Canada’s government seems set to crumble mere days after it kicked off a new parliament. At first, I was enthused by the idea. Even at around noon, yesterday, I sent an email to everyone I know, encouraging them to rally to the defence of a potential NDP-Liberal coalition (propped up by the separatist Bloc Québecois). Now, I admit, I’m not so sure.
The fact is, a three-headed coalition government is going to expose Canada’s regional fault-lines like never before. The West is going to go berserk! They’re already apoplectic out there at the very idea that Stephane Dion, a colossal failure in the election, might replace their man, Stephen Harper. And to an extent, I can see their point.
But the scariest part of a coalition is making concessions to the Bloc Québecois. It’s a sign of Canada’s current dysfunction that its second largest province has seemingly embraced a party that wants to flee Canada at the first opportunity, and meanwhile, will extract every last entitlement that it can out of federal coffers.
How to get any clarity in this current quagmire?
The ideologue in me – that profoundly disliked Harper from the get-go – relishes the prospect of him getting his ass kicked for the monumental stupidity of last week. What was he thinking? Trying to bankrupt the opposition by removing federal financing? It’s not only a slap in the face to the opposition, it’s a slap in the face to me and all the millions of other Canadians who embraced this system – who knew that our vote would mean just under two bucks in funding for our chosen party. No matter how ruthless Chrétien was in his day, he never tried to destroy the other parties.
Nevertheless, the pragmatist in me – that wants Canada to stay as strong as possible – is balking at the idea of Stephane Dion seizing the helm. Rationally, it doesn’t make sense. It goes against the country’s best interests. I mean, I agreed with Dion and the Green Shift – tax the hell out of pollution, that’s what I say. But it must be conceded that most Canadians did not embrace Dion or his platform. So to appoint him leader now is going to strike millions of Canadians as a bit of farce, not to mention, undemocratic. Granted – there is parliamentary precedent for it, indeed, Harper suggested exactly the same power-sharing arrangement in 2004, but just because Harper thought of it first certainly doesn’t make it right.
In the long term, I think there is only one way of saving Canada. We have to reform our democracy and introduce a form of proportional representation. It’s the only way a country as vast as this one can mitigate the regional differences. The Bloc is not as popular in Québec as their seat-count in parliament would suggest. Moreover, the Conservatives (or Stephen Harper) are not as popular out West as their seat-count would suggest. Both are benefitting from a first-past-the-post system that rewards the racking up of big regional victories instead of appealing to Canadians from coast to coast. If the Bloc Québecois were awarded seats on the basis of their support among Canadians, how many seats would they have right now? Thirty at most? And thirty seats seems about appropriate to their status as a purely provincial party with only narrow and selfish interests.
The vast majority of Canadians prefer centre-left parties. That is what recent history is proving. What unites the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc is that they reject the deference to Big Oil and pure individualism; in this time of economic crisis, they believe more help for struggling Canadians is needed. If we could somehow remove the toxic poison of separatism from this mix, I believe we’d get the government we need at this time.
It’s time for proportional representation!
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December 7, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Mark Senior
I’d add two points to what you say.
First of all – most Canadians probably didn’t back the Bloc Quebecois platform, not out of informed disagreement, but out of a lack of personal relevance (because there was no BQ candidate in their riding), which made it easier to stick a stereotype view of what their platform probably was.
For example, from the Ottawa Citizen, here is a summary of the BQ platform from the last election. Does it accurately represent what they were campaigning on? I haven’t the foggiest notion. http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/decisioncanada/story.html?id=4fec8278-1e0c-4232-9af9-ef9e5c2594be
Not a mention of independence. The “Other” is about decentralization and transfer of power within Canada, similar to a lot of sentiment in the US. Their “justice” platform contains some rather objectionably fasco-populist elements. Their environment, education, and “families” platforms read as entirely progressive. Not a thing of this was I aware of before reading that article.
Secondly, a comment to the proportional representation question.
PR has its problems, as I’m sure you’re aware. The main one from my point of view is the lack of answerability to a single riding, which can allow petty crooks to hang on to their positions by fooling enough of the people enough of the time.
My preferred approach would be a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. Each ballot ranks candidates for a particular riding by preference, and the votes are counted in a way as to eliminate as many wasted votes as possible. So, if I support the Green party, hate the Conservatives, and live in a riding where the best shot to beat the Conservatives is the Liberals, I can both vote with my conscience – give first preference to a Green party candidate – and strategically – give a later preference to a Liberal – and know that my vote will very likely end up counting for the Liberal, but still give some perceived legitimacy to the Greens by letting the media report a truer count of Green party supporters.
The methods of figuring which ballots to count, and which to transfer based on later choices, get rather complex rather quickly when you have multi-candidate ridings. For this reason, I prefer the single-candidate riding version, also known as Instant Runoff.
It’s aptly named – basically your ranking comes down to specifying in one trip to the polls who you vote for in a first round, then, assuming if your first choice were to be eliminated, who you’d vote for in a first runoff, then a second, etc. The result is that whoever wins has at least the grudging support of at least 50% of the voters in the riding. This generally would eliminate those candidates supported by the most extremist 28% of their riding and loathed by the other 72%, who unfortunately have divided their votes nearly evenly among 3 more moderate candidates.
The STV version recently proposed in BC (it got about 58% support at a referendum, but the government had decided not to be bound by less than 60% support) was to have multiple candidates per riding, and to transfer surplus votes fractionally based on the amount by which each candidate was over the threshold for election. It’s also a good system, and especially impressive that it got the support it did, given the maths involved.
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