May 2nd has come and gone, and the fortunes of the Green Party are either at an all time-high, with the election of Elizabeth May to parliament, or at a virtual all-time low, with our share of the popular vote having plummeted to less than 4%, its lowest level in 11 years. Whether the glass is half full or half empty, it’s certainly fair to say that the next four years are going to present both opportunities and challenges for the Green Party of Canada, in a context which we’ve never found ourselves before.
In this series of blogposts, I’m going to provide you with my observations about what I believe the Green Party needs to do to prepare ourselves for the next general election, which is tentatively scheduled now for the Spring of 2015 (if the fixed-date election law is respected). I believe that the Green Party finds itself on a very narrow path towards success, and that we have to make sure that we do just about everything right between now and 2015 if we are to experience a successful outcome.
In this first blogpost, I’ll examine how it is that we’ve ended up in the current situation, and how the Green Party’s past history is going to continue to influence future decisions.
In my second post, I hope to explore the work which I believe must be undertaken at the local level if the Green Party is going to experience success. I’ll be looking at building and maintaining healthy Electoral District Associations (EDA’s), and selecting candidates.
In my third post, I’ll take a look at what I believe the Party needs to do politically at the national level, including how best to work with (and against) other parties, and why it’s important for us to exploit each opportunity we are handed. I’ll also look at why some of what I’m suggesting is going to create challenges within our Party.
In my fourth post, I’ll take a look at internal party issues, and what I believe the Green Party should be doing over the next 4 years in order for a healthier, more responsive Party to emerge, ready to take on the other Parties in 2013.
The May 2nd Election: How We Got Here
Sudbury has been a cruel town for Michael Ignatieff. In the recent 2011 campaign, it was in Sudbury that Ignatieff famously implored Canadians to “rise up” against Stephen Harper. That many Canadians followed his advice and did, in fact, rise up against Harper proved to be a pyrrhic victory for Ignatieff, as many more abandoned his Liberal Party for the NDP in the process. Ignatieff should have chosen a different city to implore voters, as Sudbury remains solidly NDP.
Back in September, 2009, though, Ignatieff was here in Sudbury, speaking at an engagement literally just down the road from where I live. It was at the Caruso Club, Sudbury’s famous Italian community centre, that Ignatieff announced that he would be “pulling the plug” on the Liberals support of the Harper government. Many Canadians forget the political tizzy which erupted as a result of Ignatieff’s announcement. I recall these events through the lens of my own perspective as the CEO for the Sudbury Federal Green Party Association.
The Saanich Gambit
It was in early September, 2009, that the Party announced an abbreviated candidate nomination period for the Saanich-Gulf Islands (SGI) electoral district. Earlier, the Party had announced that SGI was to be Elizabeth May’s new riding, but they might have jumped the gun a little bit with their announcement, as the Party had no rules in place which would allow an uncontested nomination event.
Enter local environmentalist and (now former, I believe) Green Party member, Stuart Hertzog, who, as a wannabe champion of the grassroots, decided to challenge the Party’s Leader May for the right to represent the Green Party in SGI. By all accounts (that I’ve seen anyway), May trounced Hertzog in the nomination election, but not before several events came to the fore which highlighted the Party’s movement away from the grassroots and towards the mainstream.
Nomination Contests
First off, that abbreviated nomination period I referred to was as a result of changes made to the Party’s own nomination rules. Some may recall that the Party had initially mandated that all EDA’s have nominated candidates in place by mid-June, 2009, in anticipation of a fall election in ’09. The rules were issued by the Party in mid-March, and provided a process whereby, for the first time, there would be a pre-screening of potential candidates by the Party, and only the names of acceptable candidates would be forwarded to the EDA’s for the contest.
Our Constitution indicates that only Members who have been in the Party for more than 30 days have the right to vote. We here in Sudbury found ourselves in the position where we wanted to provide as much time as possible for candidates to sign up new members to support their candidacies, but felt that the process didn’t provide as much opportunity as we might have liked. By the time candidates were selected by the Party for our contested nomination, we were already a fair ways into April. Still, our candidates did have a couple of weeks to sign up new members in advance of the contest, although admittedly most of the time between the announcement of the candidates and the contest itself fell within the 30 day period where new members, if they were signed up, could not legally vote.
Nevertheless, our EDA complied with the Central Party’s requirement to hold a nomination contest as per the Party’s rules, because we were constitutionally required to do so. You see, our EDA, having been founded only in 2007, had adopted a “template” Constitution, provided to us by the Central Party, with a fill-in-your-name blank space for the EDA’s name. One of the provisions of this template constitution was that our EDA would follow the nomination rules as developed by the Party. I understand that many other EDA’s also found themselves in this circumstance. Interestingly, not all EDA’s complied with the requirement of having a candidate in place by mid-June, 2009.
I’m revisiting these seemingly esoteric inner workings of the Party as they have some bearing on how we have come to find ourselves in the circumstance that we did on May 2nd, 2011. Please continue to bear with me.
Back to SGI in September, 2009. In what Green Party insider Mark Kersten described as the “worst kept political secret of the summer”, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May announced that she would be seeking the nomination in SGI in early September. With new rules in place for the timing of the contest, the contest was held a couple of weeks later, and by the end of September, around about the time that Parliament returned, May received the nod from Greens in SGI to be their candidate. The timing was important because it really did look as if parliament was going to reconvene and Harper brought down. Of course, no one had counted on the wily NDP to prop up Harper in exchange for some added benefits for Employment Insurance users, thus leaving Ignatieff and his promise to “pull the plug” out in the cold. A commensurate drop in the Liberals polling numbers over the next couple of months was the result.
Stuart Hertzog, May’s challenger for the SGI nomination, really didn’t stand a chance to carry the Green banner for that riding. Not so much because he was going up against the Leader of the Party (although undoubtedly that had a little something to do with his circumstances), but because the nomination period as per the new rules didn’t provide Hertzog with any opportunity to sign up new members which could cast a ballot for him. Of course, May was equally impacted by the short nomination period, although again, the fact that May was going to run in SGI had been largely known throughout most of the summer, even if the announcement itself didn’t happen until September.
So here we have a few examples of how the Green Party of Canada has been moving away from it’s grassroots nature, and has been instead turning into more of a mainstream political party. The grassroots quality of the Party, which was endearing to many, created situations which became real headaches for a Central Party wishing to occupy a more mature position in Canada’s political spectrum. The directive to have candidates in place by mid-June of 2009 in anticipation of a fall election that year made sense from the Central Party’s perspective: the Central Party didn’t want EDA’s to be scrambling at the last moment to find candidates in the same way that we were when Harper pulled the plug on parliament unexpectedly in 2008. Further, with candidates in place throughout the summer in a lead-up to the election, pre-writ campaigning could take place.
That the ridings being considered by the Leader for a possible run (SGI; Guelph; Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound) ignored these rules is interesting, but not telling. That other EDA’s across Canada chose to ignore the rules by not nominating candidates has had a continuing impact on EDA/Central Party relationships to this day. And I’m not here simply referring to the scramble which occurred when the writ was dropped in March of this year, which in part led to Greens not running in 4 of Canada’s 308 ridings. There has been much more going on behind the scenes at the Party level, as a struggle between the EDA’s and the Central Party, which some have characterized as a struggle between the grassroots and the mainstream.
Some of the EDA’s were vocal in their defiance of the Party’s nomination rules back in 2009. It was suggested by some that if Central Party wanted to make a big deal out of not having a candidate nominated, that it was no big deal. Others pointed to the fact that their EDA’s had older Constitutions, which clearly allowed the EDA to set its own timetable. Both of these issues would be addressed to the advantage of Central Party within the next year.
And of course, the struggle between May and Hertzog in Saanich-Gulf Islands exemplified the struggle between the mainstreaming of the Party and its grassroots proponents in miniature. That May would be victorious was no surprise; that the grassroots embodied by Hertzog would be ruthlessly out-manoeuvred by the Central Party may have come as a bit of surprise, because frankly, it just wasn’t necessary.
The Winds of Change: August 2010 Biennial General Meeting
Fast forward to the August Biennial General Meeting, where the biggest issue proved to be a non-event. The Constitutionally-required 4 Year Leadership contest didn’t happen, scuttling the expectations of many members, including those who most identify on the side of the grassroots. I’ll come back to the Leadership contest matter in soon, but first I’d like to continue along and provide the story of the outcome of the candidate nomination contest thread I’ve been writing about.
Recall those EDA’s who were wilfully defiant of the Party’s nomination contest edict in the spring of 2009? Well, with a couple of constitutional amendments proposed by Green Members deeply involved with the Central Party, the grassroots got what was coming to them. Those EDA’s who asked what the Party could do if they flouted the rules will find themselves in the following circumstances in the future: facing revenue being withheld for issues of non-compliance, or outright deregistration by the Central Party. Where there were no teeth to force its hand in 2009, the Central Party grew some very strong teeth in 2010 to take a bite out of grassroots independence.
And for those EDA’s with older, locally developed constitutions which give the EDA the authority and ability to set their own timetables for things like candidate nomination and general meetings? Those are all gone now. In one fell swoop, all EDA constitutions, including template constitutions such as the one we have here in Sudbury (and which we had amended significantly in 2009) have been thrown out by the Central Party, replaced with a new template which can only be amended by the approval of the Central Party. While EDA’s have yet to see this new template over 9 months later, it’s release now that the election has ended is inevitable. I suspect many local organizations will be very surprised to discover that the constitution they wrote, adopted, and amended to better suit their evolving local circumstance, has been tossed out the window by the Central Party in favour of a standardized format. Which can only be altered through Central Party’s approval, and not exclusively by the local EDA’s members, as in the past.
The arguments regarding the need for this approach had a lot to do with the fact that a few bad-egg EDA’s were wilfully not following their own Constitution. While this might have been happening (and the ultimate de-registration of a Vancouver-area EDA which hadn’t held an AGM in years was a difficult and long struggle for the Party), the fact is that the Central Party feels that it must exert more control over what’s happening at the grassroots. Standardizing EDA constitutions will prove to be an excellent tool in the continuing mainstreaming of the Green Party, like it or not.
Maturation
When Green Party of Ontario Leader Mike Schreiner was here in Sudbury earlier this year, he told a few of us a story about how, in the past, he had attended an event where another local Green Party candidate appeared dressed as a clown or some kind of Silly Party candidate out of the Monty Python “Election Night Special” skit. Mike, no doubt dressed in his customary suit, did everything that he could to avoid getting into shot with this other candidate, no matter how much the press tried to capture the two of them together.
The old adage goes that you dress for success. And there is certainly some merit that if you want to be treated as a serious political party, you’ve got to start acting like one. With the election of Elizabeth May to parliament, gone must be the days where candidates could expound about policy in any way they saw fit, contradicting one another in neighbouring ridings. Gone too are the days of the clown-suited candidates, who use their political exposure during an election to draw attention to pet issues. These are some of the obvious “gones” now from our Party, which are sure to be lamented by some, but not by most.
Gone, too, must be the days where the Party’s decentralization acted as an impediment to decision-making. With the abolishment of creating new Provincial divisions, the structure of the Party at the 2010 BGM was streamlined, allowing more revenue to stay with the Central Party for flexible responses, while continuing to maintain the flow of revenue to local EDA’s, which is remains a rather unique feature of our Party.
And gone are the days of a mandatory Leadership Contest. Federal Council, our Party’s governing body, proposed an amendment to the Constitution which replaced the mandatory 4 year Contest (which itself had replaced a mandatory 2-year Leadership Contest in 2006) with a Leadership Review process, to be held within 6 months of a federal general election. The Leadership Review process was supported by a majority of voting members (still less than 20% of the Party), and it’s the process that we have in place today. Clearly, a review process is more in keeping with processes used by other Parties, and allows the Green Party to be more flexible in electing a Leader, rather than being beholden to an arbitrary, if expected, date. Recall that going into the fall of 2010, there was a very real possibility that an election might have been held, and there was considerable concern that our Party might have to explain to the Canadian public why it had just tried to oust Elizabeth May as Leader. The perception in the media would have triumphed over fact.
The Budget
Aside from the struggles between the Central Party and the grassroots, let us not forget the circumstance which the Party found itself it in throughout 2010 as a result of the budget. Having borrowed to finance the 2008 campaign, by 2010 the financial situation of the Party was looking pretty grim. To keep the Party afloat, cuts were made. Amongst the first to go were Organizing staff. Throughout 2010, numerous organizers were lost; we here in Sudbury had 5 different Organizers assigned to our EDA throughout a 12-month period. This was hardly a good approach for building and maintaining healthy relationships between volunteers in the field and professional organizers.
And so the EDA’s suffered. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25 EDA’s ended up being deregistered by Elections Canada throughout 2010. I understand that no new EDA’s were created. There was a move on to create an EDA in the neighbouring riding of Nickel Belt, but without committed staff to help get things off of the ground, the EDA still has not materialized.
The Campaign Strategy Pays Off
Back in 2009, our Federal Council endorsed a Campaign Strategy which squarely put the election of Green Party Leader Elizabeth May as priority #1. A draft of this strategy was circulated to EDA CEO’s and nominated candidates in the summer of that year. While some of the other priorities seem to have been sidelined (including the wonderful concept of a “Campaign University”), the election of May appears to have morphed over time into the only priority of the Party.
Now, to be fair, there were a number of things stacked against our Party in the 2011 election campaign, starting with a mainstream media which had already made the decision to ignore us. With the Broadcast Consortium’s exclusion of Elizabeth May from the televised Leaders Debates, the die was cast. This lack of media attention was probably the biggest factor which contributed to the loss of vote share throughout the nation. But, coming as it did after two years of struggle between the EDA’s and the Central Party, there was little opportunity for most EDA’s to absorb the hit that a loss of national media exposure delivered.
From Where We Have Come, and Where We are Going
In short, the damaging struggle within the Party over the past couple of years, along with declining membership and the loss of numerous former candidates, who represented the Party in 2008, the loss of organizers, and the loss of committed volunteers at the local level, coupled with the loss of media coverage in 2011, created the perfect storm for the Green Party. Only in SGI did we experience success. We poured thousands of volunteers into that riding, and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars since the fall of 2010, which proved to be a Herculean task which we simply won’t be able to repeat elsewhere.
But…it could be a game-changer for the Green Party of Canada, and it was certainly what the Central Party and many of us out here in the EDA’s were banking on. With a new-found respect for a Party which has proven that it can elect MP’s, the future of our Party remains bright, despite the loss of vote-share. I believe that the votes might come back, but our Party is going to have to maintain a kind of discipline which might prove to be problematic for some of the old-guard. I believe, however, that the Central Party has shown that it has been on the path toward respectability for some time now, and if we can collectively decide to continue to walk along this path, without pushing each other down into the ditches, this may be the way to further future success.
However, we need to acknowledge that these continuing changes to the Party are not going to be universally embraced. Those who identify as deep greens in particular may be saddened to discover that their Party is turning away from the grassroots and embracing some mainstream initiatives. To those Greens who are concerned about our transformation into a more mainstream party, I ask that you give the Party a chance. Because whatever kind of Party we ultimately become, we will still be a Party based on a set of strong, shared values. The values aren’t going to change: they can not and will not be compromised. It’s how those values are implemented in terms of local and central structure, and organizing, that the change is going to occur. Please, give the Party’s evolution a chance, because your presence continues to educate us, and to enrich us all.
(Opinions expressed in this blog are my own, and should not be interpreted as being consistent with the views of the Green Party of Canada)
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Politics of Polarization Not Suitable for Greens
“Partisanship is what’s strangling democracy.” – Elizabeth May, Vancouver Sun, Friday May 6, 2011 (“May is only one voice, but it will be loud”)
Unquestionably, with the election of more Conservative and NDP MP’s to the House of Commons, we can expect to see the most polarized parliament in Canada’s history. With the moderating influence of the Liberal Party whittled down significantly, the parties who cling to more extreme ideologies will have the run of the House for the next 4 years.
Canadians may scoff at the notion that the Conservatives and New Democrats are “extremists” in any context. Certainly, we’ve witnessed Stephen Harper’s apparent move to the centre over the course of his minority parliaments (from his refusal to run deficits to tallying up the biggest deficit in Canadian history), and the newspapers continue to report on the NDP’s apparent support of small businesses and other platform planks which seemingly have positioned Layton’s party as more centrist.
Only time will tell if these positions continue to be maintained. Already, we are seeing fractures occurring along ideological lines, with comments being interpreted as “anti-American” made from the NDP’s deputy leader, Thomas Mulcair, which question statements made by U.S. President Barack Obama about photos taken of Osama bin Laden. Calls have been made by Conservatives MP’s to end the short form census, and of course during the election campaign, Conservative MP Brad Trost waxed poetically about reopening the abortion debate in Canada.
It’s true that we can’t expect our elected MP’s to be anything but partisans, given that they ran under the banners of their respected parties. Elizabeth May, newly elected MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, will also be performing a partisan role in the new parliament, as will the handful of Liberals returned to Ottawa. People join political parties for a reason, and are often elected because of their partisan colours.
The NDP and the Conservatives, however, are the two most partisan political parties which have ever faced off against one another in the House of Commons. Despite both parties apparent moves to the centre of the political spectrum, these parties are composed of members who have arrived in their current position of MP’s as a result of their ideological and partisan leanings. Although Party Leaders can try to stifle the ability of backbenchers (and cabinet ministers, for that matter) to speak their minds in public forums, the fact is that it’s more difficult to actually change the minds of individuals who hold a strong set of beliefs.
Much work in parliament goes on behind the scenes of Question Period, and from what I understand, MP’s often generally get along with one another and work together on issues across party lines. Committee work in particular can be rewarding when MP’s decide that there is some room to accommodate the views of others for the good of the whole.
However, in the last minority parliament, we saw the Conservative Party provide their MP’s with a playbook on how to frustrate committee work for partisan reasons. Time and again, Conservative MP’s used the playbook to shut down committees, or to render their work ineffective. Clearly, there was a concerted move by Conservative partisans away from working with the other parties for their own partisan reasons. Now that the Conservatives will have control over all of the Committees, given their false majority situation, I expect that the Committees will be used as blunt instruments against the NDP Opposition, all for political gain.
Stephen Harper has already demonstrated that he’s not above using the Senate in this way. When appointed Conservative Senators killed Bill C-311 without holding any debate, despite the fact that the Bill had been approved by our elected parliament, it was clear that partisan politics trumped the democratic will of the MP’s elected to represent Canadians. Now with a false majority in the House, it’s likely that Harper and the Conservatives may start to believe that they have been handed a real opportunity to make substantive ideological changes.
At an all-candidate’s debate in Sudbury during the election, Conservative candidate Fred Slade tried to give his party the credit for actions taken by Brian Mulroney’s government. To the raucous applause of those in attendance, Slade was called out by Will Morin, the candidate for the First People’s National Party, who pointed out that it was, in fact, the Progressive Conservative Party which was in power at the time, and that today’s Conservatives are similar in name only to Mulroney’s brand.
In an article appearing recently in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, journalist Gail Lethbridge also reminds us that this Conservative Party isn’t your father’s PC party (“Harper’s quiet revolution could be a bumpy ride”). Tellingly, she reports on remarks apparently made by Preston Manning about the May 2nd election result, where Manning refers to “Reform Conservatives”.
The New Democrats, too, certainly have their share of ideologues. Despite an apparent move towards the centre, the NDP remains a Party with an anti-business “Us” vs. “Them” bent, largely because of their affiliation with unions, but also in part due to the anti-corporatist nature of many of their members, who share views with which I am sympathetic. However, I’m not sure how much new MP’s who might put on an “I Still Hate George Bush” t-shirt every now and then really understand about their Party, especially when its policies continue to promote the very corporatist agenda against which some of its members continue to rail.
Sure, the NDP’s recent platform offered tax breaks to small businesses, but at the same time, the NDP wanted to establish a multi-billion dollar carbon emissions trading scheme, which would raise the prices of goods and services in an unpredictable way. A cap and trade scheme won’t be friendly to most businesses which produce goods, big or small (but it will be friendly to the financial sector traders, who stand to make big profits); but big international businesses will be better positioned than their smaller home-grown counterparts to provide flexible responses to fluctuating markets. And before the NDP supporters chime in that the cap and trade scheme is intended to apply only to the largest emitters, let me be clear that when prices rise on things like energy, due to cap and trade, all businesses are impacted.
And people are impacted as well. The NDP’s plan to reduce carbon emissions will have a negative impact on the very “hard working” families which they purport to be the champions of, due to expected rising prices. The NDP in their platform offers little in the way of offsets for individuals and families which will have to absorb the costs passed on to them by the large emitters. It’s one thing to make the things that we don’t want more expensive, like emissions-producing gas guzzling SUV’s, and the fuel on which they operate; but the flipside of the coin is you then have to give people back their hard-earned money to make better choices. And to ensure that those living in or close to poverty have some mechanism to either absorb the higher costs, or spend their limited resources on better options.
The NDP’s position on cap and trade really has led me to conclude that the Party just doesn’t understand the economic consequences of its environmental policies. While they do seem to get the notion that reducing our carbon emissions is a good thing, and that putting a price on carbon to make carbon-intensive goods and services more expensive to consumers is the right way of doing that, the outcome of their policies will simply be to make many goods and services more expensive, period. There will be inflationary economic consequences to this approach.
But, then again, I wouldn’t really expect the NDP to move forward on their environmental policies anyway, given the way that cap and trade could impact the working class. And now we’re back to ideology.
In this past election, we saw the NDP champion lower gasoline prices, ostensibly because the price of fuel for cars is getting out of hand and unmanageable for working families. Of course, figuring out a way to lower fuel costs isn’t going to be at all helpful for reducing carbon emissions. Which leads me back to my earlier hypothesis: do the NDP really understand what we need to do to fight the climate crisis? I think that they do, however it then begs the question, Why for goodness sake do they propose policies which hinder the fight? And the answer is, because of the NDP’s over-riding ideology of protecting the jobs of workers. In this ideological context, the NDP will always sacrifice everything else, although they will try to convince voters that they really can have it both ways.
That’s because the NDP wants to appear to be all things to all people. Their unworkable and contradictory election platform is clearly evidence of this trend. What the NDP has developed into is a slick PR machine, which will say and do whatever it takes in its quest for power. But behind the machine are real people who have many good ideas about their areas of interest. What is absent, though, is a mechanism for bringing these ideas together in a way which makes sense when viewed through a comprehensive spectrum. Right now, with big labour running the show, good ideas aren’t always allowed to emerge and flourish.
The NDP likes to measure their success in small wins, rather than broad and truly transformative policy initiatives, even though they may talk about such. Take the notion of electoral reform as an example. We certainly heard Jack Layton talk about this on the campaign trail recently. It’s been a part of the NDP playbook for many years. Yet, when provincial NDP governments in B.C., Ontario and Nova Scotia have been handed the reigns of power, the issue of electoral reform suddenly appears to be too big to take on. Indeed, it’s been left up to uninspired Liberal governments in both Ontario and British Columbia to pay lip service to electoral reform.
Voters on May 2nd, might have shared some concerns about the NDP’s economic policies. Many likely bought into Stephen Harper’s messaging that an NDP government would be disastrous for the economic health of Canada. Sure, Harper’s “the sky is falling” messaging, repeated by some of the bigger financial institutions, might have left an appalling taste in the mouths of NDP supporters, but I know it found resonance in the business community and with middle class voters. With Jack Layton being forced to backtrack on some of the economic estimates made in his platform (particularly those regarding expected revenue from cap and trade) in mid-campaign, it’s no wonder that the questions were being raised.
With parliament now effectively polarized between the left and the right, where might Greens find themselves in the years to come? Certainly, it’s advantageous that Elizabeth May will be occupying a seat in the House, but wedged between partisan ideologues which do not share her set of values, and who are hell-bent on scoring political points, what might the outcome be?
The other day, I attended an event here in Greater Sudbury, where I ran into an individual whom is very political and whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for. The conversation eventually worked its way towards the idea that the time will be coming where a choice is going to have to be made between “us” and “them”, and Canadians are going to have to figure out just which side they are on. We both figured that if push ever came to shove, we both knew on which side we would find ourselves. But the whole notion that we may be forced to make that kind of choice was one which I found personally distasteful, even if perhaps likely.
Greens aren’t about making that choice. Indeed, Greens tend to be very anti-ideological when it comes to left/right issues. We like to say, “Neither left or right, but out in front”, which sounds kind of like a hokey political slogan…until you start to look into it, and the culture of our Party and its policies. Trust me, I thought it was hokey, until I did the necessary exploration. Greens inhabit a world which has largely been freed from the left-right ideological divide, and instead wish to rely on science, evidence, and the collection of facts for a kind of comprehensive and holistic decision-making, which is viewed through a lens of shared values. But, since the real world remains entrenched in the division of the left and right, there are consequences for Greens.
First, our message is often poorly understood and reported by the mainstream media which just can’t shake itself from viewing the world through the left-right lens. Since the mainstream media remains for the time being the “keeper of the message”, it makes it that much more difficult for we Greens to advance our message on just about every issue. We saw just how influential the mainstream media has become in promoting political parties one over the other during an election. Elizabeth May’s exclusion from the televised Leader’s debates might have been the turning point for all of the parties involved in the campaign. Had May been present at the debates, everything could have turned out differently, as the start of Layton’s rise in the polls can be pinpointed to his small successes in the debates.
Second, when communicating with voters, it can be difficult for Greens to get our message across, because our policies don’t always fit comfortably into voter expectations. Again, this is due to the fact that voters, informed by the media, often view the world through a polarized lens, whether or not they understand the concepts of “left” and “right”. The old notion goes that voters are won and lost one at a time. That’s because voters will most often look towards their own self-interest when casting ballots. There has to be something on offer from a Party which appeals to the individual. With Green policies, difficult to explain as they are, the personal touch is often lost, at least in many cases. Certainly most of our policies have been designed for the betterment of the community in mind, and only secondarily for the betterment of individual voters. Perhaps we Greens could learn a thing or two from the NDP and Conservatives about promoting a buffet of policies for groups of voters, instead of offering up a full 9-course meal. However, I suspect that would be very difficult for Greens to do.
Third, within our Party there remains an undercurrent of left-right tension. Despite all of the “out in front” stuff, which is very real, the Party is a big-tent party, and within its walls, former NDP’ers, Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have all found a home, mingling with those whom have never had a political affiliation, and with those whom have been active only in the environmental movement. The big-tent nature of the Party has led to some tension within the Party in the past, and will likely continue to do so. Whether the tension is because of the “left/right” lens, or between the “deep greens” and the “pragmatists”, tension exists, and it needs to be worked out in a healthy manner.
With electoral success, I suspect that the emerging tensions within our own party will at first have more to do with the disillusionment of the deep greens, who have witnessed the Party transform itself from a truly grassroots organization into a stronger, more centralized political party. Deep greens will need to make a choice as to whether to continue to support this Party, despite the Party’s continuing efforts to centralize and give the Leader more authority, or to abandon the Party. I hope that most will stay because, really, where else might they find a home?
Some of the other factors which might lead to the Green Party figuring out what it wants to be in a polarized parliament rest now with the other parties. With the NDP having just elected a large contingent of Quebec MP’s to parliament, there is a real possibility that tomorrow’s NDP will shift towards a bit of a different direction. Already there is some suggestion that the NDP might not be the strong federalist voice that its traditional supporters perceived it to be, due to comments made by some of the recently elected MP’s, along with Jack Layton’s election campaign musing about opening up the Constitution.
The Conservatives, too, may not decide to pursue a more ideologically pure agenda, despite what just about every Canadian thinks. A Conservative Party which continues to play a more moderated role in parliament, maybe in a bid to destroy the Liberal Party fully and completely, would provide less room for Greens to find support. A more ideologically-driven Conservative Party will create opportunities to grow Green support, especially if the Conservatives foil Jack Layton and the NDP in the process (which we’ve seen before on the long gun registry bill and the corporate responsibility bill).
And finally, there’s the enigma of the Liberal Party, which is the Party that I believe continues to pose the biggest challenge to the long-term success of the Green Party. I believe this because I think that the Liberals, in an effort to rebuild themselves, are going to be looking carefully at Green policies, and that they’re going to find a lot of those policies to their liking. A watered-down version of Vision Green, with a bit of a Liberal spin, could be a very compelling platform for centralist voters. Especially those who have tired after 4 years of Conservative false majority rule. If the Liberals advance our policies, even in a weakened form, what need might there be for a Green Party at all?
Of course, the Liberal Party also provides we Greens with a potential opportunity for partnership down the road, if events play themselves out as I think that they may. Of course, this is not to suggest that there is likely to be reconciliation between the Liberals and all of our policies (Afghanistan comes to mind), but there may be a critical mass of partisan interest formed, once the Liberals start getting their act together. What Greens should then focus on is becoming a more viable partner. With only one MP in the House, and a tiny fraction of the vote share, that’s not going to be an easy task to accomplish.
In a polarized parliament, though, the Green Party needs to tread carefully, and do everything right if there is to be a future at all. At least with May now sitting in the House, there remains hope that the Party can continue to shape political discourse. Another electoral failure would quite likely have doomed our Party. And although the risk remains that we could disappear into political oblivion, there still remains a flicker of an opportunity that the opposite will happen. But we need to play all of our cards right, and exploit the opportunities as they arise. Or else we will be squeezed out by the NDP and a rebuilding Liberal Party.
(Opinions expressed in this blog are my own, and should not be construed as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada).
Unquestionably, with the election of more Conservative and NDP MP’s to the House of Commons, we can expect to see the most polarized parliament in Canada’s history. With the moderating influence of the Liberal Party whittled down significantly, the parties who cling to more extreme ideologies will have the run of the House for the next 4 years.
Canadians may scoff at the notion that the Conservatives and New Democrats are “extremists” in any context. Certainly, we’ve witnessed Stephen Harper’s apparent move to the centre over the course of his minority parliaments (from his refusal to run deficits to tallying up the biggest deficit in Canadian history), and the newspapers continue to report on the NDP’s apparent support of small businesses and other platform planks which seemingly have positioned Layton’s party as more centrist.
Only time will tell if these positions continue to be maintained. Already, we are seeing fractures occurring along ideological lines, with comments being interpreted as “anti-American” made from the NDP’s deputy leader, Thomas Mulcair, which question statements made by U.S. President Barack Obama about photos taken of Osama bin Laden. Calls have been made by Conservatives MP’s to end the short form census, and of course during the election campaign, Conservative MP Brad Trost waxed poetically about reopening the abortion debate in Canada.
It’s true that we can’t expect our elected MP’s to be anything but partisans, given that they ran under the banners of their respected parties. Elizabeth May, newly elected MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, will also be performing a partisan role in the new parliament, as will the handful of Liberals returned to Ottawa. People join political parties for a reason, and are often elected because of their partisan colours.
The NDP and the Conservatives, however, are the two most partisan political parties which have ever faced off against one another in the House of Commons. Despite both parties apparent moves to the centre of the political spectrum, these parties are composed of members who have arrived in their current position of MP’s as a result of their ideological and partisan leanings. Although Party Leaders can try to stifle the ability of backbenchers (and cabinet ministers, for that matter) to speak their minds in public forums, the fact is that it’s more difficult to actually change the minds of individuals who hold a strong set of beliefs.
Much work in parliament goes on behind the scenes of Question Period, and from what I understand, MP’s often generally get along with one another and work together on issues across party lines. Committee work in particular can be rewarding when MP’s decide that there is some room to accommodate the views of others for the good of the whole.
However, in the last minority parliament, we saw the Conservative Party provide their MP’s with a playbook on how to frustrate committee work for partisan reasons. Time and again, Conservative MP’s used the playbook to shut down committees, or to render their work ineffective. Clearly, there was a concerted move by Conservative partisans away from working with the other parties for their own partisan reasons. Now that the Conservatives will have control over all of the Committees, given their false majority situation, I expect that the Committees will be used as blunt instruments against the NDP Opposition, all for political gain.
Stephen Harper has already demonstrated that he’s not above using the Senate in this way. When appointed Conservative Senators killed Bill C-311 without holding any debate, despite the fact that the Bill had been approved by our elected parliament, it was clear that partisan politics trumped the democratic will of the MP’s elected to represent Canadians. Now with a false majority in the House, it’s likely that Harper and the Conservatives may start to believe that they have been handed a real opportunity to make substantive ideological changes.
At an all-candidate’s debate in Sudbury during the election, Conservative candidate Fred Slade tried to give his party the credit for actions taken by Brian Mulroney’s government. To the raucous applause of those in attendance, Slade was called out by Will Morin, the candidate for the First People’s National Party, who pointed out that it was, in fact, the Progressive Conservative Party which was in power at the time, and that today’s Conservatives are similar in name only to Mulroney’s brand.
In an article appearing recently in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, journalist Gail Lethbridge also reminds us that this Conservative Party isn’t your father’s PC party (“Harper’s quiet revolution could be a bumpy ride”). Tellingly, she reports on remarks apparently made by Preston Manning about the May 2nd election result, where Manning refers to “Reform Conservatives”.
The New Democrats, too, certainly have their share of ideologues. Despite an apparent move towards the centre, the NDP remains a Party with an anti-business “Us” vs. “Them” bent, largely because of their affiliation with unions, but also in part due to the anti-corporatist nature of many of their members, who share views with which I am sympathetic. However, I’m not sure how much new MP’s who might put on an “I Still Hate George Bush” t-shirt every now and then really understand about their Party, especially when its policies continue to promote the very corporatist agenda against which some of its members continue to rail.
Sure, the NDP’s recent platform offered tax breaks to small businesses, but at the same time, the NDP wanted to establish a multi-billion dollar carbon emissions trading scheme, which would raise the prices of goods and services in an unpredictable way. A cap and trade scheme won’t be friendly to most businesses which produce goods, big or small (but it will be friendly to the financial sector traders, who stand to make big profits); but big international businesses will be better positioned than their smaller home-grown counterparts to provide flexible responses to fluctuating markets. And before the NDP supporters chime in that the cap and trade scheme is intended to apply only to the largest emitters, let me be clear that when prices rise on things like energy, due to cap and trade, all businesses are impacted.
And people are impacted as well. The NDP’s plan to reduce carbon emissions will have a negative impact on the very “hard working” families which they purport to be the champions of, due to expected rising prices. The NDP in their platform offers little in the way of offsets for individuals and families which will have to absorb the costs passed on to them by the large emitters. It’s one thing to make the things that we don’t want more expensive, like emissions-producing gas guzzling SUV’s, and the fuel on which they operate; but the flipside of the coin is you then have to give people back their hard-earned money to make better choices. And to ensure that those living in or close to poverty have some mechanism to either absorb the higher costs, or spend their limited resources on better options.
The NDP’s position on cap and trade really has led me to conclude that the Party just doesn’t understand the economic consequences of its environmental policies. While they do seem to get the notion that reducing our carbon emissions is a good thing, and that putting a price on carbon to make carbon-intensive goods and services more expensive to consumers is the right way of doing that, the outcome of their policies will simply be to make many goods and services more expensive, period. There will be inflationary economic consequences to this approach.
But, then again, I wouldn’t really expect the NDP to move forward on their environmental policies anyway, given the way that cap and trade could impact the working class. And now we’re back to ideology.
In this past election, we saw the NDP champion lower gasoline prices, ostensibly because the price of fuel for cars is getting out of hand and unmanageable for working families. Of course, figuring out a way to lower fuel costs isn’t going to be at all helpful for reducing carbon emissions. Which leads me back to my earlier hypothesis: do the NDP really understand what we need to do to fight the climate crisis? I think that they do, however it then begs the question, Why for goodness sake do they propose policies which hinder the fight? And the answer is, because of the NDP’s over-riding ideology of protecting the jobs of workers. In this ideological context, the NDP will always sacrifice everything else, although they will try to convince voters that they really can have it both ways.
That’s because the NDP wants to appear to be all things to all people. Their unworkable and contradictory election platform is clearly evidence of this trend. What the NDP has developed into is a slick PR machine, which will say and do whatever it takes in its quest for power. But behind the machine are real people who have many good ideas about their areas of interest. What is absent, though, is a mechanism for bringing these ideas together in a way which makes sense when viewed through a comprehensive spectrum. Right now, with big labour running the show, good ideas aren’t always allowed to emerge and flourish.
The NDP likes to measure their success in small wins, rather than broad and truly transformative policy initiatives, even though they may talk about such. Take the notion of electoral reform as an example. We certainly heard Jack Layton talk about this on the campaign trail recently. It’s been a part of the NDP playbook for many years. Yet, when provincial NDP governments in B.C., Ontario and Nova Scotia have been handed the reigns of power, the issue of electoral reform suddenly appears to be too big to take on. Indeed, it’s been left up to uninspired Liberal governments in both Ontario and British Columbia to pay lip service to electoral reform.
Voters on May 2nd, might have shared some concerns about the NDP’s economic policies. Many likely bought into Stephen Harper’s messaging that an NDP government would be disastrous for the economic health of Canada. Sure, Harper’s “the sky is falling” messaging, repeated by some of the bigger financial institutions, might have left an appalling taste in the mouths of NDP supporters, but I know it found resonance in the business community and with middle class voters. With Jack Layton being forced to backtrack on some of the economic estimates made in his platform (particularly those regarding expected revenue from cap and trade) in mid-campaign, it’s no wonder that the questions were being raised.
With parliament now effectively polarized between the left and the right, where might Greens find themselves in the years to come? Certainly, it’s advantageous that Elizabeth May will be occupying a seat in the House, but wedged between partisan ideologues which do not share her set of values, and who are hell-bent on scoring political points, what might the outcome be?
The other day, I attended an event here in Greater Sudbury, where I ran into an individual whom is very political and whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for. The conversation eventually worked its way towards the idea that the time will be coming where a choice is going to have to be made between “us” and “them”, and Canadians are going to have to figure out just which side they are on. We both figured that if push ever came to shove, we both knew on which side we would find ourselves. But the whole notion that we may be forced to make that kind of choice was one which I found personally distasteful, even if perhaps likely.
Greens aren’t about making that choice. Indeed, Greens tend to be very anti-ideological when it comes to left/right issues. We like to say, “Neither left or right, but out in front”, which sounds kind of like a hokey political slogan…until you start to look into it, and the culture of our Party and its policies. Trust me, I thought it was hokey, until I did the necessary exploration. Greens inhabit a world which has largely been freed from the left-right ideological divide, and instead wish to rely on science, evidence, and the collection of facts for a kind of comprehensive and holistic decision-making, which is viewed through a lens of shared values. But, since the real world remains entrenched in the division of the left and right, there are consequences for Greens.
First, our message is often poorly understood and reported by the mainstream media which just can’t shake itself from viewing the world through the left-right lens. Since the mainstream media remains for the time being the “keeper of the message”, it makes it that much more difficult for we Greens to advance our message on just about every issue. We saw just how influential the mainstream media has become in promoting political parties one over the other during an election. Elizabeth May’s exclusion from the televised Leader’s debates might have been the turning point for all of the parties involved in the campaign. Had May been present at the debates, everything could have turned out differently, as the start of Layton’s rise in the polls can be pinpointed to his small successes in the debates.
Second, when communicating with voters, it can be difficult for Greens to get our message across, because our policies don’t always fit comfortably into voter expectations. Again, this is due to the fact that voters, informed by the media, often view the world through a polarized lens, whether or not they understand the concepts of “left” and “right”. The old notion goes that voters are won and lost one at a time. That’s because voters will most often look towards their own self-interest when casting ballots. There has to be something on offer from a Party which appeals to the individual. With Green policies, difficult to explain as they are, the personal touch is often lost, at least in many cases. Certainly most of our policies have been designed for the betterment of the community in mind, and only secondarily for the betterment of individual voters. Perhaps we Greens could learn a thing or two from the NDP and Conservatives about promoting a buffet of policies for groups of voters, instead of offering up a full 9-course meal. However, I suspect that would be very difficult for Greens to do.
Third, within our Party there remains an undercurrent of left-right tension. Despite all of the “out in front” stuff, which is very real, the Party is a big-tent party, and within its walls, former NDP’ers, Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have all found a home, mingling with those whom have never had a political affiliation, and with those whom have been active only in the environmental movement. The big-tent nature of the Party has led to some tension within the Party in the past, and will likely continue to do so. Whether the tension is because of the “left/right” lens, or between the “deep greens” and the “pragmatists”, tension exists, and it needs to be worked out in a healthy manner.
With electoral success, I suspect that the emerging tensions within our own party will at first have more to do with the disillusionment of the deep greens, who have witnessed the Party transform itself from a truly grassroots organization into a stronger, more centralized political party. Deep greens will need to make a choice as to whether to continue to support this Party, despite the Party’s continuing efforts to centralize and give the Leader more authority, or to abandon the Party. I hope that most will stay because, really, where else might they find a home?
Some of the other factors which might lead to the Green Party figuring out what it wants to be in a polarized parliament rest now with the other parties. With the NDP having just elected a large contingent of Quebec MP’s to parliament, there is a real possibility that tomorrow’s NDP will shift towards a bit of a different direction. Already there is some suggestion that the NDP might not be the strong federalist voice that its traditional supporters perceived it to be, due to comments made by some of the recently elected MP’s, along with Jack Layton’s election campaign musing about opening up the Constitution.
The Conservatives, too, may not decide to pursue a more ideologically pure agenda, despite what just about every Canadian thinks. A Conservative Party which continues to play a more moderated role in parliament, maybe in a bid to destroy the Liberal Party fully and completely, would provide less room for Greens to find support. A more ideologically-driven Conservative Party will create opportunities to grow Green support, especially if the Conservatives foil Jack Layton and the NDP in the process (which we’ve seen before on the long gun registry bill and the corporate responsibility bill).
And finally, there’s the enigma of the Liberal Party, which is the Party that I believe continues to pose the biggest challenge to the long-term success of the Green Party. I believe this because I think that the Liberals, in an effort to rebuild themselves, are going to be looking carefully at Green policies, and that they’re going to find a lot of those policies to their liking. A watered-down version of Vision Green, with a bit of a Liberal spin, could be a very compelling platform for centralist voters. Especially those who have tired after 4 years of Conservative false majority rule. If the Liberals advance our policies, even in a weakened form, what need might there be for a Green Party at all?
Of course, the Liberal Party also provides we Greens with a potential opportunity for partnership down the road, if events play themselves out as I think that they may. Of course, this is not to suggest that there is likely to be reconciliation between the Liberals and all of our policies (Afghanistan comes to mind), but there may be a critical mass of partisan interest formed, once the Liberals start getting their act together. What Greens should then focus on is becoming a more viable partner. With only one MP in the House, and a tiny fraction of the vote share, that’s not going to be an easy task to accomplish.
In a polarized parliament, though, the Green Party needs to tread carefully, and do everything right if there is to be a future at all. At least with May now sitting in the House, there remains hope that the Party can continue to shape political discourse. Another electoral failure would quite likely have doomed our Party. And although the risk remains that we could disappear into political oblivion, there still remains a flicker of an opportunity that the opposite will happen. But we need to play all of our cards right, and exploit the opportunities as they arise. Or else we will be squeezed out by the NDP and a rebuilding Liberal Party.
(Opinions expressed in this blog are my own, and should not be construed as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada).
Friday, May 6, 2011
Pushing Back Against the Climate Change Deniers in the Media, Government
This is a copy of an unpublished letter to the editor of the Sudbury Star, submitted on April 21st in response to an article written by Sun Media's Monte Sonnenberg ("May's Green Party on the fringe for a reason", Sudbury Star, April 21 2011).
I note that the Sudbury Star did publish an excellent letter to the editor rebuking Sonnenberg's article, "Writer ignored facts on the environment", from Greater Sudbury resident Cody Walter, whom I don't know, and who may be a non-partisan.
I'm publishing this letter on my blog today, now that the election is over, and it is increasingly becoming apparent that those of us who thought the debate was over around the science of climate change will need to think again, given what has been reported about the large contingent of climate change deniers recently elected to Canada's parliament.
At least Elizabeth May will be present in parliament to present the facts about climate change to our MP's, and to people like Sonnenberg, who must be dismayed that May and the Greens won't be silenced again, in the same way that we were by the national media during the recent election campaign.
-----
On the eve of Greater Sudbury’s Earth Week celebrations, a very unfortunate article by Monte Sonnenberg appeared in the April 21st edition of the Sudbury Star (“May’s Green Party on the fringe for a reason”). This article was an insult to the intelligence of Star readers for several reasons.
As the CEO of the Sudbury Federal Green Party Association, I’m clearly partisan when it comes to politics. But I’m not writing this letter today to quibble with Sonnenberg’s assertion that it was appropriate to silence the leader of a national political party by excluding her from participating in the televised leaders debates. What is more important to me is that Sonnenberg continues to perpetuate the myth that human-made climate change isn’t happening.
In his article, Sonnenberg refers to “alleged” human-made causes of global warming. He even goes so far as to question whether greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, really do trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. I’m not sure where Sonnenberg is getting his facts from, but I can know that I learned about the “greenhouse effect” in primary school back in the early 1980s.
The science behind human-made global warming is no longer in dispute, except perhaps in the media, and amongst those with vested economic interests in denying climate change. I, along with a majority of Canadians, prefer to look towards our scientific institutions for guidance and understanding.
Back in 2007, in its Nobel Prize-winning 4th Assessment Report, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated that human actions were very likely the cause of global warming, with 90% certainty. This percentage of certainty continues to rise with each additional year of climate data collected. Climate data shows that the year 2010 was tied with 2005 for the warmest year on record, ever since records have been kept starting in 1880. The next warmest years? 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007.
Sonnenberg must be a gambler if he’s willing to bet against the odds on climate change. Perhaps he really and truly is confused between the concepts of weather and climate, as he suggests in his article with his quip about this spring’s cold weather showing that global warming isn’t happening.
In contrast, I know a sure thing when I see it. I see that thousands of committed and hard working scientists have been gathering evidence and providing analysis over decades, leading them to the conclusion that the planet is warming and that human industrial processes are responsible. Without addressing our climate crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this warming trend will continue to transform our planet.
Canadians overwhelmingly understand the reality of climate change. A recent poll conducted by the Public Policy Forum (February 2011) indicates that 80% of Canadians believe that there is sound evidence of global warming. 91% of that group believe that it is a serious problem. As the Green Party could only ever dream of polling numbers that high, clearly climate change isn’t a partisan issue.
Good public policy is based on real evidence and facts. When our governments and institutions make decisions based on incorrect information, those decisions invariably cause more harm than good.
Sonnenberg wants you to question people like me who assert that the science of climate change has been resolved. I would like for you to understand that people like Sonnenberg, who deny the sound scientific evidence that humanity is causing global warming, are a threat to our economy and to the future health of our selves and our families.
(Opinions expressed in this blog are my own, and should not be construed as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada)
I note that the Sudbury Star did publish an excellent letter to the editor rebuking Sonnenberg's article, "Writer ignored facts on the environment", from Greater Sudbury resident Cody Walter, whom I don't know, and who may be a non-partisan.
I'm publishing this letter on my blog today, now that the election is over, and it is increasingly becoming apparent that those of us who thought the debate was over around the science of climate change will need to think again, given what has been reported about the large contingent of climate change deniers recently elected to Canada's parliament.
At least Elizabeth May will be present in parliament to present the facts about climate change to our MP's, and to people like Sonnenberg, who must be dismayed that May and the Greens won't be silenced again, in the same way that we were by the national media during the recent election campaign.
-----
On the eve of Greater Sudbury’s Earth Week celebrations, a very unfortunate article by Monte Sonnenberg appeared in the April 21st edition of the Sudbury Star (“May’s Green Party on the fringe for a reason”). This article was an insult to the intelligence of Star readers for several reasons.
As the CEO of the Sudbury Federal Green Party Association, I’m clearly partisan when it comes to politics. But I’m not writing this letter today to quibble with Sonnenberg’s assertion that it was appropriate to silence the leader of a national political party by excluding her from participating in the televised leaders debates. What is more important to me is that Sonnenberg continues to perpetuate the myth that human-made climate change isn’t happening.
In his article, Sonnenberg refers to “alleged” human-made causes of global warming. He even goes so far as to question whether greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, really do trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. I’m not sure where Sonnenberg is getting his facts from, but I can know that I learned about the “greenhouse effect” in primary school back in the early 1980s.
The science behind human-made global warming is no longer in dispute, except perhaps in the media, and amongst those with vested economic interests in denying climate change. I, along with a majority of Canadians, prefer to look towards our scientific institutions for guidance and understanding.
Back in 2007, in its Nobel Prize-winning 4th Assessment Report, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated that human actions were very likely the cause of global warming, with 90% certainty. This percentage of certainty continues to rise with each additional year of climate data collected. Climate data shows that the year 2010 was tied with 2005 for the warmest year on record, ever since records have been kept starting in 1880. The next warmest years? 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007.
Sonnenberg must be a gambler if he’s willing to bet against the odds on climate change. Perhaps he really and truly is confused between the concepts of weather and climate, as he suggests in his article with his quip about this spring’s cold weather showing that global warming isn’t happening.
In contrast, I know a sure thing when I see it. I see that thousands of committed and hard working scientists have been gathering evidence and providing analysis over decades, leading them to the conclusion that the planet is warming and that human industrial processes are responsible. Without addressing our climate crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this warming trend will continue to transform our planet.
Canadians overwhelmingly understand the reality of climate change. A recent poll conducted by the Public Policy Forum (February 2011) indicates that 80% of Canadians believe that there is sound evidence of global warming. 91% of that group believe that it is a serious problem. As the Green Party could only ever dream of polling numbers that high, clearly climate change isn’t a partisan issue.
Good public policy is based on real evidence and facts. When our governments and institutions make decisions based on incorrect information, those decisions invariably cause more harm than good.
Sonnenberg wants you to question people like me who assert that the science of climate change has been resolved. I would like for you to understand that people like Sonnenberg, who deny the sound scientific evidence that humanity is causing global warming, are a threat to our economy and to the future health of our selves and our families.
(Opinions expressed in this blog are my own, and should not be construed as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada)
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
The Green Party and the 2011 Federal Election: My Observations
It’s been an interesting week in Canadian politics. I’ve fallen a little behind with my own analysis of the election that happened two days ago now. In my defence, I, unlike Stephen Harper, don’t mind having a drink or two or more. When the CBC declared Elizabeth May elected in Saanich-Gulf Islands, the champagne (ok, the “Baby Duck”) flowed freely at the Sudbury campaign office. Most of it seemed to flow directly into my belly. Now, although foresight is something that I’ve been accused of not exactly being blessed with (as some of you more constant readers of my blog have surely discovered – not that it stops my prognosticating), I had booked the Tuesday off from work, just in case things got a little out of hand on Monday night. Which, for me at least, they did.
Although it’s far from certain whether I was drinking in celebration of Elizabeth May’s historic win in SGI, or drinking to dull my mind about the prospect of a false majority government for the Conservatives. In retrospect, I think that I am more concerned and upset about the latter than I am happy about the former. I seem to recall comments made by May herself back in 2008 that the last thing that she wanted was to have a handful of Green MP’s elected to stare across the aisle at a Harper majority. But perhaps I shouldn’t bring those comments up.
Despite the other historic upsets which saw a record number of NDP MP’s elected to the House, and the virtual destruction of the Bloc Quebecois, Monday’s election has left me very concerned about the future economic health of our country. Although a minority of voters (around 40%) gave the Conservatives a nod, the fact is that with a false majority, the Cons will be free to pursue their corporatist agenda to, what I suspect will be, the detriment of a majority of Canadians. Four years is a long time; a lot of change can happen in those years. Most of the changes we’ll see, I suspect, won’t be the sorts of changes which Canada needs to make in order to be better positioned to face the future.
Almost certainly we’re not going to see any action to put a price on carbon in order to combat the climate crisis. Our role in international negotiations will undoubtedly remain obstructionist, at best, and completely undermining at worse. In an effort to pretend to be doing something about the climate crisis, and meeting their extremely modest emissions “reduction” targets (which aren’t actually targets to reduce emissions), the Conservatives may wish to continue pursuing the “one offs”, such as the recently announced carbon capture and storage project in Saskatchewan, in an effort to convince voters that they’re doing something. Unfortunately, more projects like this one, which (may) reduce carbon emissions, will end up bankrupting our economy due to a massively high price per-tonne of CO2 removed. Megaprojects aren’t the way forward for emissions reductions, when conservation is a cheap and viable alternative. But I guess conservation doesn’t line any corporate pockets.
With four years of a false majority government taking little or no action on the climate crisis, you’d think that a Green like me might be happy that my party could emerge to fill a void on neglected environmental issues. That seems sensible enough, on the one hand. If Canadians, in 2015, want to see action on the environment, maybe in the same way they did in 2008, or perhaps in a stronger way, turning to the Green Party will make sense. Right?
Not so fast. Here’s why:
The Liberal Party is going to have to try to figure out a way to rebuild itself after the disastrous result handed to Michael Ignatieff. Surely one of the ways forward for the Liberals is the need to define themselves as a Party of bold ideas, and not just the “We’re not the Conservatives” which so many Canadians obviously grew tired of hearing. When it comes to bold ideas, the Liberals are going to have to latch on to the environment as a starting point in a conversation they’ll have with Canadians. Only this time, under bright and articulate leadership (whether that’s Trudeau, Rae or Leblanc, or…dare I say it? Stephane Dion), they’ll be able to make the issue of the environment and climate change their own.
In 2008, they tried this approach and failed. Perhaps the timing wasn’t as auspicious as it might have been; perhaps the messenger wasn’t able to communicate the message effectively. Whatever the reason, the outcome led to the Liberals abandoning their carbon tax plan, and embracing an expensive, untested, and problematic cap and trade scheme which no one wanted to talk about. The fact that the NDP and Bloc also supported cap and trade in this past election meant that carbon pricing was left completely out of the (meagre) policy debates which took place.
Yet, back at the Liberals’ policy and leadership convention in the spring of 2009, the Liberal Party membership reconfirmed their commitment to a carbon tax. Famously, Michael Ignatieff at the same convention went on the record that he would not be running on a carbon tax. Now that he’s gone, the doorway remains open for the Liberals to bring back carbon tax shifting policies, which would be very similar to those promoted by the Green Party (except for the price per tonne charged, which under Dion would have been much lower than the Green’s pricing; and on the flipside, the Liberals would have given you less of your money back than the Greens would have too).
It is almost inevitable that the Liberals will find themselves in this position four years from now. I say “almost” because there really appears to be only one thing which could derail the Liberals from developing a platform which takes a visionary and comprehensive approach on addressing the climate crisis. That “one thing” is if the NDP get there first.
The NDP has been talking a little bit more lately about climate change, but it’s apparent to me that the New Democrats still just don’t get it. In this past campaign, we saw the NDP talk about the need to reduce carbon emissions, and then with the very next breath, they told voters about their desire to lower the price of gasoline, because people need to get to work. At the end of it all, the NDP’s primary focus has been (and likely will continue to be) putting the working class at the front of the line. Generally, I share those concerns with the NDP, but when it leads to inaction or detrimental action on environmental initiatives, we’ve got a problem. Because no matter how much we need good jobs for working families, if we don’t get the climate crisis under control, jobs (good or otherwise) are going to increasingly become a scarce commodity.
The NDP’s support of cap and trade illustrates their lack of understanding regarding climate change, or the needs of small businesses. A fluctuating price on carbon will put businesses at a disadvantage when it comes to figuring out medium and long term expenses. In contrast, a carbon tax is a known quantity, and businesses will be able to plan for expenses. Larger, international corporations doing business in Canada will be better positioned to handle a fluctuating carbon market in a cap and trade scenario; it will be the smaller businesses which will run the greatest risk from a fluctuating market. Since those are the same business which Jack Layton and the NDP claim now to be the champion of, it perplexes me to no end that the NDP should continue to support cap and trade over a direct tax. But that’s exactly the sort of contradiction that I’ve come to expect from the NDP, and in part why I just can not support them.
So I don’t really think that the NDP will have altered their cap and trade stance four years from now, but it is possible, and if they do, they will steal some of the Liberal’s thunder should the federal Liberals decide to go down that road (and for the reasons I’ve identified, I really do believe that they will).
Four years hence, I have to ask myself, which Party is going to be in the best position to deliver on the environment and the economy? Clearly it won’t be the Conservatives, and I doubt it will be the NDP. That leaves…the Greens and the Liberals. And four years from now, there might not be much of a Green Party left, save and except for a rump around Vancouver-Victoria, and maybe an island in Central Ontario.
You see, this election hit the Green Party hard. Yes, Elizabeth May became the first-ever Green elected to parliament, which is a huge accomplishment. I was an advocate of the “putting all of the eggs into one basket” approach to get May elected, developed as the top priority in the Party’s campaign plan. I figured that if May was elected, our Party would have renewed credibility. I suspect that’s going to still be the outcome, but how far will that credibility stretch in the current circumstance?
Aside from May’s election to parliament, what happened to the Green Party on Monday night is going to reverberate throughout the Party in the years to come. Our percentage of the popular vote declined to levels not seen since before Jim Harris was the leader. This might have had to do more with the fact that May was excluded from the Leader’s debate, which shot the Party’s credibility all to hell. At the time, May said that she didn’t see it coming, and that she expected to be included because of what happened last time. Whether this was an unexpected revelation or not, the Party had a decent contingency in place to work the mainstream media and social media to keep the story alive in an effort to change the Consortium’s mind.
I can tell you that her exclusion from the Leader’s debate came as no surprise to me. And four years hence, her exclusion from the Leader’s debate will continue to be unsurprising. I have every confidence that the Conservatives will begin assessing minor electoral reforms, and one of those initiatives will be to codify who gets invited to televised debates. In an effort to keep the Bloc out of those debates, a threshold will be set, and it will be the Leaders of Parties which have Official status in the House. This means no Bloc and no Greens. The other parties, in a rare display of agreement, are sure to endorse this approach. Why would the Liberals and NDP want the Greens at their debate? They had the opportunity to influence matters in this past campaign and chose to sit on their hands while idly mouthing that they thought the decision should have been different. Thanks for using all of your influence to walk the talk there guys.
May’s impact in the House is going to be marginal, whether she can convince the Speaker to authorize special privileges or not. She’s one voice, and she’s up against a majority government. On many of the things which she might speak about, she’s going to end up sounding no different than her NDP and Liberal counterparts. Sure, she may yet wind up to be the moral conscious of the House, but in our win at all cost electoral system, having a moral conscious is almost a sure guarantee that you won’t be returned to the House.
And that maybe most of all is why I’m feeling empty after this past campaign. What we have done is return to power a Party which was found to be in contempt of parliament, who have proven themselves to be the most secretive and power-seeking political party Canada has ever seen. Just about everything that I value about our democratic institutions and traditions, the Conservatives are willing to sacrifice on their alter of political expediency if they think there’s gain to be had by doing so. Yet we’ve rewarded the Conservatives with another chance to govern; in fact, we’ve given them a big blank cheque to make over our nation as they see fit. Why did we just do that?
I’m not going to blame the NDP surge for vote-splitting in the GTA, or the hapless Ignatieff campaign that couldn’t find an issue to stick to. I’m not going to blame the Green Party for mounting a dismal national campaign at a time which we could have seized on the zeitgeist of the moment (had we only known that the moment was upon us; no blame for us Greens here, as no one knew that the moment had come a few weeks ago, until a few days after it had happened). Heck, I’m not even going to blame the pollsters who largely blew making the call.
The votes were cast and counted, and although Canada did not get the government that it voted for, it got what it got, thanks to an antiquated electoral system where most votes simply don’t matter. 60% of voters wanted a Party other than the Conservatives, yet here we are with a Harper majority. Almost 40% of Canadian voters remain disengaged from our electoral process altogether, which remains one of the saddest stories to come out of this election.
The rise of the NDP hurt the Green Party in this election. In a majority situation, the NDP will have plenty of time to consolidate, and by staying in the spotlight for four years, we can expect that the NDP won’t be just experiencing an “ADQ moment” and dissolve back into the background. With an NDP positioned to champion the left, and with a Liberal Party offering something akin to a bold vision for Canadians, where might that leave the Green Party four years from now?
With our electoral defeat, our funding from the per-vote subsidy has been cut in half overnight. With the Conservatives threatening to remove the subsidy altogether, we can expect that funding to dry up in a few years. While it’s true that we’ve been getting better at fundraising, with a loss of votes throughout Canada, our pool of well-heeled supporters is drying up. Perhaps May can re-invigorate the Party, when she’s not busy in Ottawa or doing constituency work or just generally being Wonder Woman. I guess we can add fundraising to her list of things to do.
Without the money in the bank, we can expect a similar national campaign to the one we’ve just been through. Over the past several years, we’ve decided to make May’s election the top priority, at the expense of almost every other initiative we might have undertaken. It’s beginning to show. Last year, dozens of EDA’s were deregistered, while none were created to replace them. EDA’s are the local, grassroots heart of the party, yet they’ve been neglected by the Central Party at the expense of our campaign strategy. Without immediate focus on building healthy EDA’s, we can expect many more to whither, especially with such low numbers of supporters. Here in Sudbury, we’ve grown somewhat used to have to compete with the NDP for progressive votes; now, we’ve just seen that applied to all of Canada. And we can expect it to continue, unless something is done about it.
This past election rewarded the politics of cynicism over the politics of hope, despite what the NDP surge might have you believe. The Green Party clearly didn’t engage on a cynical level (or, pretty much on any level, due to the lack of media coverage). Our hopeful voters left us in droves, casting their ballots for orange (just as progressive Liberals flew the coup as well). In the future, if we are going to experience success, we will need to define ourselves in stark contrast to the NDP while also successfully communicating that message.
For too long now, in the minds of voters, there’s been a great degree of confusion about our Party and the NDP, given the plurality of issues which our two parties appear to support. Perhaps its time to take aim at the NDP’s policies which are problematic for our supporters, and engage in a degree of “negative campaigning” about the issues (and not about the personalities). We may have to use some of our limited media exposure to go after the NDP, in order to define ourselves as something “other”. In this past campaign, the confusion between small “g” green issues which our Party supported and the NDP did as well led directly to our supporters casting their ballot for a different Party.
This kind of messaging won’t go over well with the Green Party. May has already said that she is going to practice politics differently. That’s likely not going to be good enough for the Green Party in the face of a successful NDP Official Opposition. And make no mistake, the NDP will be successful, because they are the anti-Conservatives. With only a Liberal rump in place which doesn’t have a clue how to conduct itself as a third party, and which will be focussed on internal issues for a couple of years now anyway, the NDP under a cagey and canny Laton will have it good. Which is bad for the Greens.
Other options might need to be explored, especially if members and past-candidates begin jumping ship again, demoralized by our efforts in the election, despite May’s inclusion in parliament. Unless those members can be replaced, it may come to a point where the Green Party is going to have to seriously look at opportunities for a merger, although in our case, it would be more like being subsumed by one of the other Parties.
A rejuvenated Liberal Party might provide for a good partner for Greens in the years to come, if they truly begin to embrace a bold vision for Canada. Alternatively, the Green Party could simply bleed away into a regional or multi-regional party, with vast areas of the nation having given up and moved on – for now, with the hopes of being recaptured when a more mature Party emerges.
Either way, in the current circumstance, there must be a change of focus within the Green Party. We may have to return to our grassroots, although I don’t think that electoral success lies in that direction (plus, with May as Leader, along with our current Federal Council, additional power flowing to the grassroots just isn’t going to be on the table). Therefore, we must become like the other parties, only without the money or staff. That’s…a pretty big challenge.
There may be a third way, however, and that’s to focus on only those things which we can accomplish. One strategy might find us centring our scarce resources on winnable ridings geographically grouped together at the expense of everybody and everywhere else, perhaps as a part of an agreement with other parties not to run against them. This kind of “strategic merger”, potentially again with the Liberals, could further our interests, especially if we target Central Ontario and parts of BC (and maybe Alberta, although I’d be reluctant to waste too much time there) where the Liberals currently don’t have seats.
And finally, we should be ready to create our own opportunities when the moment arises. That means fully participating in by-elections (in ways we haven’t done so in years now), and running smart media and social media campaigns which are issue-specific. We need to use the mainstream media to target Canadians about the big issues relevant to our Party, and use social media for micro-campaigns which distinguish us from our NDP rivals. All of this will require planning and organizing. I’m just not sure that we’re going to have the resources to pull it off.
Those…are my thoughts, two days after the 2011 federal election.
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own, and should not be interpreted as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada)
Although it’s far from certain whether I was drinking in celebration of Elizabeth May’s historic win in SGI, or drinking to dull my mind about the prospect of a false majority government for the Conservatives. In retrospect, I think that I am more concerned and upset about the latter than I am happy about the former. I seem to recall comments made by May herself back in 2008 that the last thing that she wanted was to have a handful of Green MP’s elected to stare across the aisle at a Harper majority. But perhaps I shouldn’t bring those comments up.
Despite the other historic upsets which saw a record number of NDP MP’s elected to the House, and the virtual destruction of the Bloc Quebecois, Monday’s election has left me very concerned about the future economic health of our country. Although a minority of voters (around 40%) gave the Conservatives a nod, the fact is that with a false majority, the Cons will be free to pursue their corporatist agenda to, what I suspect will be, the detriment of a majority of Canadians. Four years is a long time; a lot of change can happen in those years. Most of the changes we’ll see, I suspect, won’t be the sorts of changes which Canada needs to make in order to be better positioned to face the future.
Almost certainly we’re not going to see any action to put a price on carbon in order to combat the climate crisis. Our role in international negotiations will undoubtedly remain obstructionist, at best, and completely undermining at worse. In an effort to pretend to be doing something about the climate crisis, and meeting their extremely modest emissions “reduction” targets (which aren’t actually targets to reduce emissions), the Conservatives may wish to continue pursuing the “one offs”, such as the recently announced carbon capture and storage project in Saskatchewan, in an effort to convince voters that they’re doing something. Unfortunately, more projects like this one, which (may) reduce carbon emissions, will end up bankrupting our economy due to a massively high price per-tonne of CO2 removed. Megaprojects aren’t the way forward for emissions reductions, when conservation is a cheap and viable alternative. But I guess conservation doesn’t line any corporate pockets.
With four years of a false majority government taking little or no action on the climate crisis, you’d think that a Green like me might be happy that my party could emerge to fill a void on neglected environmental issues. That seems sensible enough, on the one hand. If Canadians, in 2015, want to see action on the environment, maybe in the same way they did in 2008, or perhaps in a stronger way, turning to the Green Party will make sense. Right?
Not so fast. Here’s why:
The Liberal Party is going to have to try to figure out a way to rebuild itself after the disastrous result handed to Michael Ignatieff. Surely one of the ways forward for the Liberals is the need to define themselves as a Party of bold ideas, and not just the “We’re not the Conservatives” which so many Canadians obviously grew tired of hearing. When it comes to bold ideas, the Liberals are going to have to latch on to the environment as a starting point in a conversation they’ll have with Canadians. Only this time, under bright and articulate leadership (whether that’s Trudeau, Rae or Leblanc, or…dare I say it? Stephane Dion), they’ll be able to make the issue of the environment and climate change their own.
In 2008, they tried this approach and failed. Perhaps the timing wasn’t as auspicious as it might have been; perhaps the messenger wasn’t able to communicate the message effectively. Whatever the reason, the outcome led to the Liberals abandoning their carbon tax plan, and embracing an expensive, untested, and problematic cap and trade scheme which no one wanted to talk about. The fact that the NDP and Bloc also supported cap and trade in this past election meant that carbon pricing was left completely out of the (meagre) policy debates which took place.
Yet, back at the Liberals’ policy and leadership convention in the spring of 2009, the Liberal Party membership reconfirmed their commitment to a carbon tax. Famously, Michael Ignatieff at the same convention went on the record that he would not be running on a carbon tax. Now that he’s gone, the doorway remains open for the Liberals to bring back carbon tax shifting policies, which would be very similar to those promoted by the Green Party (except for the price per tonne charged, which under Dion would have been much lower than the Green’s pricing; and on the flipside, the Liberals would have given you less of your money back than the Greens would have too).
It is almost inevitable that the Liberals will find themselves in this position four years from now. I say “almost” because there really appears to be only one thing which could derail the Liberals from developing a platform which takes a visionary and comprehensive approach on addressing the climate crisis. That “one thing” is if the NDP get there first.
The NDP has been talking a little bit more lately about climate change, but it’s apparent to me that the New Democrats still just don’t get it. In this past campaign, we saw the NDP talk about the need to reduce carbon emissions, and then with the very next breath, they told voters about their desire to lower the price of gasoline, because people need to get to work. At the end of it all, the NDP’s primary focus has been (and likely will continue to be) putting the working class at the front of the line. Generally, I share those concerns with the NDP, but when it leads to inaction or detrimental action on environmental initiatives, we’ve got a problem. Because no matter how much we need good jobs for working families, if we don’t get the climate crisis under control, jobs (good or otherwise) are going to increasingly become a scarce commodity.
The NDP’s support of cap and trade illustrates their lack of understanding regarding climate change, or the needs of small businesses. A fluctuating price on carbon will put businesses at a disadvantage when it comes to figuring out medium and long term expenses. In contrast, a carbon tax is a known quantity, and businesses will be able to plan for expenses. Larger, international corporations doing business in Canada will be better positioned to handle a fluctuating carbon market in a cap and trade scenario; it will be the smaller businesses which will run the greatest risk from a fluctuating market. Since those are the same business which Jack Layton and the NDP claim now to be the champion of, it perplexes me to no end that the NDP should continue to support cap and trade over a direct tax. But that’s exactly the sort of contradiction that I’ve come to expect from the NDP, and in part why I just can not support them.
So I don’t really think that the NDP will have altered their cap and trade stance four years from now, but it is possible, and if they do, they will steal some of the Liberal’s thunder should the federal Liberals decide to go down that road (and for the reasons I’ve identified, I really do believe that they will).
Four years hence, I have to ask myself, which Party is going to be in the best position to deliver on the environment and the economy? Clearly it won’t be the Conservatives, and I doubt it will be the NDP. That leaves…the Greens and the Liberals. And four years from now, there might not be much of a Green Party left, save and except for a rump around Vancouver-Victoria, and maybe an island in Central Ontario.
You see, this election hit the Green Party hard. Yes, Elizabeth May became the first-ever Green elected to parliament, which is a huge accomplishment. I was an advocate of the “putting all of the eggs into one basket” approach to get May elected, developed as the top priority in the Party’s campaign plan. I figured that if May was elected, our Party would have renewed credibility. I suspect that’s going to still be the outcome, but how far will that credibility stretch in the current circumstance?
Aside from May’s election to parliament, what happened to the Green Party on Monday night is going to reverberate throughout the Party in the years to come. Our percentage of the popular vote declined to levels not seen since before Jim Harris was the leader. This might have had to do more with the fact that May was excluded from the Leader’s debate, which shot the Party’s credibility all to hell. At the time, May said that she didn’t see it coming, and that she expected to be included because of what happened last time. Whether this was an unexpected revelation or not, the Party had a decent contingency in place to work the mainstream media and social media to keep the story alive in an effort to change the Consortium’s mind.
I can tell you that her exclusion from the Leader’s debate came as no surprise to me. And four years hence, her exclusion from the Leader’s debate will continue to be unsurprising. I have every confidence that the Conservatives will begin assessing minor electoral reforms, and one of those initiatives will be to codify who gets invited to televised debates. In an effort to keep the Bloc out of those debates, a threshold will be set, and it will be the Leaders of Parties which have Official status in the House. This means no Bloc and no Greens. The other parties, in a rare display of agreement, are sure to endorse this approach. Why would the Liberals and NDP want the Greens at their debate? They had the opportunity to influence matters in this past campaign and chose to sit on their hands while idly mouthing that they thought the decision should have been different. Thanks for using all of your influence to walk the talk there guys.
May’s impact in the House is going to be marginal, whether she can convince the Speaker to authorize special privileges or not. She’s one voice, and she’s up against a majority government. On many of the things which she might speak about, she’s going to end up sounding no different than her NDP and Liberal counterparts. Sure, she may yet wind up to be the moral conscious of the House, but in our win at all cost electoral system, having a moral conscious is almost a sure guarantee that you won’t be returned to the House.
And that maybe most of all is why I’m feeling empty after this past campaign. What we have done is return to power a Party which was found to be in contempt of parliament, who have proven themselves to be the most secretive and power-seeking political party Canada has ever seen. Just about everything that I value about our democratic institutions and traditions, the Conservatives are willing to sacrifice on their alter of political expediency if they think there’s gain to be had by doing so. Yet we’ve rewarded the Conservatives with another chance to govern; in fact, we’ve given them a big blank cheque to make over our nation as they see fit. Why did we just do that?
I’m not going to blame the NDP surge for vote-splitting in the GTA, or the hapless Ignatieff campaign that couldn’t find an issue to stick to. I’m not going to blame the Green Party for mounting a dismal national campaign at a time which we could have seized on the zeitgeist of the moment (had we only known that the moment was upon us; no blame for us Greens here, as no one knew that the moment had come a few weeks ago, until a few days after it had happened). Heck, I’m not even going to blame the pollsters who largely blew making the call.
The votes were cast and counted, and although Canada did not get the government that it voted for, it got what it got, thanks to an antiquated electoral system where most votes simply don’t matter. 60% of voters wanted a Party other than the Conservatives, yet here we are with a Harper majority. Almost 40% of Canadian voters remain disengaged from our electoral process altogether, which remains one of the saddest stories to come out of this election.
The rise of the NDP hurt the Green Party in this election. In a majority situation, the NDP will have plenty of time to consolidate, and by staying in the spotlight for four years, we can expect that the NDP won’t be just experiencing an “ADQ moment” and dissolve back into the background. With an NDP positioned to champion the left, and with a Liberal Party offering something akin to a bold vision for Canadians, where might that leave the Green Party four years from now?
With our electoral defeat, our funding from the per-vote subsidy has been cut in half overnight. With the Conservatives threatening to remove the subsidy altogether, we can expect that funding to dry up in a few years. While it’s true that we’ve been getting better at fundraising, with a loss of votes throughout Canada, our pool of well-heeled supporters is drying up. Perhaps May can re-invigorate the Party, when she’s not busy in Ottawa or doing constituency work or just generally being Wonder Woman. I guess we can add fundraising to her list of things to do.
Without the money in the bank, we can expect a similar national campaign to the one we’ve just been through. Over the past several years, we’ve decided to make May’s election the top priority, at the expense of almost every other initiative we might have undertaken. It’s beginning to show. Last year, dozens of EDA’s were deregistered, while none were created to replace them. EDA’s are the local, grassroots heart of the party, yet they’ve been neglected by the Central Party at the expense of our campaign strategy. Without immediate focus on building healthy EDA’s, we can expect many more to whither, especially with such low numbers of supporters. Here in Sudbury, we’ve grown somewhat used to have to compete with the NDP for progressive votes; now, we’ve just seen that applied to all of Canada. And we can expect it to continue, unless something is done about it.
This past election rewarded the politics of cynicism over the politics of hope, despite what the NDP surge might have you believe. The Green Party clearly didn’t engage on a cynical level (or, pretty much on any level, due to the lack of media coverage). Our hopeful voters left us in droves, casting their ballots for orange (just as progressive Liberals flew the coup as well). In the future, if we are going to experience success, we will need to define ourselves in stark contrast to the NDP while also successfully communicating that message.
For too long now, in the minds of voters, there’s been a great degree of confusion about our Party and the NDP, given the plurality of issues which our two parties appear to support. Perhaps its time to take aim at the NDP’s policies which are problematic for our supporters, and engage in a degree of “negative campaigning” about the issues (and not about the personalities). We may have to use some of our limited media exposure to go after the NDP, in order to define ourselves as something “other”. In this past campaign, the confusion between small “g” green issues which our Party supported and the NDP did as well led directly to our supporters casting their ballot for a different Party.
This kind of messaging won’t go over well with the Green Party. May has already said that she is going to practice politics differently. That’s likely not going to be good enough for the Green Party in the face of a successful NDP Official Opposition. And make no mistake, the NDP will be successful, because they are the anti-Conservatives. With only a Liberal rump in place which doesn’t have a clue how to conduct itself as a third party, and which will be focussed on internal issues for a couple of years now anyway, the NDP under a cagey and canny Laton will have it good. Which is bad for the Greens.
Other options might need to be explored, especially if members and past-candidates begin jumping ship again, demoralized by our efforts in the election, despite May’s inclusion in parliament. Unless those members can be replaced, it may come to a point where the Green Party is going to have to seriously look at opportunities for a merger, although in our case, it would be more like being subsumed by one of the other Parties.
A rejuvenated Liberal Party might provide for a good partner for Greens in the years to come, if they truly begin to embrace a bold vision for Canada. Alternatively, the Green Party could simply bleed away into a regional or multi-regional party, with vast areas of the nation having given up and moved on – for now, with the hopes of being recaptured when a more mature Party emerges.
Either way, in the current circumstance, there must be a change of focus within the Green Party. We may have to return to our grassroots, although I don’t think that electoral success lies in that direction (plus, with May as Leader, along with our current Federal Council, additional power flowing to the grassroots just isn’t going to be on the table). Therefore, we must become like the other parties, only without the money or staff. That’s…a pretty big challenge.
There may be a third way, however, and that’s to focus on only those things which we can accomplish. One strategy might find us centring our scarce resources on winnable ridings geographically grouped together at the expense of everybody and everywhere else, perhaps as a part of an agreement with other parties not to run against them. This kind of “strategic merger”, potentially again with the Liberals, could further our interests, especially if we target Central Ontario and parts of BC (and maybe Alberta, although I’d be reluctant to waste too much time there) where the Liberals currently don’t have seats.
And finally, we should be ready to create our own opportunities when the moment arises. That means fully participating in by-elections (in ways we haven’t done so in years now), and running smart media and social media campaigns which are issue-specific. We need to use the mainstream media to target Canadians about the big issues relevant to our Party, and use social media for micro-campaigns which distinguish us from our NDP rivals. All of this will require planning and organizing. I’m just not sure that we’re going to have the resources to pull it off.
Those…are my thoughts, two days after the 2011 federal election.
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own, and should not be interpreted as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada)
Thursday, April 28, 2011
From Conservative Minority to Majority, Part IV: The Conservative Edge
In Part III, I described why I believed that the Governor General would have little choice but to follow the advice offered to him by the Prime Minister to dissolve parliament, once a Conservative minority government falls on a vote of confidence, orchestrated by the Opposition as part of an effort to form a stable government. I indicated that it seemed to me that, based on Stephen Harper’s past statements, some of which were made quite recently to the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, a defeated Harper would ask the GG to dissolve parliament, rather than follow the example of former Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Frank Miller, when he was defeated by the Liberals and the NDP on the throne speech back in 1985. While Harper could advise the GG to turn to the Opposition to govern, I can’t see how he could bring himself to do so.
And that means that we will find ourselves in yet another election before too long. Really, that shouldn’t surprise Canadians too much, in one respect: because Conservative candidates have been saying as much for the past 30+ days on the campaign trail. They’ve been using the threat of another unnecessary election as a reason for voters to give the Conservatives a majority government. Without a majority, Conservatives have said, expect another election.
Yet, if another election, whether it be in June or November (following a prorogation), is precipitated by a request from Stephen Harper to the Governor General, won’t Canadians hold that against Harper, and punish him at the polls?
No way.
If the Opposition Liberals and NDP get together to defeat a Conservative minority government, likely on the first matter of confidence which comes before the House (the throne speech), and Harper feels that he is forced to return to Canadians through an election, it is the Opposition which stands to be punished by voters, and not the Conservatives. In Part III, I discussed the notion of upping the level of rhetoric to an uncomfortable level, some of which we saw back in 2008 during the so-called “Constitutional Crisis”, where terms like “coup d’etat” were being used to describe the Opposition’s attempt to “seize power” from “winning party”.
If you think Harper and the Conservatives have been nasty on the campaign trail during this election when it comes to talking about the coalition, you haven’t seen anything yet. If Canada is drawn into another election, you can bet that the Conservatives will wrap themselves in the Canadian flag, and paint the Opposition coalition as no better than a gang of criminals trying to seize power from the legitimate elected government. If the Bloc Quebecois is involved at all, so much the better from the Conservative’s perspective (and you can bet whether the Bloc is involved or not, that the Conservatives will trot out the separatist bogeyman as yet another reason for voters to punish the Opposition parties).
The Opposition parties will be left with the unenviable task of having to explain a few things to Canadians. First, they’ll have to try to explain why they believed that their actions to replace the Conservative minority government were not only legal and legitimate, but also in the best interests of Canada. And second, they’ll have to explain why they never believed that their actions would precipitate yet another election that Canadians don’t want, given that they ought to have known that an election is exactly where their actions would lead to, given what the Conservatives had previously warned Canadians about.
Of course, the Opposition Parties will be able to claim that Stephen Harper has no honour, that he should have advised the GG to turn power over to them, er, that they could have formed a stable government without an election, but for the bad advice given to the GG by Stephen Harper.
As someone who has been involved with campaigns now on several elections, I can tell you from which side I would prefer to make my case to voters during an election.
At a debate held in Sudbury on Tuesday night, I watched the NDP candidate try to explain the NDP’s position on cap and trade, and how it would work. He couldn’t do it. His response was just terrible. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t understand the position, though. Only that explaining something as complex as cap and trade in a minute and a half, when put on the spot, is very difficult to do for anyone. Even I would have struggled.
Well, explaining how a cap and trade emissions scheme would work pales in comparison to the difficulty in explaining why the Prime Minister’s advise to the GG was wrong, and how the GG should have used Reserve powers to transfer governance from the Party that won the election to a coalition of parties that lost, and how actually a transfer of power without having an election is more democratic than going back to the voters and why it would have been in the interests of Canadians to allow the coalition to govern in the first place, not to mention why they ever thought they wouldn’t end up right where they did, given that’s where Stephen Harper and the Conservatives said we’d all be.
Ya, cap and trade would be a snap compared to that.
So, the Conservatives would start off by occupying the moral high ground, at least in the perception of many Canadians. Sure, there would be some who would understand what’s really going on, but with a compelling Conservative narrative, I can’t help but think they’d be in the minority. Especially if the Liberals and NDP had to work with the Bloc to orchestrate the defeat of the Conservative minority government. Remember that public opinion during the so-called “Constitutional Crisis” was clearly favouring the Conservative’s position.
Public opinion, too, is sure to be bolstered by the mainstream media. Now, I’m not at all suggesting that the mainstream media is going to get behind the notion that Harper had no choice but to call an election after his defeat (although many in the mainstream media will adopt that approach…indeed, I think I’ve made a pretty strong case for just that in Part III of this series). Why I believe the media will be complicit in selling the Harper narrative has to do with the media’s current and past track record of not actually questioning Harper’s assertions regarding the legitimacy of coalition governments, and whether parties have the right to form them.
Harper and the Conservatives, and indeed Ignatieff and Layton, seem to be able to say pretty much whatever they want to the mainstream media nowadays, and very rarely are they questioned on their assertions. Instead, the media moves on to the next story, before fact-checking the one they’ve just published. Indeed, there used to be a time when fact-checking would have occurred before publication, but in the 24 hour news cycle, who has the time or resources for that? If something truly egregious emerges, such as the Conservatives claim that the Liberals voted for an iPod tax, then the media will likely sort it out eventually, maybe even causing some brief embarrassment to the parties involved. And then the story is forgotten (remember when it was reported that the Conservatives used the words of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser out of context in a report, for which she rebuked them? That was only a couple of weeks ago, but I’ll bet most of you have moved on from this story after Stockwell Day publicly apologized to the Auditor General on national TV. Day, of course, isn’t running in this election, so he’s largely been absent from the media spotlight).
Who, then, will be left to challenge the Harper narrative? If the Opposition parties can’t do it, and the media won’t do it, that leaves only the little voices shouting in the sea of online social media. And trust me, unless someone can explain all of this in an exciting YouTube video, preferably one with singing children or cats falling off of furniture, best of luck to us social media types for getting the word out in a 35-day election.
Finally, let’s not forget what’s probably the biggest factor at play here: money. The fact is the Conservative Party will have enough money in the bank to fight two elections back-to-back, while the Opposition Parties will not. In fact, we can expect the Liberals and the NDP, along with the Bloc and the Greens, to have built up some debt as a result of this election campaign. That’s not unusual, especially since the Parties know that money will be coming back to them in the from of candidate reimbursements (for those ridings where more than 10% of the vote was won) and the per-vote subsidy.
If money is an issue, though, no doubt the Conservatives would benefit from calling a snap election right away, before Elections Canada has a chance to send out any rebates to candidates and parties. Without money in the bank, and with debt from one election, it’s not at all likely that the Opposition parties would be able to run successful national campaigns. This would put them at even more of a disadvantage to Harper’s Conservatives.
To recap: another election on the heels of this one benefits the Conservatives in many ways. The Conservatives will have compelling national narrative to present to the people of Canada in contrast to the Opposition’s need to present difficult, technical information. The Conservatives will continue to enjoy a free ride in the mainstream media, which will fail to ask the difficult questions as to why we’re having another election. And the Conservatives have the money in the bank to pull this off, while the Opposition parties will be broke.
With all of the above acting in favour of the Conservatives, a majority government is almost a certain outcome. A majority government is what Stephen Harper has been craving for a long while now; it’s been something which progressive Canadians have long feared.
In this series of blogposts, I’ve looked at why I believe that an immediate move by the Opposition parties to defeat a Conservative minority government will lead inexorably towards the establishment of a Conservative majority government. In the process, we’re sure to witness a further decline in the democratic health of our national discourse, with political mudslinging on a scale never before witnessed in Canada. Depending on how things play themselves out, we will run the risk of jeopardizing the very Canada that all political parties are intent on governing.
The Canada which emerges from this scenario is sure to be a damaged Canada, and potentially a Canada in crisis. A majority Conservative government will be given a free hand to provide the medicine that it thinks Canada will need in order to heal. For progressive Canadians, we can be sure that the medicine will be the bitterest and sourest on offer, and that it will do more harm than good. We’d call that medicine “poison”.
Given that, around the world, right-wing governments have used crises to tear down social systems and privative state assets, and given that there remains a multi-billion dollar hole in the Conservative’s budget (along with tens of billions of dollars of deficit), the Canada which emerges from the four or five years of a Harper majority after such a wrenching electoral crisis is almost certainly to be one unidentifiable to Canadians today.
Now, all of this may be for naught if the NDP continues to its meteoric rise in the polls, and we all wake up on Tuesday morning to discover that Jack Layton is going to be the Prime Minister. I’ll have to write about the problems with that scenario at another time!
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are more own, and should not be interpreted as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada)
And that means that we will find ourselves in yet another election before too long. Really, that shouldn’t surprise Canadians too much, in one respect: because Conservative candidates have been saying as much for the past 30+ days on the campaign trail. They’ve been using the threat of another unnecessary election as a reason for voters to give the Conservatives a majority government. Without a majority, Conservatives have said, expect another election.
Yet, if another election, whether it be in June or November (following a prorogation), is precipitated by a request from Stephen Harper to the Governor General, won’t Canadians hold that against Harper, and punish him at the polls?
No way.
If the Opposition Liberals and NDP get together to defeat a Conservative minority government, likely on the first matter of confidence which comes before the House (the throne speech), and Harper feels that he is forced to return to Canadians through an election, it is the Opposition which stands to be punished by voters, and not the Conservatives. In Part III, I discussed the notion of upping the level of rhetoric to an uncomfortable level, some of which we saw back in 2008 during the so-called “Constitutional Crisis”, where terms like “coup d’etat” were being used to describe the Opposition’s attempt to “seize power” from “winning party”.
If you think Harper and the Conservatives have been nasty on the campaign trail during this election when it comes to talking about the coalition, you haven’t seen anything yet. If Canada is drawn into another election, you can bet that the Conservatives will wrap themselves in the Canadian flag, and paint the Opposition coalition as no better than a gang of criminals trying to seize power from the legitimate elected government. If the Bloc Quebecois is involved at all, so much the better from the Conservative’s perspective (and you can bet whether the Bloc is involved or not, that the Conservatives will trot out the separatist bogeyman as yet another reason for voters to punish the Opposition parties).
The Opposition parties will be left with the unenviable task of having to explain a few things to Canadians. First, they’ll have to try to explain why they believed that their actions to replace the Conservative minority government were not only legal and legitimate, but also in the best interests of Canada. And second, they’ll have to explain why they never believed that their actions would precipitate yet another election that Canadians don’t want, given that they ought to have known that an election is exactly where their actions would lead to, given what the Conservatives had previously warned Canadians about.
Of course, the Opposition Parties will be able to claim that Stephen Harper has no honour, that he should have advised the GG to turn power over to them, er, that they could have formed a stable government without an election, but for the bad advice given to the GG by Stephen Harper.
As someone who has been involved with campaigns now on several elections, I can tell you from which side I would prefer to make my case to voters during an election.
At a debate held in Sudbury on Tuesday night, I watched the NDP candidate try to explain the NDP’s position on cap and trade, and how it would work. He couldn’t do it. His response was just terrible. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t understand the position, though. Only that explaining something as complex as cap and trade in a minute and a half, when put on the spot, is very difficult to do for anyone. Even I would have struggled.
Well, explaining how a cap and trade emissions scheme would work pales in comparison to the difficulty in explaining why the Prime Minister’s advise to the GG was wrong, and how the GG should have used Reserve powers to transfer governance from the Party that won the election to a coalition of parties that lost, and how actually a transfer of power without having an election is more democratic than going back to the voters and why it would have been in the interests of Canadians to allow the coalition to govern in the first place, not to mention why they ever thought they wouldn’t end up right where they did, given that’s where Stephen Harper and the Conservatives said we’d all be.
Ya, cap and trade would be a snap compared to that.
So, the Conservatives would start off by occupying the moral high ground, at least in the perception of many Canadians. Sure, there would be some who would understand what’s really going on, but with a compelling Conservative narrative, I can’t help but think they’d be in the minority. Especially if the Liberals and NDP had to work with the Bloc to orchestrate the defeat of the Conservative minority government. Remember that public opinion during the so-called “Constitutional Crisis” was clearly favouring the Conservative’s position.
Public opinion, too, is sure to be bolstered by the mainstream media. Now, I’m not at all suggesting that the mainstream media is going to get behind the notion that Harper had no choice but to call an election after his defeat (although many in the mainstream media will adopt that approach…indeed, I think I’ve made a pretty strong case for just that in Part III of this series). Why I believe the media will be complicit in selling the Harper narrative has to do with the media’s current and past track record of not actually questioning Harper’s assertions regarding the legitimacy of coalition governments, and whether parties have the right to form them.
Harper and the Conservatives, and indeed Ignatieff and Layton, seem to be able to say pretty much whatever they want to the mainstream media nowadays, and very rarely are they questioned on their assertions. Instead, the media moves on to the next story, before fact-checking the one they’ve just published. Indeed, there used to be a time when fact-checking would have occurred before publication, but in the 24 hour news cycle, who has the time or resources for that? If something truly egregious emerges, such as the Conservatives claim that the Liberals voted for an iPod tax, then the media will likely sort it out eventually, maybe even causing some brief embarrassment to the parties involved. And then the story is forgotten (remember when it was reported that the Conservatives used the words of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser out of context in a report, for which she rebuked them? That was only a couple of weeks ago, but I’ll bet most of you have moved on from this story after Stockwell Day publicly apologized to the Auditor General on national TV. Day, of course, isn’t running in this election, so he’s largely been absent from the media spotlight).
Who, then, will be left to challenge the Harper narrative? If the Opposition parties can’t do it, and the media won’t do it, that leaves only the little voices shouting in the sea of online social media. And trust me, unless someone can explain all of this in an exciting YouTube video, preferably one with singing children or cats falling off of furniture, best of luck to us social media types for getting the word out in a 35-day election.
Finally, let’s not forget what’s probably the biggest factor at play here: money. The fact is the Conservative Party will have enough money in the bank to fight two elections back-to-back, while the Opposition Parties will not. In fact, we can expect the Liberals and the NDP, along with the Bloc and the Greens, to have built up some debt as a result of this election campaign. That’s not unusual, especially since the Parties know that money will be coming back to them in the from of candidate reimbursements (for those ridings where more than 10% of the vote was won) and the per-vote subsidy.
If money is an issue, though, no doubt the Conservatives would benefit from calling a snap election right away, before Elections Canada has a chance to send out any rebates to candidates and parties. Without money in the bank, and with debt from one election, it’s not at all likely that the Opposition parties would be able to run successful national campaigns. This would put them at even more of a disadvantage to Harper’s Conservatives.
To recap: another election on the heels of this one benefits the Conservatives in many ways. The Conservatives will have compelling national narrative to present to the people of Canada in contrast to the Opposition’s need to present difficult, technical information. The Conservatives will continue to enjoy a free ride in the mainstream media, which will fail to ask the difficult questions as to why we’re having another election. And the Conservatives have the money in the bank to pull this off, while the Opposition parties will be broke.
With all of the above acting in favour of the Conservatives, a majority government is almost a certain outcome. A majority government is what Stephen Harper has been craving for a long while now; it’s been something which progressive Canadians have long feared.
In this series of blogposts, I’ve looked at why I believe that an immediate move by the Opposition parties to defeat a Conservative minority government will lead inexorably towards the establishment of a Conservative majority government. In the process, we’re sure to witness a further decline in the democratic health of our national discourse, with political mudslinging on a scale never before witnessed in Canada. Depending on how things play themselves out, we will run the risk of jeopardizing the very Canada that all political parties are intent on governing.
The Canada which emerges from this scenario is sure to be a damaged Canada, and potentially a Canada in crisis. A majority Conservative government will be given a free hand to provide the medicine that it thinks Canada will need in order to heal. For progressive Canadians, we can be sure that the medicine will be the bitterest and sourest on offer, and that it will do more harm than good. We’d call that medicine “poison”.
Given that, around the world, right-wing governments have used crises to tear down social systems and privative state assets, and given that there remains a multi-billion dollar hole in the Conservative’s budget (along with tens of billions of dollars of deficit), the Canada which emerges from the four or five years of a Harper majority after such a wrenching electoral crisis is almost certainly to be one unidentifiable to Canadians today.
Now, all of this may be for naught if the NDP continues to its meteoric rise in the polls, and we all wake up on Tuesday morning to discover that Jack Layton is going to be the Prime Minister. I’ll have to write about the problems with that scenario at another time!
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are more own, and should not be interpreted as being consistent with those of the Green Party of Canada)
From Conservative Minority to Majority, Part III: Fallout from the May 2nd Vote
Tuesday morning, May 3rd. Canada wakes up to discover that it’s elected yet another Conservative minority government. Just as all of the pundits were predicting prior to the vote of non-confidence in the Harper government. Sure, maybe the NDP and the Liberals have exchanged a few seats, and perhaps Harper’s majority isn’t as strong as it once was. And, oh look, there’s the Green Party making an elected appearance in the House for the first time. And maybe the Bloc has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Either way, though, the Conservatives have won the most seats. It’s to be…business as usual, right?
Well, Stephen Harper has been trying to sell to Canadians the notion that a Conservative minority situation will be anything but business as usual, and that’s why he’s been appealing to Canadian voters to give him a majority. Here in Greater Sudbury, I’ve heard the Nickel Belt candidate claim that if a Conservative minority government is elected on May the 2nd, we’re sure to see another election happening in the very near future.
What’s behind this is the notion that the Opposition parties, in some combination, whether in formal coalition or simply with verbal support, will try to bring down a Conservative minority at the first opportunity, and govern in its place. And frankly, why wouldn’t they? The Opposition has only recently expressed its extreme displeasure with the Harper Conservatives by voting on a motion of contempt of parliament. That was what directly precipitated this election. If the same group of contemptuous anti-democrats are returned to the House, and they continue to express their desire not to work with any other parties, why would the Opposition even try to pretend that a Conservative minority is the appropriate vehicle for governance?
Well, a Conservative might say that they should try because the Conservatives will have just won the election, and they have a right to govern. An Opposition supporter will say that while Harper may have a right to govern at the outset, if the Conservatives lose the confidence of parliament, Harper will have lost his right to govern, and since the Opposition parties are ready and able to govern, they should be allowed to form a government. Plus, don’t the Opposition parties actually have a greater plurality of seats in the House than do the Conservatives? Didn’t more Canadians actually vote for candidates who weren’t Conservatives?
It was this kind of friction which led to the so-called “Constitutional Crisis” of 2008. Back then, there seemed to be some confusion regarding who was right about what. With the prorogation of parliament, however, and a change of leadership in the Liberal Party, the crisis went away, and questions about which side was right were never answered. In 2011, however, we may find ourselves having to sort through that mess.
Let’s now turn our attention to how all of this might play itself out.
Clearly, as Stephen Harper is still technically the Prime Minister, and will remain so until the House resumes sitting after the election, Harper has the first shot at forming a government, whether his Party emerges from the election with the largest number of seats or not. Harper has said, though, that if the Conservatives don’t receive the largest number of seats, he will not try to form a government. And for once, I believe him. But, as of this moment, Jack-o-mania and the NDP surge isn’t yet threatening to displace the Conservatives from the top of the perch, so let’s continue along on the assumption that the Conservatives will have won the most seats, and thus will govern in a minority situation.
When the House returns, the first available opportunity for the Opposition to defeat a Conservative minority government will be on the Throne Speech. The Throne Speech, which lays out a government’s priorities for the coming session of parliament, requires a vote by the House, which is always a matter of confidence. Even back in 2008, before the so-called “Constitutional Crisis” struck, the newly elected Conservative minority government had presented a throne speech which received the support of the Opposition. Their support of this speech may have been a factor in the Governor General’s decision to prorogue parliament a few weeks later, when it looked as if the Opposition had completely changed its mind and was threatening a non-confidence vote.
If the Opposition finds that it is serious about governing, they’re not going to make the same potential mistake that they made last time. Discussions between Opposition parties will have all taken place prior to the House’s return, so a clear course of action will be on the table. The Governor General, and the Canadian people, will hear from the Opposition that there is a government-in-waiting. That happened back in 2008 as well, and I’m sure most of us remember just how horribly toxic the rhetoric got in the media and elsewhere.
Nonetheless, if the Opposition is serious about wanting to govern, the Conservatives will be defeated on the throne speech. Having lost the confidence of the House, Stephen Harper will be forced to go to the Governor General and advise
Hmmm….advise what? In Part I of this series, I wrote about how former Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Frank Miller, who had just been elected to a minority government, was defeated by the combined efforts of the Liberals and NDP on a throne speech. He visited the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and advised that the Opposition had indicated that it was able to govern (because they had signed an accord whereby the NDP promised to support the Liberals on matters of confidence, in exchange for the Liberal government implementing some NDP platform planks). The transition in Ontario was orderly and painless, because of Miller’s advice to the LG.
However, as I’ve indicated, I don’t think that there’s any way that Stephen Harper would ever offer similar advice to the GG if he is defeated on a matter of confidence. Quite certainly, back in 2008, Harper was on record that Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, whose party had just elected the second most members to parliament, had no right to govern. More recently, in attempting not to answer a pointed question from the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge regarding the legitimacy of a coalition government, Harper squirmed out a response that this was a constitutional matter. Those “in the know” scoffed at this weasel-worded response.
Again, I’m not a constitutional expert, but clearly there is no doubt that the Governor General can request the Opposition to form a government. That’s exactly what happened in Ontario in 1985. There are other precedents in other nations. It’s unusual, sure, but it’s absolutely not unheard of for the Opposition to govern without holding an election when the government has fallen on a matter of confidence. There is no question. That’s what Mansbridge was trying to get Harper to admit.
But, along with being cagey in his interview with Mansbridge, Harper had an ace up his sleeve: Peter Mansbridge had asked him the wrong question.
Mansbridge should have asked Harper what Harper’s advice to the Governor General would be if he was defeated by the Opposition on a vote on the throne speech. That’s the question which needs answering.
Put aside this nonsense about whether a coalition is legitimate or not legitimate, because it’s been answered by the Frank Miller / David Peterson Ontario example in 1985. Anything else is really just trying to obscure the fact. But as long as the media continue to allow Harper and the Conservatives to get away with obscuring this fact, and outright lying about the legitimacy of a coalition government, I’m sure that the Conservatives will continue to do so. Why? Because it serves their ultimate purpose to portray a coalition of losing parties trying to seize power as anti-democratic and un-Canadian.
Back to the scenario for a moment. Harper and the Conservatives have lost the confidence of the House, and Harper goes to visit his friend the GG, David Johnston (who was just appointed by Harper, after all; perhaps for, as Foghorn Leghorn would say about numbering his feathers, “for just such an emergency”). If Harper isn’t going to advise the GG to turn to the Opposition (and he’s not going to offer that advice, for all of the reasons above), the only thing he’s going to be able to request would be the dissolution of parliament, which would throw Canada into another election.
Would the GG follow this advice? In Part II, I discussed the GG’s relationship as the Crown’s representative with the State, and how, over time, the use of the GG’s Reserve powers (which allow the GG to ignore the advice of the Prime Minister) should only ever be used when democracy itself is imperilled by the advice or actions of the Prime Minister. While some might argue that a request for an election made by the PM is an abuse of democracy, I’m not sure that they would have a leg to stand on. Even if we had just went through an electoral process several weeks or months before.
If we had just gone through an election, would the GG use his Reserve powers to ignore the advice of the Prime Minister, and turn to the Opposition, under the assumption that an election isn’t necessary for government to function? Well, here’s what’s interesting about that. Sure, the argument that an election might be unnecessary would be a sound argument, and certainly it would be clear that the Opposition can govern in place of the Conservatives. But neither of these facts is relevant to the use of Reserve powers.
The relevant question which must be answered is whether the advice offered by the Prime Minister to hold another election so soon after an election imperils democracy. Another election could be viewed as unnecessary, and expensive, and even an “inconvenience” to Canadians. Certainly, calling another election is going to rile us up from coast to coast to coast. But how does a request to have an election, which is probably the purest expression of democracy at work, actually imperil our democracy?
I’m sorry…but it doesn’t. Whether we would need an election or not to produce a stable government doesn’t matter. What matters in this circumstance is whether it is appropriate for the Crown to exercise the use of Reserve powers, thus interfering with the interests of the State.
“Interfering with the interests of the State”. That’s a pretty strong term. How could the GG’s use of Reserve powers to stave off an unnecessary election ever be considered as meddling in the State’s affairs? Well, when it goes against the legitimate advice of the Prime Minister of Canada, that’s meddling.
So, would the PM’s advice be legit? Look at the circumstance, and you decide. And as hard as it might be, try putting yourself in Harper’s stated position for a moment. Harper’s Conservatives will have just won the most seats in the House; in the past, when this has happened, most often a minority government led by the dominant party has been the result. Certainly, that’s what we’ve seen happen in the last 3 elections from which minorities have resulted.
This minority, however, will not have been allowed to govern, because it had been defeated by the Opposition parties. Harper believes that the Opposition parties have “no right” to govern, and that a coalition of losing parties is illegitimate (in Canada, at least). Others in his Party have described this kind of attempt at seizing power as a “coup d’etat”.
If Harper really does believe his own rhetoric, his advice to the Governor General to return to the people of Canada would be advice offered in good faith. It would be advice which would not, in any way, shape or form, undermine Canada’s democratic principles. Indeed, from Harper’s perspective, if the GG didn’t follow this advice and allowed what is tantamount to a coup to take place, well, that would be far more of a threat to democracy than holding another election.
What might Canadians think of all of this? On the hand, the answer to that question isn’t relevant to whether the GG uses his Reserve powers to take action contrary to the Prime Minister’s advice. But on the other hand, the question is a very relevant one, because of where it might lead, and how knowing this might help influence the GG’s decision to acquiesce to the PM’s request.
Things were getting really bad back in 2008 with the rhetoric that was flying around. Pro-coalition demonstrations were being met by Pro-government demonstrators. There was little violence, to be sure, but clearly Canadians were beginning to polarize on the issue of the legitimacy of a coalition government. Had the situation continued for a few weeks more, I have little doubt that the opposing camps would have taken their conflicts off of the Editorial pages and onto the streets. The prorogation, however, put an end to that. Pro-government supporters felt that it was a victory, while pro-Opposition supporters believed that the GG’s decision to prorogue parliament simply put the inevitable off for a few more weeks. Of course, with Stephane Dion’s fall as Liberal Leader in the aftermath events that December, history tells a different story.
After May 2nd, however, events might move forward on their own, and prove to be unstoppable. Sure, it’s possible that Stephen Harper will delay parliament’s return to the House as long as possible, in order to avoid a confidence vote. He might even use that time to stoke the anti-coalition flames in the same way that the Conservatives did back in 2008. When parliament does return, and the throne speech is introduced, Harper might even try to prorogue parliament again before a vote is taken. Such a prorogation could last for several months, and technically could last as long as a year, although that’s very unlikely.
Either way, through a combination of delaying parliament’s return, and proroguing the House once the throne speech has been introduced, it’s quite possible that Harper might not actually have to face a confidence vote for several months, and maybe not even until the Fall of 2011. Maybe as many as 6 months might pass between May 2nd and the confidence vote.
Or, Harper might just want to get it all over with as quickly as possible.
Sooner or later, though, what we can be sure of is if the Opposition makes any suggestion that it wants to govern in place of the Conservatives, things are going to get very messy in Canada. You can bet that the Conservatives will do almost everything that they can to stave off this grab for power. If you thought the use of words like “coup d’etat” were problematic back in 2008, well, you’ve not seen anything yet.
And that’s the problem. Once these kind of terms enter our political discourse, there really isn’t any way for a politician to back down from them, even if he’s the Prime Minister. We have a Prime Minister who has already indicated that a coalition government is illegitimate. From there, based on past rhetoric, the notion that such a coalition would be illegal isn’t a stretch, and that a play for power by the Opposition is a coup worthy of a third-world military junta would be the logical conclusion.
When we reach this kind of rhetoric in our political discourse, things are bound to get dangerous. The Conservatives, for one, would not have anywhere to back down to. They would be forced to either admit that they were wrong, completely wrong, and apologize to the people of Canada for their deception, or they would have to continue to persecute the Opposition in an attempt to hold onto power.
The only thing that we can be certain of is that Canadians will become more polarized than ever before. Knowing that this outcome is inevitable, if the GG chooses to exercise the use of Reserve powers and allow the Opposition to govern against the advice of the Prime Minister, it is highly doubtful that a significant segment of the Canadian populace would ever view the government as being legitimate. Therefore, it would make all the more sense for the GG to follow the advice of the Prime Minister and dissolve parliament, because the alternative would actually threaten Canada’s democratic institutions to their very foundations. And that’s exactly what the GG would be trying to avoid when making a decision.
This situation can only be avoided should the Opposition choose not to bring down the Conservative minority government, OR if Stephen Harper, after losing a vote of confidence, advises the Governor General that the Leader of the Official Opposition should be given the chance to govern. The second scenario seems entirely unlikely, as it will be an admission by Harper that everything he and his party have said about coalitions was stated simply for the express purpose of misleading Canadians. It would be the end of Harper’s political career.
Clearly, the defeat of a Conservative minority government will put the Governor General in a difficult position, if Harper recommends “going over the heads of parliament” and “to the Canadian people” as John Baird did back in 2008, when the Conservatives were in a similar situation. As distasteful as it may seem, the GG will likely feel that he will have no choice but to grant the Prime Minister his request for dissolution, and call another election. The more time which elapses between when the GG must decide and the May 2nd election date, the easier this decision will be for him. But conceivably, even if this all plays itself out in May or early June, he may have no choice but to send Canadians back to the polls.
Some might think that a second election wouldn’t be in the interests of the Conservatives, if the Prime Minister asks for one. I don’t agree. In Part IV, I’ll share my thoughts on why I believe the Conservatives have everything to gain by having a second election fast on the heels of this campaign.
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own, and should not be considered consitent with the views of the Green Party of Canada)
Well, Stephen Harper has been trying to sell to Canadians the notion that a Conservative minority situation will be anything but business as usual, and that’s why he’s been appealing to Canadian voters to give him a majority. Here in Greater Sudbury, I’ve heard the Nickel Belt candidate claim that if a Conservative minority government is elected on May the 2nd, we’re sure to see another election happening in the very near future.
What’s behind this is the notion that the Opposition parties, in some combination, whether in formal coalition or simply with verbal support, will try to bring down a Conservative minority at the first opportunity, and govern in its place. And frankly, why wouldn’t they? The Opposition has only recently expressed its extreme displeasure with the Harper Conservatives by voting on a motion of contempt of parliament. That was what directly precipitated this election. If the same group of contemptuous anti-democrats are returned to the House, and they continue to express their desire not to work with any other parties, why would the Opposition even try to pretend that a Conservative minority is the appropriate vehicle for governance?
Well, a Conservative might say that they should try because the Conservatives will have just won the election, and they have a right to govern. An Opposition supporter will say that while Harper may have a right to govern at the outset, if the Conservatives lose the confidence of parliament, Harper will have lost his right to govern, and since the Opposition parties are ready and able to govern, they should be allowed to form a government. Plus, don’t the Opposition parties actually have a greater plurality of seats in the House than do the Conservatives? Didn’t more Canadians actually vote for candidates who weren’t Conservatives?
It was this kind of friction which led to the so-called “Constitutional Crisis” of 2008. Back then, there seemed to be some confusion regarding who was right about what. With the prorogation of parliament, however, and a change of leadership in the Liberal Party, the crisis went away, and questions about which side was right were never answered. In 2011, however, we may find ourselves having to sort through that mess.
Let’s now turn our attention to how all of this might play itself out.
Clearly, as Stephen Harper is still technically the Prime Minister, and will remain so until the House resumes sitting after the election, Harper has the first shot at forming a government, whether his Party emerges from the election with the largest number of seats or not. Harper has said, though, that if the Conservatives don’t receive the largest number of seats, he will not try to form a government. And for once, I believe him. But, as of this moment, Jack-o-mania and the NDP surge isn’t yet threatening to displace the Conservatives from the top of the perch, so let’s continue along on the assumption that the Conservatives will have won the most seats, and thus will govern in a minority situation.
When the House returns, the first available opportunity for the Opposition to defeat a Conservative minority government will be on the Throne Speech. The Throne Speech, which lays out a government’s priorities for the coming session of parliament, requires a vote by the House, which is always a matter of confidence. Even back in 2008, before the so-called “Constitutional Crisis” struck, the newly elected Conservative minority government had presented a throne speech which received the support of the Opposition. Their support of this speech may have been a factor in the Governor General’s decision to prorogue parliament a few weeks later, when it looked as if the Opposition had completely changed its mind and was threatening a non-confidence vote.
If the Opposition finds that it is serious about governing, they’re not going to make the same potential mistake that they made last time. Discussions between Opposition parties will have all taken place prior to the House’s return, so a clear course of action will be on the table. The Governor General, and the Canadian people, will hear from the Opposition that there is a government-in-waiting. That happened back in 2008 as well, and I’m sure most of us remember just how horribly toxic the rhetoric got in the media and elsewhere.
Nonetheless, if the Opposition is serious about wanting to govern, the Conservatives will be defeated on the throne speech. Having lost the confidence of the House, Stephen Harper will be forced to go to the Governor General and advise
Hmmm….advise what? In Part I of this series, I wrote about how former Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Frank Miller, who had just been elected to a minority government, was defeated by the combined efforts of the Liberals and NDP on a throne speech. He visited the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and advised that the Opposition had indicated that it was able to govern (because they had signed an accord whereby the NDP promised to support the Liberals on matters of confidence, in exchange for the Liberal government implementing some NDP platform planks). The transition in Ontario was orderly and painless, because of Miller’s advice to the LG.
However, as I’ve indicated, I don’t think that there’s any way that Stephen Harper would ever offer similar advice to the GG if he is defeated on a matter of confidence. Quite certainly, back in 2008, Harper was on record that Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, whose party had just elected the second most members to parliament, had no right to govern. More recently, in attempting not to answer a pointed question from the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge regarding the legitimacy of a coalition government, Harper squirmed out a response that this was a constitutional matter. Those “in the know” scoffed at this weasel-worded response.
Again, I’m not a constitutional expert, but clearly there is no doubt that the Governor General can request the Opposition to form a government. That’s exactly what happened in Ontario in 1985. There are other precedents in other nations. It’s unusual, sure, but it’s absolutely not unheard of for the Opposition to govern without holding an election when the government has fallen on a matter of confidence. There is no question. That’s what Mansbridge was trying to get Harper to admit.
But, along with being cagey in his interview with Mansbridge, Harper had an ace up his sleeve: Peter Mansbridge had asked him the wrong question.
Mansbridge should have asked Harper what Harper’s advice to the Governor General would be if he was defeated by the Opposition on a vote on the throne speech. That’s the question which needs answering.
Put aside this nonsense about whether a coalition is legitimate or not legitimate, because it’s been answered by the Frank Miller / David Peterson Ontario example in 1985. Anything else is really just trying to obscure the fact. But as long as the media continue to allow Harper and the Conservatives to get away with obscuring this fact, and outright lying about the legitimacy of a coalition government, I’m sure that the Conservatives will continue to do so. Why? Because it serves their ultimate purpose to portray a coalition of losing parties trying to seize power as anti-democratic and un-Canadian.
Back to the scenario for a moment. Harper and the Conservatives have lost the confidence of the House, and Harper goes to visit his friend the GG, David Johnston (who was just appointed by Harper, after all; perhaps for, as Foghorn Leghorn would say about numbering his feathers, “for just such an emergency”). If Harper isn’t going to advise the GG to turn to the Opposition (and he’s not going to offer that advice, for all of the reasons above), the only thing he’s going to be able to request would be the dissolution of parliament, which would throw Canada into another election.
Would the GG follow this advice? In Part II, I discussed the GG’s relationship as the Crown’s representative with the State, and how, over time, the use of the GG’s Reserve powers (which allow the GG to ignore the advice of the Prime Minister) should only ever be used when democracy itself is imperilled by the advice or actions of the Prime Minister. While some might argue that a request for an election made by the PM is an abuse of democracy, I’m not sure that they would have a leg to stand on. Even if we had just went through an electoral process several weeks or months before.
If we had just gone through an election, would the GG use his Reserve powers to ignore the advice of the Prime Minister, and turn to the Opposition, under the assumption that an election isn’t necessary for government to function? Well, here’s what’s interesting about that. Sure, the argument that an election might be unnecessary would be a sound argument, and certainly it would be clear that the Opposition can govern in place of the Conservatives. But neither of these facts is relevant to the use of Reserve powers.
The relevant question which must be answered is whether the advice offered by the Prime Minister to hold another election so soon after an election imperils democracy. Another election could be viewed as unnecessary, and expensive, and even an “inconvenience” to Canadians. Certainly, calling another election is going to rile us up from coast to coast to coast. But how does a request to have an election, which is probably the purest expression of democracy at work, actually imperil our democracy?
I’m sorry…but it doesn’t. Whether we would need an election or not to produce a stable government doesn’t matter. What matters in this circumstance is whether it is appropriate for the Crown to exercise the use of Reserve powers, thus interfering with the interests of the State.
“Interfering with the interests of the State”. That’s a pretty strong term. How could the GG’s use of Reserve powers to stave off an unnecessary election ever be considered as meddling in the State’s affairs? Well, when it goes against the legitimate advice of the Prime Minister of Canada, that’s meddling.
So, would the PM’s advice be legit? Look at the circumstance, and you decide. And as hard as it might be, try putting yourself in Harper’s stated position for a moment. Harper’s Conservatives will have just won the most seats in the House; in the past, when this has happened, most often a minority government led by the dominant party has been the result. Certainly, that’s what we’ve seen happen in the last 3 elections from which minorities have resulted.
This minority, however, will not have been allowed to govern, because it had been defeated by the Opposition parties. Harper believes that the Opposition parties have “no right” to govern, and that a coalition of losing parties is illegitimate (in Canada, at least). Others in his Party have described this kind of attempt at seizing power as a “coup d’etat”.
If Harper really does believe his own rhetoric, his advice to the Governor General to return to the people of Canada would be advice offered in good faith. It would be advice which would not, in any way, shape or form, undermine Canada’s democratic principles. Indeed, from Harper’s perspective, if the GG didn’t follow this advice and allowed what is tantamount to a coup to take place, well, that would be far more of a threat to democracy than holding another election.
What might Canadians think of all of this? On the hand, the answer to that question isn’t relevant to whether the GG uses his Reserve powers to take action contrary to the Prime Minister’s advice. But on the other hand, the question is a very relevant one, because of where it might lead, and how knowing this might help influence the GG’s decision to acquiesce to the PM’s request.
Things were getting really bad back in 2008 with the rhetoric that was flying around. Pro-coalition demonstrations were being met by Pro-government demonstrators. There was little violence, to be sure, but clearly Canadians were beginning to polarize on the issue of the legitimacy of a coalition government. Had the situation continued for a few weeks more, I have little doubt that the opposing camps would have taken their conflicts off of the Editorial pages and onto the streets. The prorogation, however, put an end to that. Pro-government supporters felt that it was a victory, while pro-Opposition supporters believed that the GG’s decision to prorogue parliament simply put the inevitable off for a few more weeks. Of course, with Stephane Dion’s fall as Liberal Leader in the aftermath events that December, history tells a different story.
After May 2nd, however, events might move forward on their own, and prove to be unstoppable. Sure, it’s possible that Stephen Harper will delay parliament’s return to the House as long as possible, in order to avoid a confidence vote. He might even use that time to stoke the anti-coalition flames in the same way that the Conservatives did back in 2008. When parliament does return, and the throne speech is introduced, Harper might even try to prorogue parliament again before a vote is taken. Such a prorogation could last for several months, and technically could last as long as a year, although that’s very unlikely.
Either way, through a combination of delaying parliament’s return, and proroguing the House once the throne speech has been introduced, it’s quite possible that Harper might not actually have to face a confidence vote for several months, and maybe not even until the Fall of 2011. Maybe as many as 6 months might pass between May 2nd and the confidence vote.
Or, Harper might just want to get it all over with as quickly as possible.
Sooner or later, though, what we can be sure of is if the Opposition makes any suggestion that it wants to govern in place of the Conservatives, things are going to get very messy in Canada. You can bet that the Conservatives will do almost everything that they can to stave off this grab for power. If you thought the use of words like “coup d’etat” were problematic back in 2008, well, you’ve not seen anything yet.
And that’s the problem. Once these kind of terms enter our political discourse, there really isn’t any way for a politician to back down from them, even if he’s the Prime Minister. We have a Prime Minister who has already indicated that a coalition government is illegitimate. From there, based on past rhetoric, the notion that such a coalition would be illegal isn’t a stretch, and that a play for power by the Opposition is a coup worthy of a third-world military junta would be the logical conclusion.
When we reach this kind of rhetoric in our political discourse, things are bound to get dangerous. The Conservatives, for one, would not have anywhere to back down to. They would be forced to either admit that they were wrong, completely wrong, and apologize to the people of Canada for their deception, or they would have to continue to persecute the Opposition in an attempt to hold onto power.
The only thing that we can be certain of is that Canadians will become more polarized than ever before. Knowing that this outcome is inevitable, if the GG chooses to exercise the use of Reserve powers and allow the Opposition to govern against the advice of the Prime Minister, it is highly doubtful that a significant segment of the Canadian populace would ever view the government as being legitimate. Therefore, it would make all the more sense for the GG to follow the advice of the Prime Minister and dissolve parliament, because the alternative would actually threaten Canada’s democratic institutions to their very foundations. And that’s exactly what the GG would be trying to avoid when making a decision.
This situation can only be avoided should the Opposition choose not to bring down the Conservative minority government, OR if Stephen Harper, after losing a vote of confidence, advises the Governor General that the Leader of the Official Opposition should be given the chance to govern. The second scenario seems entirely unlikely, as it will be an admission by Harper that everything he and his party have said about coalitions was stated simply for the express purpose of misleading Canadians. It would be the end of Harper’s political career.
Clearly, the defeat of a Conservative minority government will put the Governor General in a difficult position, if Harper recommends “going over the heads of parliament” and “to the Canadian people” as John Baird did back in 2008, when the Conservatives were in a similar situation. As distasteful as it may seem, the GG will likely feel that he will have no choice but to grant the Prime Minister his request for dissolution, and call another election. The more time which elapses between when the GG must decide and the May 2nd election date, the easier this decision will be for him. But conceivably, even if this all plays itself out in May or early June, he may have no choice but to send Canadians back to the polls.
Some might think that a second election wouldn’t be in the interests of the Conservatives, if the Prime Minister asks for one. I don’t agree. In Part IV, I’ll share my thoughts on why I believe the Conservatives have everything to gain by having a second election fast on the heels of this campaign.
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own, and should not be considered consitent with the views of the Green Party of Canada)
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
From Conservative Minority to Majority, Part II: Following the Advice of the Prime Minister
In Part I of this series, I expressed my own understanding about how parliament works with regards to the ability of parties to work with another and establish a government in circumstances where two or more parties, who don’t have the most seats, combine their efforts in government.
That’s currently the situation on the ground in Israel today, where Kadima won the most seats in an election, but where a coalition of smaller parties have formed government, centred around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and propped up by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s Independence Party.
As far as I know, Stephen Harper has never suggested that the government of Israel is “illegitimate”. And that’s telling.
Now, I’m going to be wading into Constitutional waters for a little bit. I need to point out that I do not pretend to be an expert on Canada’s Constitution, or matters constitutional. These observations are my own, and while I’ve put some good thought into them, I simply don’t possess the academic skills to have more than a cursory discussion of these issues. Not that it’s going to stop me from sharing these ideas, mind you. I enjoy kicking a political football around as much as anyone.
The Scenario: No Prorogation
So, back in December 2008, the Opposition Parties have just defeated the Conservative minority government by voting non-confidence. Harper is forced to go to Governor General Michaelle Jean and…
And this is where things get interesting. What would have been Harper’s options in this situation? Clearly, he could have advised the GG, as Frank Miller did, that he had lost the confidence of the House and that the Opposition has indicated that they could form a stable government, and that the GG should turn to the Opposition now. After all, there had just been an election, so there needn’t be another one. Had Harper, in this scenario, offered this advice to the GG, the GG could have accepted it and turned to Stephane Dion and asked him to form a government. She also could have refused Harper’s advice, through the use of the GG’s Reserve Powers, and dissolved parliament, bringing about another election. Although it’s almost certain that she would not have done so. Certainly the LG in Ontario didn’t use those powers when Miller advised that the Opposition was a government-in-waiting.
But would Stephen Harper have ever offered the GG that advice? Harper was already on record saying that Stephane Dion’s attempt to seize power was illegitimate (“he does not have the right”); that’s similar to what Harper has been saying on the hustings during this campaign about a coalition government of losing political parties. Clearly, his position on this matter has been consistent (at least since becoming Prime Minister; his prior track record on this issue is as clear as mud).
After having said publicly that Dion doesn’t have the right to form a government, and after the Conservative’s hyper-partisan media campaign to convince people that the Opposition was trying to seize power from a legitimately elected government, it’s inconceivable to me at least that Harper would have advised the GG to invite Stephane Dion to become Canada’s next Prime Minister at the head of a Liberal-NDP coalition government.
Instead, he could have advised the GG that parliament be dissolved and an election be held.
This is where things would have got really interesting. Clearly, in this circumstance, the GG would have had the authority to exercise Reserve powers, and make up her own mind regarding a course of action that is in the interests of Canada. In this scenario, she could have decided to ignore the advice of the Prime Minister and turn to Stephane Dion anyway. We’d just been through an election, after all. What might another election have accomplished?
What does it mean, however, for the GG to use “Reserve” powers? I seem to recall at the time of the so-called Constitutional Crisis, that the Conservative Party had trotted out a number of constitutional experts which offered the opinion that, over time, the GG’s use of Reserve powers has become restricted, since that whole King-Byng affair took place back in the 1920s.
When you look into this matter of the use of Reserve powers, what you’ll find is that invariably, the GG just doesn’t use them. The notion here is that the Crown is going to interfere in the affairs of the State as little as possible. What the Prime Minister wants, essentially, is what the Prime Minister gets.
Regarding the use of Reserve powers, constitutional experts use phrases like “only in the most exceptional of circumstances” and “only when the advice or actions of the Prime Minister undermine the very foundations of the political system.” And I’m not at all certain that a Prime Minister, having just lost the confidence of the House, and requesting the dissolution of parliament and calling for an election, would be one of those circumstances which undermine our political system. I’m not sure that a strong case could ever be made that asking the people of Canada to vote in an election is, in any way, shape or form, an action which undermines our democratic institutions.
As I wrote earlier, Conservative cabinet Minister John Baird was already on record with his nebulous idea of returning to the Canadian people if the Conservatives didn’t get the permission from the GG that they wanted in order to prorogue parliament. Some have suggested that this might have been a reference to appealing to the Queen, or simply part of a larger media campaign to mislead Canadians. But what if Baird was telling the truth? That the plan was to face a vote of confidence, lose it, and have Harper advise the GG that an election should be held, going straight to the Canadian people?
Do you recall the toxic atmosphere which existed in late November / early December 2008? The rhetoric had been upped a notch, that’s for sure. The Conservatives were starting to use terms like “coup d’etat” to describe the Opposition’s attempt to form a coalition government. The term “coup” is not one to be thrown lightly around in political circles. Many Canadians, however, scoffed at the notion that the Opposition was engaged in a coup. Conservative supporters, however, clearly begged to differ.
From the point of view of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party, Dion had “no right” to form government after “losing” the election, and that the attempt by the Opposition to form a coalition government was an illegitimate attempt to seize power by an extra-constitutional means. From a Conservative viewpoint, one that Harper would have expressed to the GG at the time had he found himself in the scenario I’ve here created for him, a strong case could be made that Harper’s call for an election would have been much more in keeping with Canada’s democratic values than what the Opposition was trying to do. Hence, there would have been no need for the GG to use Reserve powers.
What Actually Happened
Of course, the above-scenario never had the chance to play itself out, because the GG granted Harper’s request to prorogue parliament. Many expressed their outrage that the GG would allow parliament to be prorogued, in order for the government to avoid a confidence vote. Indeed, back in the 1920s, when Prime Minister MacKenzie King visited the Governor General, Lord Byng, on the eve of a confidence vote, and requested a dissolution of parliament, Byng used the GG’s Reserve powers and denied the request.
But, as I’ve indicated earlier, the King-Byng affair can be viewed as an anomaly in the context of the history of the relationship between the Crown and State in the Westminister system. Did you know that, in Canada (and in Britain), no request to a Crown head of state to prorogue a parliament has ever been denied, at least not since the passage of the 1867 Great Reform Bill. I have to admit, I didn’t actually know that until recently. And it certainly put into clearer context the decision of Governor General Michaelle Jean to prorogue parliament back in 2008.
It appears that a strong case can be made that the Governor General’s use of Reserve powers to act against the advice of a Prime Minister is not something which can be undertaken lightly, and indeed, should only occur in extreme circumstances where the very foundations of our democratic principles and institutions are at risk. In that context, the request to prorogue parliament for a period of time amounting to a few months was determined not to constitute such a risk, even if it meant that Harper’s government would avoid a motion of confidence for a while.
And that’s just it: the prorogation of parliament wasn’t actually the tool used to avoid a vote of confidence; at the time the GG granted the request, it simply was going to delay the vote until parliament’s return in the new year. What scuttled the vote of confidence in the House was the fall of Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, and the rise of his replacement, Michael Ignatieff. It was Ignatieff’s decision to withdraw from the coalition. Remember his, “A coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition.” (and with straight-talk like that, is it any wonder that Ignatieff’s Liberals have fallen so hard in the polls recently?).
In Part III of this series, I’ll explore the possible future scenario of a Conservative Minority government resulting from this election, and how all of the above might play itself out.
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own, and should not be considered consitent with the views of the Green Party of Canada)
That’s currently the situation on the ground in Israel today, where Kadima won the most seats in an election, but where a coalition of smaller parties have formed government, centred around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and propped up by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s Independence Party.
As far as I know, Stephen Harper has never suggested that the government of Israel is “illegitimate”. And that’s telling.
Now, I’m going to be wading into Constitutional waters for a little bit. I need to point out that I do not pretend to be an expert on Canada’s Constitution, or matters constitutional. These observations are my own, and while I’ve put some good thought into them, I simply don’t possess the academic skills to have more than a cursory discussion of these issues. Not that it’s going to stop me from sharing these ideas, mind you. I enjoy kicking a political football around as much as anyone.
The Scenario: No Prorogation
So, back in December 2008, the Opposition Parties have just defeated the Conservative minority government by voting non-confidence. Harper is forced to go to Governor General Michaelle Jean and…
And this is where things get interesting. What would have been Harper’s options in this situation? Clearly, he could have advised the GG, as Frank Miller did, that he had lost the confidence of the House and that the Opposition has indicated that they could form a stable government, and that the GG should turn to the Opposition now. After all, there had just been an election, so there needn’t be another one. Had Harper, in this scenario, offered this advice to the GG, the GG could have accepted it and turned to Stephane Dion and asked him to form a government. She also could have refused Harper’s advice, through the use of the GG’s Reserve Powers, and dissolved parliament, bringing about another election. Although it’s almost certain that she would not have done so. Certainly the LG in Ontario didn’t use those powers when Miller advised that the Opposition was a government-in-waiting.
But would Stephen Harper have ever offered the GG that advice? Harper was already on record saying that Stephane Dion’s attempt to seize power was illegitimate (“he does not have the right”); that’s similar to what Harper has been saying on the hustings during this campaign about a coalition government of losing political parties. Clearly, his position on this matter has been consistent (at least since becoming Prime Minister; his prior track record on this issue is as clear as mud).
After having said publicly that Dion doesn’t have the right to form a government, and after the Conservative’s hyper-partisan media campaign to convince people that the Opposition was trying to seize power from a legitimately elected government, it’s inconceivable to me at least that Harper would have advised the GG to invite Stephane Dion to become Canada’s next Prime Minister at the head of a Liberal-NDP coalition government.
Instead, he could have advised the GG that parliament be dissolved and an election be held.
This is where things would have got really interesting. Clearly, in this circumstance, the GG would have had the authority to exercise Reserve powers, and make up her own mind regarding a course of action that is in the interests of Canada. In this scenario, she could have decided to ignore the advice of the Prime Minister and turn to Stephane Dion anyway. We’d just been through an election, after all. What might another election have accomplished?
What does it mean, however, for the GG to use “Reserve” powers? I seem to recall at the time of the so-called Constitutional Crisis, that the Conservative Party had trotted out a number of constitutional experts which offered the opinion that, over time, the GG’s use of Reserve powers has become restricted, since that whole King-Byng affair took place back in the 1920s.
When you look into this matter of the use of Reserve powers, what you’ll find is that invariably, the GG just doesn’t use them. The notion here is that the Crown is going to interfere in the affairs of the State as little as possible. What the Prime Minister wants, essentially, is what the Prime Minister gets.
Regarding the use of Reserve powers, constitutional experts use phrases like “only in the most exceptional of circumstances” and “only when the advice or actions of the Prime Minister undermine the very foundations of the political system.” And I’m not at all certain that a Prime Minister, having just lost the confidence of the House, and requesting the dissolution of parliament and calling for an election, would be one of those circumstances which undermine our political system. I’m not sure that a strong case could ever be made that asking the people of Canada to vote in an election is, in any way, shape or form, an action which undermines our democratic institutions.
As I wrote earlier, Conservative cabinet Minister John Baird was already on record with his nebulous idea of returning to the Canadian people if the Conservatives didn’t get the permission from the GG that they wanted in order to prorogue parliament. Some have suggested that this might have been a reference to appealing to the Queen, or simply part of a larger media campaign to mislead Canadians. But what if Baird was telling the truth? That the plan was to face a vote of confidence, lose it, and have Harper advise the GG that an election should be held, going straight to the Canadian people?
Do you recall the toxic atmosphere which existed in late November / early December 2008? The rhetoric had been upped a notch, that’s for sure. The Conservatives were starting to use terms like “coup d’etat” to describe the Opposition’s attempt to form a coalition government. The term “coup” is not one to be thrown lightly around in political circles. Many Canadians, however, scoffed at the notion that the Opposition was engaged in a coup. Conservative supporters, however, clearly begged to differ.
From the point of view of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party, Dion had “no right” to form government after “losing” the election, and that the attempt by the Opposition to form a coalition government was an illegitimate attempt to seize power by an extra-constitutional means. From a Conservative viewpoint, one that Harper would have expressed to the GG at the time had he found himself in the scenario I’ve here created for him, a strong case could be made that Harper’s call for an election would have been much more in keeping with Canada’s democratic values than what the Opposition was trying to do. Hence, there would have been no need for the GG to use Reserve powers.
What Actually Happened
Of course, the above-scenario never had the chance to play itself out, because the GG granted Harper’s request to prorogue parliament. Many expressed their outrage that the GG would allow parliament to be prorogued, in order for the government to avoid a confidence vote. Indeed, back in the 1920s, when Prime Minister MacKenzie King visited the Governor General, Lord Byng, on the eve of a confidence vote, and requested a dissolution of parliament, Byng used the GG’s Reserve powers and denied the request.
But, as I’ve indicated earlier, the King-Byng affair can be viewed as an anomaly in the context of the history of the relationship between the Crown and State in the Westminister system. Did you know that, in Canada (and in Britain), no request to a Crown head of state to prorogue a parliament has ever been denied, at least not since the passage of the 1867 Great Reform Bill. I have to admit, I didn’t actually know that until recently. And it certainly put into clearer context the decision of Governor General Michaelle Jean to prorogue parliament back in 2008.
It appears that a strong case can be made that the Governor General’s use of Reserve powers to act against the advice of a Prime Minister is not something which can be undertaken lightly, and indeed, should only occur in extreme circumstances where the very foundations of our democratic principles and institutions are at risk. In that context, the request to prorogue parliament for a period of time amounting to a few months was determined not to constitute such a risk, even if it meant that Harper’s government would avoid a motion of confidence for a while.
And that’s just it: the prorogation of parliament wasn’t actually the tool used to avoid a vote of confidence; at the time the GG granted the request, it simply was going to delay the vote until parliament’s return in the new year. What scuttled the vote of confidence in the House was the fall of Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, and the rise of his replacement, Michael Ignatieff. It was Ignatieff’s decision to withdraw from the coalition. Remember his, “A coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition.” (and with straight-talk like that, is it any wonder that Ignatieff’s Liberals have fallen so hard in the polls recently?).
In Part III of this series, I’ll explore the possible future scenario of a Conservative Minority government resulting from this election, and how all of the above might play itself out.
(Opinions expressed in this blogpost are my own, and should not be considered consitent with the views of the Green Party of Canada)
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