Grazing Rites

Obama won, Alvin lost, the provincial election is months away, and Hillary is Secretary of State. Got that? Good, now you’re caught up – on to Canadian federal politics and boy is it interesting!

Stephen Harper is poised to be ousted as Prime Minister and I couldn’t be happier at the prospect. Harper took his final steps into the dark side when he tried to slip a budget bill past parliament that included suspending civic servants’ right to strike and federal funding for all political parties which would heavily favour the Conservatives for the foreseeable future and all but destroy the Green Party. The opposition parties did their job and raised bloody hell about the whole thing and began talking about forming a coalition to take down Harper’s government. Harper got scared and took those two parts out of the budget bill and promised to make them separate non-confidence votes but the damage was done. Any Prime Minister willing to shred constitutional rights and try to twist election law to establish an unending dynasty for his party needs to be removed from power as fast as possible. He’s a threat to Canadian democracy and organized labour.

So separating the bill may have been enough to calm the Bloc but the Liberals and NDP aren’t about to let this go and rightly so. He stepped over the line and has lost the confidence of parliament and hopefully any reasonably informed Canadian citizen. The NDP and the federal Liberals have reached an agreement for a coalition in which the NDP gets 25% of the cabinet seats in a potential coalition government which Dion would lead. They brought Ed Broadbent out of retirement to assist with the negotiations – he’s like a God to die-hard NDPers, and I think a personal icon to Jack Layton. He’s really the heart of the NDP and if he helped draft the agreement then most NDP supporters should be on side with this one. Ignatieff and Rae have signed off on it as well, with surprising enthusiasm. The positions of finance minister, treasury board president and deputy prime minister would be held by Liberals under this agreement.

Still sitting on the fence? Let me tell you 3 more things about this evil economic update bill that should firmly put you in support of the coalition. First, it called for the sale of over $2 billion in government assets but failed to name a single one – what presents were the private sector about to get at a huge discount from a motivated seller of questionable integrity? Second, it called for $2 billion in cuts to government programs but failed to name a single program it would cut from – what were we going to give up: child care subsidies, health care, defense spending, welfare? Third, the budget contained no stimulus package for the economy – now personally I don’t really care about this point, I don’t think things are as bad off as advertised but this seemed to have a lot of people steamed so I thought I’d throw it in.

So what happens next?

First off if you agree with me that Harper stepped over the line I want to encourage you to write your local Liberal, or NDP (or hell, Bloc even – viva la Quebec!) representative and express your support of the coalition. If you live in a riding represented by a Conservative then just write the NDP and Liberal parties generally. Respect to Peter Griffin notwithstanding, coalition is the word!

So the federal political future branches off from here into 3 possibilities largely dictated by the Governor General.

Option 1: Coalition! On December 8th Parliament votes down the economic update and the Liberals and NDP ask the Governor General to form a coalition government. If she consents the coalition has agreed to stand for 30 months but that can be cut short if they lose a confidence vote. So the Bloc votes become disproportionately important – which Quebec and the Bloc should love so why would they mess with a balance of power that gives them plenty of influence and attention?

Option 2: Harper suspends Parliament, called “proroguing”. But in order to do this he must also have the Governor General’s permission but that’s not all. In theory he must make the prorogue a confidence vote itself and even if he somehow pulled that off he would have to kiss goodbye to any legislative agenda.

Option 3: Election. Harper loses the confidence vote but the Governor General does not give Dion permission to form a coalition government. This is unlikely for 2 huge reasons. Firstly it would represent a huge interference in government affairs from what is generally considered a figurehead or ceremonial position. Secondly if we haven’t hit election fatigue yet you can bet this decision would be hugely unpopular among the electorate, not to mention a significant burden on taxpayers – although personally not so terrible for me as I’d get more work out of it. If a largely unpopular election is called as a result of unprecedented interference from the Governor General it could spark a public outcry that could shake our very governmental structure to the core. Any party promising to eliminate the Governor General position could gain fierce support and if they won and kept the promise, textbooks across the nation would have to be rewritten. Although as a matter of law we would actually have to go to the Queen to disband the position, overrule her decisions, or replace her – and we’d do it, too.

So, suddenly the Governor General and her views become important to Canada. Who knew the day would come? Her name is Michaëlle Jean and she was appointed (technically recommended to the Queen) by Paul Martin. She was born in Haiti which she fled with her family to escape a dictatorship. So, who do you think she’ll support? The Conservative who wants to repeal the right to strike, disenfranchise all other politician parties, and sell off government property and make cutbacks without specifying which or a Liberal-lead coalition?

I’m confident we’ll have a new Prime Minister by Christmas.

This entry was posted on December 1, 2008 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.