POP CHAMPAGNE
An overnight epidemic of cooperative governance has the press moody and disappointed, and some intemperate voices calling parliamentary governance a coup. Haters! Meanwhile, up in the club, coalition players roll deep and break out the Moët.
Shortly after 5pm yesterday, Canada witnessed something almost unprecedented in the country’s history: a written commitment to build a Parliamentary majority out of different parties. Sure, a short-lived unity government was cobbled together during World War I, and various provinces have had official accords and coalition deals. Never before, however, have parties agreed to retain their individual identities, while supporting a coalition cabinet and maintaining a minority government for a fixed period of time. It was difficult to envision in the heat of the fall election two months ago, and even hard to imagine as late as last week. But as Stéphane Dion put it yesterday, when asked how the author of the notorious Clarity Act could cut a deal with the most popular sovereigntist leader in the country, the opposition parties decided to trust each other on a commitment to a core governing program, while maintaining “respectful democratic disagreement” on other points.
Faced with a sudden outburst of political maturity, however, the papers have decided that they don’t like it. Whole bales of comment seek to rhetorically delegitimize a clear-cut succession with considerable Commonwealth precedent; in the Post, Don Martin growls about a “putsch” and John Ivison sneers at an incipient “banana republic”, the Globe editorial mutters about “averting this politically illegitimate coalition”. Others, more troublingly, contort constitutional logic to legally delegitimize the idea of majority rule in a hung parliament. In the Citizen, Randall Denley calls it a “virtual coup that is perfectly legal” (and thus, not a coup at all); in the Post, L. Ian MacDonald rants near-identically about “a perfectly constitutional coup, endorsed by the Westminster tradition” (ditto). Sputtering with rage in the Post, Michael Bliss goes so far as to demand that the Governor-General reject any no-confidence vote supported by the Bloc — and if she doesn’t, it amounts to “an abuse of vice-regal power” that raises “fundamental questions about Ms. Jean’s loyalty to the Constitution and to Canada”. Whoa, cowboy.
Various levelheaded assessments peek out between the boulders of bullshit, and actual constitutional experts quoted in the Star, the Globe, the Post and (magisterially and at great legnth) Le Devoir agree that Harper is the one pushing the country into uncharted constitutional territory. The Citizen notes the way that ethics rules and abrupt changes of government make leaving and re-entering government service tricky for Liberal and New Democratic staffers, and on the difficulties facing a civil service that has to adapt to a totally new way of doing business just after they finally got used to the Conservative governing style. More workaday political reporting from Jane Taber in the Globe, Julie Smyth in the Post, and Linda Diebel in the Star outlines how the Liberal leadership candidates informally and calmly decided to sheathe their swords and back Dion as interim PM (charight, sure). These reports, along with the solid lead peices from CanWest (in the Citizen and Post versions), the Globe, Le Devoir, and the Star, might accidentally give you the impression that the Canadian government tends to be run by adults who are capable of acting decisively when they see the need.
So why do we read the opposite, from the Star to the Globe to the Post, that Canadian democracy is the loser when majorities discover themselves? Part of it is just the way a story came from out of nowhere and so obviously shot ahead of the bored Ottawa press corps before they could catch up or figure out what happened. Another part is the media’s inability to notice that the intellectual crutches they’ve leaned on hard for the past few years are old and tired. Canada isn’t heading to the right, voters outside the Conservative base were put off by the government’s mean streak, and Harper’s wedge issues weren’t working; Keynesianism, deficit politics, and social democracy don’t trouble popular opinion; the Bloc just won a near-record number of seats by promising to ignore sovereignty and oppose Harper at all costs, and they aren’t that threatening or new anymore. Most importantly, though, the papers didn’t figure out that the opposition could, by figuring out the considerable policy turf and political interests they hold in common, satisfy the oft-expressed deisre for mature coalition-building and consensus governance in Ottawa. It’s a celebration, bitches! So pop champagne. Because in most of the world, this is what parliamentary democracy looks like.
Creative Commons photo by Gaetan Lee / Flickr
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