A correspondent writes in to say:
“An election this spring would result in a 3rd minority in a row. Sometimes people forget that the 70s had 2 Minority governments(1972 and 1979) the 60s had 3 (1962, 1963 and 1965) and of course there was one in 1968. Should the next election be a minority, that will be 9 minorities put of the last 18 elections.”
That's a good pre-amble for this piece I put together for Canwest which is hitting the Web now and might be in the odd newspaper tomorrow:
Minority Governments May Become the norm for Canada
OTTAWA — For all of its modern history, Canada has been shaped by the politics of language, by the divisions of les deux nations.But last week's census release of the ethnocultural portrait of Canada underlined a political divide that has been hardening for nearly a decade: There are the country's three biggest cities – Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver – and then there is the rest of Canada.
For more than a decade, the Conservative party or its predecessors have not been able to elect a candidate in the cores of those cities. Meanwhile, support for its major opponent, the Liberal party, is withering and weakening in most areas of the country outside those three big cities.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberals are keen to break this decades-old structural impasse but until they figure out how to steal from the other's strengths, Canadians will get one minority government after the other.
“Unless one of the parties nibbles into the others' core area, they just can't mathematically form a majority government,” said Nik Nanos, president of polling firm Nanos Research. “That explains the structural impasse that we're at.”
Canada today is increasingly a non-white Canada. As Statistics Canada reported last week, the percentage of Canadians who are visible minorities has quadrupled in the last 25 years to more than 16 per cent of the country's population.
In Toronto, a Liberal bastion, visible minorities make up 43 per cent of the population. In Greater Vancouver, where Conservative-held suburban ridings circle a non-Conservative core, visible minorities make up 42 per cent of the population.
“New Canada, which is urban Canada, is going one way, and Old Canada has been going the other way,” said Peter Woolstencroft, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo who studies political geography.
The Conservatives dominate in the vast resource-rich 2,000-kilometre stretch between Winnipeg's south end and Vancouver's eastern fringes. In all of that the Liberals can claim only Ralph Goodale's lonely outpost in Regina.
“That equation is still very much stalemated. Canada's three largest cities are still tending to stick to their basic political instincts,”said Steven MacKinnon, who was executive director of the Liberal Party of Canada when Paul Martin was the leader. [Read the rest of the story]
I really have an issue with ongoing minority governments. It tells me a couple of things first of all. Primarily, it speaks to a desire that exists in the public at large for a change in politics. Whether that change is in the way things are done, to the policies and platforms of the time, the bottom line fact is that change is being demanded. And there isn't anything wrong with that.
The first problem arises in that the current system isn't set up to be ABLE to make the necessary changes within a minority government as opposition parties will often block any major changes for the sole misguided reasoning that their purpose is simply to oppose whatever the party that forms government is attempting to do.
This leads to the second problem which is how does one survive as a minority government? The looming threat of an election can be used both ways currently through Confidence matters. If the government is opposed to going to an election, then we are ruled by the opposition parties whose platforms did not resonate with the most voters in the country, and thus it's split 6 ways from Sunday. On the other hand, if it's the opposition parties who are reluctant to go to the polls, then in order to survive, the minority government will resort to pursuing their own agenda by making key platform issues Confidence matters. This leads to accusations of bullishness and strong-arming the country. In either of these cases, very little gets done because of the fighting that results in the House of Commons. Needed changes can't be made. For that you need a Majority Government, but if they had that, the message for change wouldn't be there and the status-quo would continue.
And the vicious circle continues.
The third problem is continuing elections taking place at the drop of a hat. There is no guarantee that even in a Minority situation that a government can carry out a full 4 year mandate. When there has been as many elections as years in which a single one should have been allowed to govern, voter apathy becomes a very dangerous and real threat allowing a minority to control the majority. It's well documented that the vocal minority very often do not represent the silent majority. The succession of short term governments and the continuing general elections eventually equate to beating one's head against a wall.
The answer, I'm afraid, is to elect an overwhelming Majority Government with an extremely clear mandate to change the way in which Government operates. A mandate with the authority and will of the people behind it to make the changes fast and hard and ride out the turbulence. Such a procedure would result in several interruptions of social services and programs as existing bureaucratic knots are excised from the system and constitutional matters are dealt with in brutal expediency. It may also include a special double-term mandate (8 years instead of 4) to ensure the job is done. A system would also have to be set up for broad and continuous consultation with the public at large. All in all, a right contentious mess.
I'm afraid this will never happen, or be allowed to happen and the infinite loop of status-quo will continue.
I fully agree with Mr. Calder. Minority governments, unlike previous minority governments, cannot work because there is a Separatist party sitting in the House of Commons with one thing in mind and that is Quebec. The hell with the rest of the country. So as long as they have a swing vote in the House nothing serious will get accomplished even if the other federalist parties want to cooperate.
We now have legislation in place allowing majority governments to have a 4 year mandate. That is not a very long time and much can be at least started or accomplished during that time frame. In the meantime Canadians can take the measure of a government and determine within that four years whether they approve or disapprove of the manner in which the government has managed the country.
Should the majority government pass legislation etc. which is so offensive to Canadians then its replacement government can always change the legislation. Once again Canadians will be the judge.
Does anyone believe that if Dion's polling numbers were higher we would not have already had an election? We all know the answer. So we are in this never never land of will or won't there be an election. As Calder said nothing gets done as the parties are always in election mode. What's in it for Canadians. Nothing absolute gridlock with the parties playing politics.
We need a majority government in the next election. Let them govern and Canadians can judge their real performance at the end of 4 years.