either. But this exercise isn't about what I want, or what you want, or what any one group wants. It's about what Canadians voted for. And there are still several open possibilities that would give us that, or at least something much closer to it than we've had in a very long time.

I've never had a lot of faith that these things will actually work as they're intended to, and I've lost even more of that faith this week. But it would help me regain some of it if we could all put partisanship aside and commit to working toward and supporting the existence of a stable, cooperative government formed from the House we elected. In whatever form that might take.

On the backroom

Consider this: When people in the same party get together to talk about plans for laws or governance or strategy, we call it a caucus meeting. But when people from different parties do exactly the same thing, we call it a secret backroom plot.

Apparently it's peachy keen for our parliamentarians to get together, hash through an idea, and propose a new piece of legislation without presenting it first to the public in an election campaign--but only if everybody involved in the deal is wearing the same colour scarf.

Is that really the message we want to send to the people who govern us? Wall off the parties and make sure no one leaves their bubble? No talking to each other unless it's antagonistic, and even then, preferably only in Question Period? Because when we use rhetoric like that, that's exactly what we're saying.

And we wonder why nobody in this country can make a democratically elected minority parliament work to save their lives.

"Undemocratic?" Oh, that's just precious.

From the Canadian Press:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has guaranteed the survival of his minority Conservative government for at least another week and is imploring Canadians to reject what he says is an undemocratic and illegitimate coalition.

"The opposition has been working on a backroom deal to overturn the results of the last election without seeking the consent of voters,'' Harper said late Friday in the foyer of the House of Commons. "They want to take power, not earn it.'

Do you people really have to get an immigrant to explain to you how your system works? All right, fine, then.

You might have noticed at some point that when you go to the polls and draw your X, you're not actually getting to place that X next to the name of a party leader. This is because you're not actually voting for a party leader.

No, seriously, you're not. Your power is limited to voting for your MP. Really and truly.

Among other things, this means that Stephen Harper, in and of himself, did NOT win the 40th general election. Oh, he did win an election in Calgary-Southwest, fair and square, but last I checked, the voters of Calgary-Southwest hadn't been gifted with seekrit powers to choose the prime minister.

Now, it is the case that his party didn't just win the election in Calgary-Southwest, but a bunch of other elections, too. In fact, they won more elections than each of the other parties did. But calling that, in and of itself, "winning the election" is...not accurate. A strange and unique Canadian custom, yes. One that would completely flummox most residents of most of the world's parliamentary democracies, absolutely. But accurate? No.

Why? Let's look at the numbers. In the last election, Stephen Harper's party had the support of precisely 37.65% of Canadians. Now, our voting system turned that number into 46.4% through a kind of Seekrit Voodoo Magic known as First-Past-The-Post, but even our Seekrit Voodoo Magic isn't powerful enough to turn a 37.65 into a 50. And if it's not a 50, you can't say you won the election. Nobody can.

So how do we pick the government when our voting system doesn't produce an outright winner? Well, we don't, actually. The group of people who won the smaller elections get to do that. That's what that there phrase "parliamentary democracy" means. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

If you live in Canada, you tend to solve this dilemma by collective delusion. Together, all of the politicians, all of the media, and all of the voters, decide to say: "What, 46.4% isn't 50%? Details! U R Da Winnar, Mistar Harpar!!! Here, have the whole country to do with as you please!!!"

But if you live in a sane country, like...well, pretty much any other parliamentary democracy in the democratic world, you say: "Ooh, goody for Mr. Harper! His party's got more seats than everybody else, and he's that party's leader! He's won the right to pick the additional set of MPs that gets to help form government with his MPs!" And if for some reason he can't or won't do that, they look for a different set of 50% or more who can, and will.

You might notice that our Mr. Harper skipped this step. Funny, I noticed that, too. It's a pretty powerful collective delusion, what can I say.

But powerful as it is, it is still a delusion. And if a larger portion of those people we elected can get together and say: "Um, pardon us, but the emperor has no clothes you've only got 46.4%," then the delusion kind of collapses. And if they can also add: "And we have 37%, and together with that other group of MPs who are willing to support us, we actually add up to 52.9%", well...then the election finally has a real winner.

Because '52.9' is not just a bigger number than '46.4'--it's also more than 50. And if you can get to more than 50? Well, that's how you actually win an election in this system of ours, without a collective delusion to help you along. (And for that matter, if you take our Seekrit Voodoo Magic out of the picture and look at the real numbers, you get 54.42%. Which is also more than 50%, and certainly more than 37.65%. A lot more.)

Now, you can call this crazy. You can call it silly, or ridiculous, or even unfair. Some of those things I might even agree with, on a bad day. But if you call it undemocratic, you are saying that 52.9 is not, in fact, a bigger number than 46.4. And that will make those of us who really understand how parliamentary democracies work--or for that matter, how numbers work--point at you and laugh.

Political culture and the post-2008 NDP

There are some terrific conversations going on out there right now about what's next for the NDP after the 2008 election. First, we have the NDP Strategic Review series over in Accidental Deliberations (parts one, two, and three), we have the Globe and Mail discussion between Brian Topp and Les Campbell, we have NDP Outsider's thoughts on the election and analysis of the Topp-Campbell discussion, and last but definitely not least, the thoughtful post over at EnMasse.

I have to admit, though, every time I've tried to participate in one of those discussions, I've found myself feeling a fundamental disconnect with the assumptions behind the points being made. It's not that I disagree with the NDP's policies, because I'm still just fine with most of them. It's not even that I think there's anything wrong with the leader of the NDP running to be prime minister. It's that as long as the NDP was just trying to do the best job it could in opposition, I could pretend that I don't have issues with the core assumptions of Canadian political culture. I do, though. And given the NDP's new strategies, it's getting harder and harder to talk with my fellow partisans about the future of our party without running up against that wall.

I alluded to this issue once before in my discussion about the NDP policy convention in 2006:

The most interesting thing about Sunday, though, was watching the talk of the prospect of an NDP-led government--which for the rest of the weekend had been bubbling under the surface--come out full force. One delegate, in debating one of the "building the party" resolutions, even slammed Jack for his "lend us your votes" rhetoric from the last election, saying that the NDP should instead start talking seriously about leading. I have to admit that I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, if the NDP wants to be taken seriously as a major force in Canadian politics, they have to instill confidence that they're ready to lead. To do this they need not just the right rhetoric, but also a serious effort to truly build the policies that would enable them to take the reins. I support this part of it wholeheartedly.

But at the same time, the NDP is supposed to be the only major party that completely supports an electoral reform in the direction of proportional representation. I know how PR elections are fought from my time living in Germany, and the people who fight them don't make statements like: "we want to form a government [implied: on our own]." They certainly don't say things like: "If we're ever going to form a government, it's going to be because we can beat the Liberals and the Tories at their own game." The fact is that PR makes single-party majority (or even minority) governments vanishingly rare, and majority coalitions--a form of government that's commonplace in most of the world but not currently a part of Canadian political culture--utterly normal. I brought that fact up with another delegate at the convention, and his argument was that the NDP needs to get elected before they can make the shift to PR, after which the necessary changes to the political culture can happen. I think this is the wrong tack to take, for two reasons. First, I agree as strongly as humanly possible with Wilf Day's statement that the voting system belongs not to the politicians, but to the voters, and that electoral reform needs to come from the people and not from their government. But much more disturbingly, it suggests to me that the NDP may not have thought about what PR would really look like once implemented. It suggests to me that the NDP may not want PR because it's the best thing for Canada, but because it's the best thing for the NDP right now, and they might well change their tune if the voters were to grant them their coveted chance to lead.

As I've mentioned before, I came of age politically not in Canada, and not in the U.S., but in Germany. It's difficult to underestimate the extent to which German political culture has been influenced by its voting system (which is based on proportional representation), because not only are coalition governments the norm, but political strategies are also correspondingly different. In that kind of culture, parties grow in influence not by changing their fundamental ideologies in order to expand their appeal to ever-expanding groups of citizens, but by coming up with good ideas within the boundaries of their fundamental political identity, and doing a good job of selling those ideas first to voters in an election, and then later to coalition partners in government. So Canadian talk among both professional and armchair party strategists about winning ever-increasing pieces of the pie by developing policies that appeal to a bigger and bigger tent of voters (and let's face it, that's exactly what the NDP is trying to do right now) has always collided with my basic ideas about how to do politics right.

So what am I suggesting, then--a coalition government with the Liberals to Stop Harper, like what Murray Dobbin is advocating? Not exactly. First of all, there's no sense in forming a coalition government unless that government can be a majority one, and second of all, it's difficult to imagine joining forces with a Liberal Party whose main raison d'être isn't the execution of a particular kind of policy, but getting back into power at all costs. But when I think about what Canada would look like with the kind of political culture that most shaped me, it seems obvious that parties and their strategies would be very different. And a coalition between a left-wing party (whether it's called the NDP or something else) and a centrist party (whether it's called the Liberals or something else) is a completely reasonable outcome in a scenario where the only real reason to vote for or join a party is because you like their policies. But until we reform our electoral system and the assumptions behind our political culture change, these kinds of discussions about party strategy beyond the constituency level aren't anything I'm going to be particularly interested in participating in.

I have to admit, I feel ambivalent about making this post in the first place, out of fear that it will be misread. I certainly don't mind criticizing the NDP when they deserve it, but this post isn't so much a criticism of the NDP as it is a criticism of what our voting system has done to our political culture and the results of that for the NDP. I absolutely understand why the leader of the NDP doesn't run for leader of a coalition government--within the constraints of our political culture, any acknowledgement that they can't form a majority on their own would be read as a glaring weakness. Voters would be at best puzzled and at worst scared off. I know all that.

But I don't like it. And more importantly, I don't accept it. Running to form government on their own may be the best the NDP can do within the current political culture, but Dymaxion World's axiom applies here as well as it ever has: Basic politics in a democracy: If you want to change the behaviour, don't change the actors, change the rules. Until we have proportional representation and the political culture that would result from it, partisan politics in Canada is always going to be more about how to get a bigger and bigger piece of the pie than it is about promoting good people and good ideas. And that's always going to limit the level at which I'm willing to get involved with my party of choice, no matter how good their candidates and their ideas are.

An alternative for would-be Nader voters

I've never voted for Ralph Nader, but I absolutely understand the mindset of those Americans who do. It's not because they believed that there was literally no difference beween Bush and Gore in 2000, or that there's literally no difference between McCain and either Clinton or Obama in 2008. It's because they recognize that there's a lot more political diversity out there than they're seeing represented in their available choices, and so they're opting to use their votes not to vote for president, but to say: "hey, we deserve a broader spectrum of choice than we're getting."

There are those who call these kinds of votes "protest votes," but really, that's too simplistic a description of the thought process behind them. What it's really about is how, when your Political Compass score is way down in the lower left quadrant, the differences between any of the multitudes of candidates in the upper right one just don't look that major to you. They certainly seem a lot less important than working toward a more diverse political spectrum that might actually stand a chance of someday encompassing your own views.

The problem, though, is that any hope of increasing that diversity is a vain one. The combination of direct voting for president and the first-past-the-post electoral system does an excellent job of decreasing the chances of any third-party emerging in the U.S. from "not very likely" to "no chance in hell." It just ain't gonna happen, ever. And there's the rub: if voting for Nader has no chance of changing anything, that means that the effect of voting for Nader is zero. In the short term, and in the long term as well. Anyone voting for Nader is essentially opting out.

If you're already opting out, then, why not really opt out? And no, I don't mean "don't vote," I mean "leave the U.S. behind in favour of a country that already runs political candiates who represent your views." The bureaucracy of such a move is maddening, but trust me, the relief at regularly having more choices than "right-wing" and "righter-wing" is worth any amount of paperwork. You've already reached the conclusion that you don't fit into the political and cultural mainstream of your country, so isn't emigration the logical next step? And for that matter, if what you're really interested in is sending a message, just imagine the message that would be sent by masses of lefty Americans stampeding across the border! It'd be a sight to behold.

An open response to Chantal Hébert

The other day, I went to go see Chantal Hébert speak at the University of Alberta. It was a terrific hour and a half; she was as insightful as ever and quite funny in a very human way. But when she started going on again about how another Conservative government should trigger talks about uniting the Liberals and the NDP in happy harmony, I had to challenge that in the question period. The response was predictable: the NDP is in a "sorry state" because they've never formed a federal government, and they have to give up their "holy war on the Liberals" because they're not going to kill them off no matter what Jack Layton thinks. And since we're not going to have proportional representation anytime soon, the NDP should stand aside and let the Liberals kill them off.

If it had been just her and me in the room, there are so many ways I would have wanted to respond to that. I would have talked to her about what it's really like to live under a two-party system where only a tiny fraction of the political spectrum gets represented. I would have made her a list of all the ways the NDP has influenced politics in this country without ever seeing power on the federal level, some of which have been extremely profound (I mean, health care springs to mind just immediately). I would have brought up how the NDP represents between fifteen and twenty percent of the Canadian people, and how no one in, say, Germany would even think to say that the Greens (at 8%) or the Free Democrats (at 10%) are in a "sorry state" and should give up the ghost. I would have detailed how it was the feeling of disenfranchisement resulting from choosing between a centre-right and a right-wing party too many times that drove me to come to Canada in the first place, and how if too many people like her make my beloved Canadian political diversity go away, I'm up and moving to New Zealand. But the next guy with his hand up was shooting daggers at me with his eyes, so I just agreed with her that the NDP should quit trying to kill off the Liberals, and shut up.

Now, I've written this post one too many times for even my comfort, so I won't go on and on. But Blogging Horse made a terrific point a couple of weeks back that I think deserves a little bit more attention: the fact that the entire reason political parties exist is to "aggregate interests." Big-tent parties are by necessity unable to actually aggregate all of the interests of their membership (or even all of the interests of the mainstream of their membership!) due to those interests being so broad, which means that they aren't serving the sole purpose of political parties. BH used that point to tweak the Liberals, but I'd argue that it applies equally to the Conservatives these days. (Ask any Canadian right-winger whether they actually feel represented by the current government's policies. I suspect they'll either start ranting or give you a sad look and talk about how there's no other choice.)

No, fewer parties isn't the answer. And that would be true no matter which side were to end up victorious in the great battle to gain sole control over centre-left voters.

Realistically, I suspect there's no reasoning with Hébert on this one. She's enough of a product of the political culture she grew up in that she's not going to be giving up on the prediction that continued Conservative governments will force an amalgamation of left-wing and centre-left parties. My prediction, though, is that continued minority governments (of whichever colour) will eventually force the existing parties to learn to work together in true multiparty coalition governments in Parliament, after the voters get their pick among a series of real choices.

It's going to happen.

With or without electoral reform.

(Like it or not.)

A little more humility

It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog regularly that the hardest thing for me about being involved in Canadian politics is the wanton, screechy hyperpartisanship. You know: the thing about our political culture that says that if one of your political opponents has a good idea, you'd damn well better pretend you hate it anyway, and if you can't find anything to dislike about them right now, you'd better look a little harder. I find it terribly disappointing, and it makes it harder than just about anything else in this business does to "resist the pull of cynicism."

Well, after hearing Nathan Cullen speak this weekend, this proponent of interparty cooperation, fair play, and coalition governments has a new hero.

Some quotes:

"We exist in a political forum that says that only one can be right at any given time, and that's just ridiculous when it comes to such a complicated issue. I believe we need to have the Greens at the table, we need to have the Conservatives at the table, and the Liberals--and a little more humility in our governments so that they're forced into situations like [the special committee on the Clean Air Act]."

"I'll tell you this: all the way through the Cold War, we always talked to the Russians. You never stop talking to your opponent. Because the eventual solution will involve your opponent. It must."

Video:


More here.

Stick 'em in a room together and make them fight it out

It's hard to think of a more divided society than Northern Ireland. A centuries-old ethnic conflict has split the territory into two separate communities that also divide along religious and political lines. The division even extends to daily life--when I was there in 1992, it wasn't at all unusual for Catholics to associate almost entirely with other Catholics, and Protestants to associate almost entirely with other Protestants. Things have certainly improved since then, with an official ceasefire and a rocky yet steadily improving peace process, but there's still a long way to go.

Northern Ireland has its own parliament, but when the main political parties (which also divide pretty much entirely along the same lines as the rest of the society) failed to reach enough agreement to work together in government, that parliament was suspended. Since then, Northern Ireland has been governed directly from Westminster, but last fall, an agreement was reached to get these parties on the road toward resolving their disagreements. The deck was stacked against them--the two parties are led by Ian Paisley, an arch-conservative Protestant minister who spouts off on the evils of Catholicism from his pulpit, and Gerry Adams, a socialist Catholic who believes Northern Ireland should be part of the Republic of Ireland and who once made common cause with the Irish Republican Army. But as of yesterday, the two parties have agreed to form a coalition government and lead their people side-by-side. So think again, all of you who think Canadian politics is just too antagonistic for coalition governments--if Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party and Gerry Adams' Sinn Fein can do it, anybody can.

In fact, every time I read about this, it occurs to me that what Canada really needs is a similar process. The next time our minority parliament fails to reach an agreement on something important (like, oh, maybe climate change legislation), that parliament should be yanked away from us. We'd be told that we could get it back, but only if our politicians agreed to put aside their differences, play fair, and actually work together to get things done.

If nothing else, there'd be a lot less screaming.

Finding common ground

Last fall, when NDP leader Jack Layton first browbeat the Conservatives into striking an all-party committee to rewrite the Conservatives' crappy "Clean Air Act," criticism from the Liberals was swift, harsh, and frequent. Though all of the parties were taking part in the committee, deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff still dubbed it a "marriage of convenience" between the NDP and the Tories, and later accused the NDP of "propping up" the Tories through that committee's work. Never mind the fact that the NDP had voted against the government on every confidence motion--something the Liberals themselves couldn't claim--the NDP were willing to venture beyond their own partisan fiefdom, and were therefore evil, evil, evil. And the Liberals stalled and obstructed the committee's work every step of the way.

What a difference a couple of months can make.

Not only have the Liberals now finally come on board with their own amendments to the Clean Air Act; they're also now proving willing to unite with the NDP and the Bloc to try and push a joint set of amendments through. The David Suzuki foundation say they're "ecstatic," and I have to agree. If passed, these amendments would produce a multipartisan piece of legislation that includes Kyoto targets. And while the Conservative cancellation of a Tuesday meeting of the committee has led to some speculation that they might vote against their own bill and use it to trigger an election, others are suggesting that even they might be convinced to come along for the ride.

Now, while it's hard to deny that the Liberals are Dion-come-latelys on the Clean Air Act committee, I have to say that their new willingness to jump on the bandwagon has softened my skepticism about their commitment to the environment. This kind of cooperation is a political risk for any party in an antagonistic political culture like ours, but this is especially the case for the Liberals. If real progress on the environment happens under a Conservative minority, after all, it will be much harder for them to argue that the planet is doomed if they don't get back into power post haste. But those who insist that we don't have any time to lose aren't wrong, and the Liberals' willingness to take that risk indicates a real commitment to the issue that's above partisan politics. That's worthy of anyone's respect.

But as a New Democrat, I also have to say that I couldn't be prouder right now. When Ignatieff and the other Liberals were breathing down their necks for daring to even sit in the same room as the Conservatives, the NDP stuck to their guns. When it comes to an issue as crucial and as time-critical as climate change, they have proven to be the one party that can not only put aside blind partisanship, but convince the other parties to do the same. The ultimate result of all this is still up in the air, of course, but if the current parliament proves willing to pass this bill, this country could very well get some real emission reductions right away. How's that for "getting results for people"?

This is a real-world example for Canadians of how politics works in most of the democratic world, where laws nearly always get written through multiparty cooperation. Canada's a latecomer to that ballgame, but you know what they say--it's better late than never. And watching the way the parties are managing to turn lead into gold on this file, I can almost have faith that our toxic political culture could someday change.

[Update: My fellow oxymoron over at Accidental Deliberations rains on my parade by pointing out that the Liberals have introduced several last-minute amendments that are almost certain to slow down, if not outright stall, the committee's work. But I've managed to successfully resist the pull of cynicism so far today, so I'm going to chalk this up to poor planning instead of deliberate strategy. Here's hoping they don't prove me wrong by next week.]

[March 28th update: CanWest is now reporting that the opposition has, in fact, teamed up to force through major changes to the bill.]

Reprise

I realize that it's an incredibly cheap move to devote an entire new post to linking to an old one, but hey, I figure it's my pad, and every now and then I get to be just that self-indulgent.

I wrote a post last summer that summed up how I see the Canadian left and Canadian politics in general, and in fact kind of summed up why I blog, too. Hardly anybody read it then, and most of those who did didn't seem to understand it, but it seems even more relevant in the current political context than it did then, and I still stand behind it 100%. Consider it a way of contextualizing my disgreement with Pat Martin's rephrasing.

Some thoughts on Pat Martin's rephrasing

How about that? Just when I was starting to get uncomfortable with how suspicious it was that the CanWest story on Pat Martin had contained an awful lot of paraphrase of what Martin had "said" and surprisingly few direct quotations, Martin comes out and issues a clarification:

Yesterday I spoke with a reporter from the Winnipeg Free Press. It was reported I favour a merger of the New Democratic and Liberal parties. I do not. I wish to take this opportunity to clarify my remarks and clear up any misunderstanding.

I didn’t suggest that New Democrats should merge with the Liberal Party. I believe that progressives across Canada should unite behind a strong vehicle for change and demand a better government. That vehicle for change is the New Democratic Party.

That is why I have run in the past four elections for the New Democrats and intend to run for the New Democrats in the next election — whenever that may be. We need to defend the values that we believe in and I believe that under Jack’s leadership the NDP has great opportunity to grow even further.

I can hear the cynical out there scream ‘backtrack’ already. But, let me assure you. As the New Democrat MP who holds the seat once held by Stanley Knowles and J.S. Woodsworth, a pioneer of this great country and my party, my commitment to social democracy and the NDP has never been greater.

Ordinary Canadians need us to fight for them in Ottawa — to fight for their values, to fight against government corruption, to fight against corporate elites who would turn our country into their own playground.

This is the NDP that rewrote a federal budget — that cancelled Liberal corporate tax cuts to invest in education, housing and the environment. This is the NDP that’s working to rewrite the Conservatives’ lame Clean Air Act to produce environmental legislation with teeth.

This is the NDP that has more than doubled its caucus and tripled its popular vote in the last two elections, and let me assure you again: we’re just getting started.

Some will insist that this is nothing but backtracking, but I can definitely buy that this is a rephrasing of what Martin actually said to the reporter, minus a few key points. You know: Everybody should get behind the NDP and form a new big-tent party of the left, yaddayadda jameyheathcakes. And after that, he would have said the part that was paraphrased by the goons at CanWest, but which got left out of the officially endorsed rephrasing, which probably sounded something like And if that doesn't work out, then the left is in big trouble because we're splintered. Sure, I buy that he said that.

Thing is, I still disagree with him.

As I said after the last election:

Think about what it would take for [this] scenario to come true in Canada. The Liberals would collapse completely and be unable to bounce back from their internal rifts and their recent defeat. The NDP, noting the gaping hole to their right, would drift toward the centre. They'd start choosing centrist candidates--maybe even some wayward Liberals abandoning the sinking ship--and moving away from social democratic policies in their platform. After a decade or two of this, they'd be able to win over even the most centrist of centre-left voters and start occupying the territory currently staked out by the Liberals. With no party to their left, they'd have a lock on the entire centre-left and be able to vault themselves into an easy victory. Anglophone Canada would have a neat little two-party system once again.

I'm sorry, but don't want to be a part of that NDP. Heck, if I did want that, I'd join the Liberals now and skip all the steps in the middle--it would be a heck of a lot simpler, and at least there would still be a left-wing party in this country. The solution to the current problems among Canada's centre-left isn't replacing one natural governing party with another--it's electoral reform. I want to see an NDP that represents the 18% of Canadians who vote for them (or 20%, or 22%, or whatever it ended up being under a system where people actually voted the way they wanted to vote) and does it well. I want them to have precisely the amount of power the voters have given them, no more and no less. And most of all, I want an NDP that can play the role of representing left-wing voters in a parliament that requires compromise on all sides.

There's a lot that frustrates me about Canadian politics, but if I could name one thing that frustrates me most of all, it's that nobody here seems to realize just how ridiculous they sound to the rest of the world when they start going on about the lure of big-tent parties. The notion that a party needs to get (or be aiming at getting) 33% or more of the vote in order to justify its existence is such complete nonsense that I don't even know where to begin. In pretty much all the countries of the world with multiparty systems, genuinely small parties--I'm talking parties that regularly get no more than ten percent of the vote--play a role by forcing all the parties to debate their policy ideas during elections and in Parliament, by taking part in all-party committees, and even by forming part of the government when coalition conditions are right. A midsize party like the NDP can do all that and more. All we have to do is open our eyes and recognize that this country has a multiparty system--not a two-party system with a couple of temporary outliers, but a genuine, colourful multiparty system that's getting more colourful all the time. And then start acting like it.

[Update: More detail from John Ivison. Martin was definitely taken out of context and poorly paraphrased. I do still disgree with him, but this new version sounds a lot more like the Martin we know.]

Big tent caterpillars, take two

John from Dymaxion World points to yet another reason why coalition governments and electoral reform are better models for Canada than merging parties out of existence or deliberately crowding them off the political map: the health of our democracy.

Something more than 30% of this country votes conservative, and on occasion much more. But the motivating idea behind a single progressive party seems to be to prevent Conservative voters from ever forming a government, ever again. Or at least, not until we've decided they're responsible enough to handle the reins again.

The problem, in case it isn't obvious, is that Canada isn't a left-wing country. Canada has a strong and legitimate conservative streak, and I'm not wild about any idea that has as it's goal the marginalization of 30%+ of the Canadian electorate. Pragmatically, we can see that Japan has had a single party in power for the last half-century, and it's produced paralysis, corruption, and a legendary amount of pork-barreling in government.

As John points out, engineering things so that conservatives could never have a say in Canadian politics again would mean that our Parliament would represent Canadians even less well than our current configuration does, and granting that kind of permanent hegemony to a big-tent centrist party would be a recipe for corruption on a never-before-seen scale in Canada. This would hardly be a positive development. Lefties and centrists need to counter conservative ideas by offering up better ones, not by trying to ignore the people who want to advance them.

This is also why I can't agree with the analysts who point to the PC-Reform merger as a success story for conservatives. Sure, it bought the Conservative Party of Canada power, but at what cost? The Red Tory faction now has no political home. The small yet once-vocal far right does exist in the current caucus, but those MPs are now muzzled, so there's nobody left to represent that part of the political spectrum, either. And the people in charge of the party are the strategists who will do pretty much anything to gain more power, including masquerading as moderates--and yet they're still polling at only 33%. I'm sorry, but that's a "nobody wins" scenario, not an "everybody wins" one, and certainly not one I want duplicated on the left. Within reason, more parties means a greater diversity of perspectives--and that's a healthy thing, even when we don't all agree. (Or maybe even especially then.)

It was the diversity of the Canadian political spectrum that first drew me to Canada after years of no real choices as an American lefty. And it's a good thing I don't actually believe any of these big-tent-left movements in Canada have a chance of succeeding, because if I did, I'd probably be looking for a job in New Zealand.

Hope, possibility, unity, and reality for Canadian progressives

Jamey Heath's new book, Dead Centre: Hope, Possibility, and Unity for Canadian Progressives, makes five important points that every centre-left or left-wing Canadian needs to internalize:

1. Liberals tend to present the voters with laudable centre-left policies in their Red Books. But once elected with a majority--or, in Paul Martin's case, even with a minority--they veer right and refuse to deliver on most of their own best ideas. This has happened over and over again, and is undeniable.

2. When Canadian progressives are feeling anxious about the Conservatives, they tend to forget about the fact that they don't like what Liberal governments actually do, and vote Liberal indiscriminately.

3. Even worse, this tendency extends to ridings where the New Democrat has a better chance of winning than the Liberal, and so-called "strategic" voters end up electing scores of Tories in ridings that are actually Tory-NDP races.

4. Ontario is a region within Canada, not a microcosm of it--and while the Liberals may be the dominant choice of progressives there, this is not the case either in Québec or in the growing west. When we hear about the Liberals being Canada's sole natural governing party, forever and ever amen, that's Ontariocentrism talking, not reality.

5. Progressive voters who refuse to recognize these essential facts end up trying to exist in some warped universe in which Jack Layton is personally responsible for the Liberals' loss of their hegemonic grip on the country. This idea is not only demonstrably false, but because of #1, it actually perpetuates a situation that prevents progressives from getting what we want out of our government.

It's hard to argue with any of this, and by tracing progressive Canada's recent history through to the present, Heath makes his case quite convincingly. And it's a fine book in other ways, as well: it's a brisk, tightly-paced read, and packed with enough facts and insider information to tantalize political junkies of all stripes. Which makes it all the more tragic that Heath's central thesis--that the only way out of this muddle is for centre-left Liberal voters to abandon a party that doesn't actually match with their ideals and join with the NDP to fight for progressive values--misses the mark by a bare inch and sails off into the brush somewhere.

I'll admit that as a New Democrat, there's a part of me that finds Heath's "realignment" scenario appealing. But eventually my inner pragmatist kicks in, and I have to recognize that succeeding at that game would depend on three factors. First, the left wing of the Liberal Party would have to collectively see the light and be lured away by the power of Jack Layton's moustache. Second, the right wing of the Liberal Party would need to be willing to remain marginalized in a much leaner centre-right party instead of joining up with the Conservatives and giving them a majority. And third, the brand-new, big-tent NDP would have to maintain its lefty integrity despite a sudden dearth of pressure from its left flank and a pile of potential votes on its right.

Now, I'm not going to say this is impossible--this is Canadian politics, after all, and if the last few years have taught us anything, it's that we should never dub anything impossible. But even the unabashed idealists among us have to admit that it's not very likely. One of the three, maybe. Two of them, possibly. But to actually get the progressive policies we want, all three of them would have to happen, and as far as I know, there's no precedent for that in Canada or anywhere else. But there is another way, one that Heath doesn't mention even once in 296 pages of glorious political geekery. The Liberals and the NDP could decide right now to do what parties that can't get majorities on their own do in every other parliamentary democracy across the globe: signal to the voters that they would be interested in forming a coalition government after the next election. Not a minority government with one party "propping up" the other, but a genuine, stable government coalition.

Take a moment, if you would, to let that idea sink in. Now envision what it would mean. Loyal Liberals would be able to vote Liberal, committed New Democrats would be able to vote NDP, and the swing voters would be able to cast their votes based on policy preferences for the first time in their lives. After the election, then, if the Liberals ended up with the most votes, Dion would be prime minister and his party would have more cabinet positions, and if the NDP ended up with the most votes, Layton would be prime minister and his party would have more cabinet positions. But either way, the makeup of the government--and the compromises that would form its policy--would be pretty darn similar, so the country's progressive future wouldn't depend on which way the dominoes fell. Heath's point #1 above means that we can't trust the Liberals to implement progressive policies when they govern alone, but a coalition government with the NDP would force their hands.

A coalition government would also mean diversity within unity--a Canadian value if there ever was one. Both parties would keep their respective identities, party structures, constitutions, traditions. Both parties would have their caucuses--and their ideas--represented in a centre-left government borne of cooperation and compromise. And during the campaign, both parties would be able to campaign on the policies they really believed in, rather than strategically attempting to best position themselves to poach votes from each other.

"It'll never happen," the naysayers among you will inevitably be saying. Well, I'll tell you what: it's a heck of a lot more likely to happen than either what Jamey Heath is proposing or what his counterparts in the Liberal Party are proposing--crowding the other guy into electoral irrelevance. And it's certainly more likely to happen than an outright merger under the Liberal banner, which, given that the NDP is set up as a federation of provincial parties, would require the longstanding provincial governments of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to disband. If we really want unity among progressives, this is the only realistic solution. The time to try it is now, since we finally have a Liberal leader and an NDP leader who actually respect each other. And remember, we're not talking about some nobody blogger's crazy idea, here, but about the status quo in the vast majority of the world's parliamentary democracies.

Stephen Harper's worst nightmare is staring us right in the face, people. All we have to do is open our eyes.

"Winning it all" is not desirable

In response to some of my friend Confused's comments in my "Out of the mouths of innocents" post, where she talked about how Canadians had "voted for a minority government," Joseph from Canada's Debate responded:

I didn’t vote for a majority or a minority, I voted for a single MP, and I wanted my party to win it all.

The first part of this statement is a simple fact--Canada's voting system does, in fact, mean that we get only one vote, and so we have to direct our preferences for the local riding and for the shape of the government into the same action. The second part of this statement, though--the part that says "I wanted my party to win it all"--is personal to Joseph. And I'm curious how many people feel the same. Putting aside questions of what was realistic, I'd like to know how many of you thought the ideal outcome of the last election would have been a majority government consisting only of the party you voted for. 'Cause I'll tell you quite honestly that wasn't the case for me. And this is due not to a lack of faith in the NDP, but to a well-founded nervousness about single-party majority governments.

I wonder how many Canadians are aware how rare it is across the world's democracies for a single party to assume complete control of a country's governance. Parliamentary systems that use some form of proportional representation to elect their MPs--that is, most parliamentary systems--tend to form stable government coalitions in which multiple parties govern together. In some countries, like Germany, there have even been government coalitions when a single party did manage to squeak out a majority on its own, simply because it's seen as better to have a strong multiple-party majority than a weak majority alone. Even the U.S., which still elects its Congress by means of the outdated first-past-the-post voting system, has checks and balances in place to make it unlikely for the same party to control the House of Representatives and the Senate and the Presidency. Only in Canada and a few other countries is it considered normal to want one party to "win it all."

A smart British historian once mused that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." And unfortunately for us, a look at many of Canada's longest-running single-party majority governments--the federal Tories under Mulroney, the federal Liberals under Chrétien and Martin, and the Alberta PCs for most of recent history--doesn't exactly seem to contradict that. Given the combination of this and the unlikelihood of Canadians uniting behind any single political party these days, isn't it time to start thinking seriously about a better way of doing things? One that looks more like the successful political cultures of stable European democracies, and not like giving in to the worst aspects of our current political culture?

Out of the mouths of innocents

Last night I had dinner with two colleagues from Germany. The first one--let's call her Confused--is an immigrant who has been here for a couple of years now, but who is still trying to figure out the Canadian political system. The other one--let's call her Bewildered--has only been here a couple of months and is still stumbling over the basics. And I'm the closest thing they've got to a political expert who can explain things to them. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Poor souls.) Anyway, here's an approximate reconstruction of last night's conversation:

Confused: So, explain this to me. There's a minority government, right?

IP: Right.

Confused: And that means that if the Conservatives want to get their environment legislation passed, they need to work with one of the other parties and make compromises.

IP: Well, actually there's a special committee working on the legislation, so all of the parties are supposed to get a say. But yeah, they have to make compromises.

Confused: So why are people so mad?

IP: What do you mean?

Confused: I mean, people voted for a minority government, right? So they wanted the parties to work together, right? But every time they try, the politicians don't like it!

IP: *laughing* Well, the Liberals don't like it. The Conservatives probably don't like it, either, but they have to pretend they do. Canadian politicians aren't used to minority governments.

Bewildered: What do you mean by 'minority government'?

IP: Well, the Conservatives don't have 50% of the seats on their own, and there's no coalition--

Bewildered: There's no coalition? Why is there no coalition?

IP: Well, um...because...*laughing*...I guess because Canadian politicians aren't used to that. The two big parties both want to think they can get majority governments all on their own. And so--

Bewildered: All on their own? But isn't that a lot of power for one political party to have?

IP: *laughing* Yes. Yes it is. It's not very likely to happen, though, because there are three so-called "smaller" parties that aren't very small anymore. But as long as we don't have proportional representation, the big parties will still think there's at least a chance of getting majority governments on their own. So the Liberals don't want there to be any good legislation that comes out while the Conservatives are in power, because they want their majority, and the Conservatives don't want the Liberals to have anything to do with their accomplishments, because they want their majority. And the NDP has to try to help something reasonable get accomplished without actually making either of the big parties look good, and the Bloc has to make sure people keep hating the both the Conservatives and the Liberals.

Confused: So the politicians are all standing around yelling at each other and not doing anything productive.

IP: Kind of, yeah.

Confused: Are they all stupid?!

IP: *laughing very hard now* Kind of, yeah.

Bewildered: Wait, I still don't understand why there isn't a coalition. Doesn't there have to be a coalition? I mean, how do they get anything done at all?

IP: Well...that's why we don't know whether there's going to be an election this spring or not.

Bewildered: *dumbfounded look*

IP: *cracking up completely* Yeah, I really can't defend this. Sorry.

Myth #1: proportional representation leads to minority governments

The UK electoral reform blog Make My Vote Count has an interesting, semi-regular series on myths about proportional representation, and in light of some misleading comments that have been made on various blogs recently, it's starting to look like it's necessary to do a similar series for Canada. So let's start with the one that's been rattling through the blogosphere lately as the Conservatives have gotten frustrated with running a minority govermnent: if Canada had proportional representation, we would have the current sort of unstable minority government forever and ever amen.

The myth

One example of this myth can be found in the comments to this post over at Accidental Deliberations:

And this is what Proportional Representation would look like, nothing getting done. Not too amusing when the taxpayer is footing the bill for NOTHING.

and a bit more thoughtfully in this post from the Prairie Wranglers:

Under a PR system, it would be very unlikely, at any point, for any Canadian political party to achieve majority status, as few politicians have been able to achieve over 50% of the popular vote since Canadian first realigned into a 3-party system, sometime between 1921-35 (Diefenbaker did in 1957, and Mulroney did in 1984, but only by 0.03% margin). Many suggest this is an inherent benefit of the system, as it forces political parties to work together in order to achieve a consensus which better represents the nuances of political opinion throughout the country.

How does this jive, however, with our current predicament. Witness the recent pitched battle over who in fact is responsible for preventing parliament from moving legislation through the House; the Conservatives blame the opposition, the NDP and the Liberals blame the government, while the Bloc sits on the sidelines making outrageous demands in return for its support. This lends credence to the criticisms of those against PR that a perpetual minority government in Canada is an unworkable and unstable solution, as it will simply provide a forum for political grandstanding and posturing while obstructing concrete action.

When put like that, it sounds pretty convincing, right? Proportional representation prevents majority governments, right? When Canada has minority governments, things are unstable, and there's more political grandstanding than there is concrete action, right? Therefore, if Canada switches to a PR-based electoral system, we will have a perpetual minority government--which would mean yearly elections, nothing but hot air from our politicians, and never getting anything done. Right?

It would be a lot more convincing if it were true. In fact, minority governments are much rarer under proportional representation than they have been recently in Canada. What proportional representation systems actually tend to produce are majority coalition governments, which, as I mentioned previously in my proportional representation FAQ, are about as similar to minority governments as apples are to kumquats. Majority coalitions aren't minority governments, but real majority governments of more than one party, formed to create the kind of long-term stability that simply cannot be found in a minority government.

How coalitions work

Part of the problem for Canadians is that the word 'coalition' tends to be misused in this country to mean any informal alliance between parties. But a true government coalition bears almost no resemblance to the informal agreements such as the one we saw between the federal Liberals and the NDP in 2005, or the one Jack Layton is trying to build between all parties in the House right now over the Clean Air Act. These kinds of informal alliances are created on an impromptu basis when one party or a group of parties exerts pressure on the party running the minority government, and as we have seen, this pressure usually consists of threatening to bring down the government if they don't jump. Government coalitions, on the other hand, are formed immediately after an election between the winning party and its chosen coalition partner(s), with the goal of forming a majority government (i.e., adding up to at least 50% of the seats between them). There are no threats and no media grandstanding, just quiet talks between the first-place party and the party or parties they feel they can work with on a long-term basis. The point of these talks is not to concoct a plan that will hold a fragile minority together for a couple of months, but to come up with compromises between the parties' platforms that will withstand the test of time.

During these talks, the parties not only agree to a common policy framework, but they also negotiate about who is going to get various cabinet positions and take charge of the corresponding ministries. This means that the leader of the winning party might say something like this to the potential coalition partner: "Okay, you guys hold ten percent of the seats, so it makes sense for you to have around ten percent of the cabinet positions. But it's important for our party to be in charge of all of the main ministries like finance and foreign affairs. We're willing to give you things like immigration and labour--how about that?" The leader of the potential coalition partner can then come back with things like: "Well, if you're not going to let us have any of the main ministries, we want more than ten percent of the cabinet positions. How does twenty percent sound?" Or perhaps: "No, we're not willing to settle for only minor ministries--and specifically, we want the environment ministry because it's been a huge part of our platform and that's something we won't back down on. But we're willing to take fewer than ten percent of the ministries in order to make sure it can happen that way."

Because everyone agrees to these compromises during the formation of the government, the government doesn't get formed until the disagreements are worked out. This can take up to several weeks in situations where there are a lot of conflicts--primarily in cases when the electoral outcome was different from expectations and the winning party's preferred coalition partner didn't get enough seats to add up to a majority--but the end result is a situation in which all members of the coalition have a stake in ensuring the continued persistence of the government. The smaller coalition partner doesn't feel moved to threaten to bring down the government because they are part of the government. The parties then work together to make and implement the common policies that they have agreed on.

The stability of coalitions

There is a further widespread misconception that regardless of the care taken in their formation, majority government coalitions tend to function in practice in the same way minority governments do. This misconception showed up most recently in Olaf's responses to my objections to the Prairie Wranglers' post:

It is my understanding that coalition governments, as opposed to minority governments, are not as fundamentally different as you would suggest, and would appear quite similar for quite some time in our Westminster system of government, in particular. I mean, the Liberals and the NDP were, in my opinion, textbook examples of natural allies in many respects, and we all know how that worked out.

While it's certainly the case that there have been majority coalition governments that have been as battle-torn and unstable as our minority governments (more on that in a moment), it's incorrect to imply that this is the norm, or even that it is common. There are many forms of proportional representation found in the world today, but only two have been advanced as possible models for reform in Canada: Mixed-Member Proportional like they have in Germany, and Single Transferable Vote like they have in Ireland. And when you compare the frequency of elections in these two countries to similar numbers for Canada, the results are striking:

Ireland:
16 elections since 1948, 1 election every 3.63 years
Germany:
16 elections since 1949, 1 election every 3.56 years
Canada:
18 elections since 1945, 1 election every 3.39 years

In these two countries, majority coalition governments are the norm: Ireland hasn't had a single-party government since the 1980s, and Germany has only had one single-party government in its entire post-war history. And yet they have still been incredibly stable. In Ireland, the coalition of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats has persisted throughout all but five of the last seventeen years (Fianna Fáil chose the Irish Labour Party as a coalition partner from 1992 to 1994, and three other parties briefly formed a different coalition from 1994 to 1997). The recent German coalition between the Social Democrats and the Greens was stable enough not only to last out its term, but to be reelected in 2002, and extremely stable coalition governments of the conservative Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats have also existed under chancellors Adenauer, Erhard, and the seemingly undefeatable Helmut Kohl, who was reelected a total of five times.

These two countries are typical for the two kinds of proportional representation that have been proposed for Canada. But even if we summarize trends from proportional representation systems across the board, the stability picture doesn't look all that objectionable. The average length of government in countries that use Canada's First Past the Post system is three and half years. In countries with various proportional representation systems, the average length of a government is two and half years. This suggests a somewhat more frequent turnover, but not enormously so. Furthermore, the actual effects of this kind of "instability" are greatly lessened in practice, since many of these "changes in government" include restructurings where the main coalition partner stays the same but only the smaller one is different (making them less like Canadian changes in government and more like Canadian cabinet shuffles). And this average includes many countries that Canadian electoral reformers have no desire to emulate, and many forms of proportional representation (such as pure party list proportional representation) that no Canadians want.

Now, in conversations about proportional representation, detractors will inevitably bring up two countries where coalition governments have meant frequent changes of government and/or a great deal of conflict between coalition partners: Israel and Italy. But there is no reason to believe that Israel and Italy behave typically for countries with proportional electoral systems, and there are many reasons to believe that they are in fact completely atypical. In Italy, weakened party discipline can be attributed largely to the practice of secret balloting by MPs in the House, and in Israel, living under a constant threat of war seems likely to have influenced their governments in ways that most European parliamentary democracies have not had to deal with. And finally, both Italy and Israel have historically used versions of pure party list proportional representation (Italy recently switched to a system more similar to Germany's) that Canadian electoral reformers are not interested in introducing in Canada anyway. And both Mixed-Member Proportional and Single Transferable Vote systems do away with the worst of the potential problems of pure list PR by having threshholds for small parties' inclusion in parliament.

Coalitions: not for Canada?

Finally, an idea has been batted around lately that majority coalition governments simply wouldn't work in Canada. Scott Tribe put this viewpoint forward in his comments on my interview with Stéphane Dion, arguing that "multi-party coalitions just don't happen in Canada," and that "the ideological diffrences in the multi-party system in a such a diverse country as Canada are deep and bitter, and I highly doubt that parties would set aside their partisan differences." Olaf from the Prairie Wranglers agreed in his responses to my arguments in his post, saying that "our system of government is reliant on conflict, and has been since day one," and that he "doesn't think that Canada's political culture has progressed to the point where collaboration and conciliation could be the rule rather than the exception."

I find this line of reasoning puzzling. It's certainly true that coalition governments have been far rarer in Canada than they have been in most other parliamentary democracies: since the 1800s, Canada has only had one coalition government (during World War I). But attributing this rarity to something inherent in Canadian culture seems farfetched at best. There is nothing inherently more squabble-prone about Canadians than there is about Europeans--on the contrary, Canadian culture is well-known for its propensity for compromise. Instead, it seems far more realistic to attribute this distinction to Canada's electoral system. In fact, if we compare the few parliamentary democracies with single-party government traditions to those that instead tend to form government coalitions, a noticeable pattern emerges. The only countries in which the winning party insists on governing alone are those that use First Past the Post--countries like Canada, the UK, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. All of the countries that have some sort of proportional electoral system tend to govern by majority coalition.

Part of the reason for this, of course, is the way First Past the Post tends to award a majority of the seats in parliament to parties that do not manage to get a majority of the votes. After all, there is no need for more than one party to cooperate in a coalition when one party alone always gets the majority of seats. But this also means that under First Past the Post, all parties that want to govern will tend to organize their political strategies in ways that aim for single-party majority governments. We see evidence of that in Canada right now--the Tories are so devoted to finding a way to govern alone that they seem to be forgetting that they have a minority government, and the Liberals, too, tend to behave as if they just need to win the next election and they'll be able to govern with a single-party majority. A lack of compromise is built into the system.

As for the argument that switching to proportional representation wouldn't make our politicians any more willing to work together to form coalition governments, evidence from New Zealand would seem to counter that. New Zealand switched from First Past the Post to a Mixed-Member Proportional system by referendum in 1993, and they have had government coalitions ever since. The early coalitions did tend to be wobbly and fractious, since their parties had to completely adjust their strategies and their politicians had to learn how to do their jobs in ways that promoted cooperation over conflict. But they seem to be moving out of the adjustment period now, and more recent years have shown evidence of the kind of long-term stability found in Germany or Ireland.

It's silly to talk about coalition governments as if they were some weird phenomenon that only exists in the Third World when they're the status quo in most of the world's democracies. Belgium and the Netherlands manage to form government coalitions in countries with large numbers of immigrants. Switzerland manages it in a country that has four national languages and four distinctly different cultural groups. Germany manages it in a country that used to be two different countries right up until 1990. There is absolutely no reasonable argument for the notion that Canada is inherently different from the rest of the world on this front. It is only our electoral system that promotes the kind of conflict our political culture is rife with--all the parties are so busy going for broke that they don't realize they're going for broken.

But most importantly, the arguments about whether or not coalitions are possible for Canada make it sound like we have a choice in the matter. We don't. The main argument for First Past the Post is that it produces a clear winner that can then go on to form a strong single-party majority government, and it works this way in countries that have a strong two-party system, like the United States. In Canada, however, that very same electoral system doesn't work the way it is supposed to work anymore. Why? Because the NDP and the Bloc Québécois have become significant enough forces that the advantage granted to large parties under First Past the Post is no longer enough to manufacture a majority government for either the Tories or the Liberals. And while the two large parties like to pretend that we'll soon be returning to a strong two-party system, pretending doesn't make it so. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the NDP and the Bloc are going anywhere anytime soon. On the contrary, the rise in popularity of the Greens suggests that there may soon be yet another significant force on the electoral scene, one that moves Canada even more irrevocably toward being a true multiparty system.

This means that the political strategies of both the Conservatives and the Liberals--strategies that require single-party majority governments in order to function properly--are entirely out of synch with the realities of the Canadian political situation. Even the NDP, with their recent talk of forming a government on the federal level, seems to be more interested in governing alone than in being part of a real, lasting government coalition. But these parties are labouring under a collective delusion, and it's a delusion that's harming Canada. The only realistic, long-term solution to the current instability is for our political parties to learn to work together--and not in an ad-hoc, temporary sense like what Jack Layton is promoting right now, but in true government coalitions. And while proportional representation isn't a prerequisite for coalition governments (Canada's World War I coalition attests to that) it may well be the only way to force our parties to stop denying the need for majority coalitions and start finding a permanent solution to our current predicament.

Ironically, the best argument for proportional representation in Canada right now may not be the run-of-the-mill ones such as more fairness, increased voter participation, or an increase in the number of women parliamentarians, but more stability.

Further reading

True electoral system geeks (as well as anyone who wants to check the facts in this post) are going to want to read Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. A summary of this book (in .pdf form) can be downloaded from the Fair Vote Canada website here.

Local vs. national tensions in Canadian voting

One of the things that intrigues me about voting behaviour in Canada is the fact that you only get one vote, and that one vote helps determine two very different things: your local representative and your government. And I'm fascinated by the very different decisions people make as a result of this combined vote.

Exhibit A on this front is people like Andrew Anderson of Bound by Gravity, who is a member and staunch supporter of the Conservative Party of Canada, but who is so disenchanted with his MP that he says he won't be able to vote for him next time. Because Andrew needs to support that particular candidate in order to vote for his party, this effectively means that he will have to vote for a party other than the Conservatives. For him, local factors trump national ones.

On the other side, we have exhibit B, i.e., the various people who are saying that the success or failure of this or that Liberal leadership candidate at the convention will entirely determine the way they vote. "The day Ignatieff becomes leader of the Liberals is the last day of any support I give the party," says one commenter over at Canadian Cerberus, and Mike, the somewhat disenchanted New Democrat from Rational Reasons, has said several times that if Bob Rae wins the leadership, he will vote Liberal for the first time in his life. For these people, national factors trump local ones.

Finally, we have exhibit C, which consists of those who try to balance the local with the national. A good example here is Matt from Pample the Moose, who has said things like: "In a wide-open race, I wouldn't vote for an Ignatieff-led Liberal party over the NDP - although I'd still strategically vote Liberal in a tight local race to beat a Conservative." People like Matt are influenced by the leaders of the parties and their official policies, but those things aren't the be-all and end-all of their decisions, as local factors matter as well.

I think this is part of why I would find the way people vote under a Mixed-Member Proportional voting system so ideal for Canada. Because you get two votes under that system--one for a local candidate and one for a party--it separates choosing a local representative from choosing a government. If, say, you're particularly enamoured with your local Green candidate, but you'd really like to give Jack Layton a shot at becoming prime minister--or if you'd ideally like to see a Liberal-led government but think your local NDP candidate has a better chance of ousting the sitting Tory (as in my riding)--you can actually represent both of those preferences with your vote.

Party dividedness again

That weird Canadian "your party is divided, ha ha" argument is raising its ugly head again, this time with respect to the NDP. Yes, MPs Peter Stouffer and Pat Martin take positions rather different from the party line (and, it should be said, different from each other) on Afghanistan. I'll ask the same question I asked when this came up about the Liberals: why, exactly, is this supposed to be a problem? What I see in the NDP is a party that demands unanimity when it comes to an actual vote on a matter of Charter rights, but doesn't do so when it comes to a foreign policy issue that's still being hotly debated. This is a positive thing, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

Judging from some of the defensive comments over at A BCer in Toronto's post, though, I may be in the minority in looking at it this way. "If you still support the NDP," one commenter says, "you should be clear on this issue, and don't give the Liberals ammunition." Why should admitting the existence of caucus members that dissent from the majority once in a while be seen as a weakness? I'm sorry, but that's just plain silly. Party caucuses consist of people from extremely varying backgrounds who all live and breathe politics. It would be ridiculous to expect them to agree about everything all the time.

I'm afraid this may be an aspect of Canadian political culture I'll never quite understand.

The "dividedness" of the Liberal Party

Much hay has been made of how divided the Liberal Party is these days--or to put it in a somewhat more neutral way, how prominent party members and leadership candidates have taken opposing sides on various issues. These issues have ranged from the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan to the Conservative Accountability Act. The conclusion seems to be that this is yet another piece of evidence that the Liberals are in complete disarray, because they can't even come up with a common position on important issues. And Stephen Harper is some sort of political genius for exposing this Achilles heel.

Exactly why is this a problem again?

I'm aware that this is one of those Ignorant American questions that I work so hard to avoid having to ask, but I've thought and read about this for more than a month now, and I'm quite honestly flummoxed. I mean, I know this isn't the U.S., where divided votes are an everyday occurrence. I realize that it's common to toe the party line on most issues in a parliamentary democracy, and I also realize that there are actually good reasons for this. But if you're not allowed to take differing positions on various issues during a leadership race, when are you allowed to do that? They'll eventually have to prove they can unite behind their new leader, whoever that ends up being, but at a time when leadership candidates are supposed to be distinguishing themselves from each other, whipping the party into some false unity would seem unnecessarily harsh and restrictive. And wait a minute, didn't the old Reformatories--of which our new prime minister was once a proud member--think free votes/divided votes were a positive thing?

I'm also finding myself scratching my head that none of the party's PR people doing damage control on this image problem have simply said: "issue x has two sides to it, and our party is large enough that we have members who stand on either side of the line. This is a good thing!" Even in the blogosphere, where you can generally find every opinion under the sun, only Far and Wide comes close to that position. There's got to be some piece of cultural context I'm missing, some bit of tradition or some slice of history. Anybody want to take a shot at explaining it to the Silly Immigrant?