To read the complete article:
http://www.thestar.com/article/656290
Don’t forget the comments.
“Get a Grip
Look, coalitions are legal in Canada. We’ve had them before we’ll get them again. What was not right in this case was Jack and Gilles plotting as the election ended, to entrap the hapless Dion into signing on to the coalition. That was not accepting the outcome of the election. What Jack and Gilles basically did, was deny the vote of “ordinary” Canadians as it did not conform with the wishes of their special interest groups.”
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Les Whittington
Ottawa Bureau
OTTAWA–Stephen Harper welcomed the temporary truce reached last week with the Liberal party, pointedly reminding Canadians the compromise would preserve the Conservative minority government for at least a few more months.
“Nobody wants to see us plunged into an election … and nobody wants to see the opposition coalition we had at the end of last year,” the Prime Minister told reporters.
As he did in December when opposition parties threatened to topple the Tory minority, the Prime Minister suggested such a move would be akin to a coup d’état.
“I don’t think the constant election threat or, quite frankly, the inability of some of the parties in the House of Commons to accept the result of the last election – to accept that the Conservative party actually won the last election – I don’t think that reflects well upon them.”
It’s a refrain that has worked well for Harper. When his government teetered on the brink of defeat last winter, Canadians responded very favourably to his proposition that only the voters can determine which party rules – not the MPs they send to Parliament to represent them.
But it might not be such a good thing for Canada. Harper’s interpretation of the principles of Canadian democracy has set off alarms among many who worry about the potential for abuse of power under this country’s unwritten rules for governing.
“It’s a real concern,” said Peter Russell, a constitutional expert who has acted as an adviser to past governors general. “We take for granted our stability, but we could suddenly find ourselves being one of the shakiest democracies going.”
The fear is that the traditional workings of British-style parliamentary democracy are being undermined, laying the groundwork for a potential constitutional crisis in which an unresolved political clash could paralyze Canada’s government.
“We all talk about our economic fundamentals being sound,” Russell said. “Right now, our parliamentary fundamentals are not sound, compared with all the major Western parliamentary democracies.”
At the heart of the problem is the fact that many Canadians seem to get their government lessons from television in the U.S.
An Ipsos Reid poll in the midst of last winter’s crisis found 51 per cent of Canadians think the prime minister is directly elected, like the U.S. president. And the corollary to this belief is that the prime minister, like the president in Washington, should not be removed except as a result of an election.
Both perceptions are a monkey wrench in Canada’s democratic machine, where voters do not elect a prime minister directly but instead elect MPs to the House of Commons. And in Ottawa, unlike the U.S., the right to form a government hinges entirely on being able to obtain the support of a majority of those MPs.
Laura Stephenson, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario, said Canadians think their system of government is a lot simpler than it actually is.
That makes it easier for voters to accept the concept that one party is trying to “unjustly take control of government,” she said.
But, under Canada’s parliamentary system, it was wholly legitimate for the Liberals and New Democrats, with the support of Bloc Québécois MPs, to get together last December to try to defeat the Conservatives over what they saw as the government’s woefully inadequate response to the economic crisis.
Harper, saddled with the prospect of perennial minority governments, seems determined to promote a very different view about the legitimate use of power by his opponents in the House of Commons.
Saying “this is a pivotal moment in our history,” Harper gravely told the country in a televised address on Dec. 3 that opposition parties were attempting to take power “without your say, without your consent and without your vote.”
Public support for Harper’s stance was widespread. A national poll found that, had an election been held then, the Conservatives might have captured a majority.
The voters’ anti-coalition response reflected various factors, including their sound rejection of Stéphane Dion, the previous Liberal leader.
Still, the ferocity of the backlash was a wake-up call for experts who study Canada’s democracy.
Lorraine Weinrib of the University of Toronto’s law faculty said the Prime Minister’s handling of the constitutional issue was shocking.
“He was exploiting the fact that the general public isn’t aware of the intricacies of our democratic parliamentary system,” she said.
The crisis wound down when Governor General Michaëlle Jean used her power to temporarily suspend Parliament.
But what worries experts like Russell is the potential for a partisan flare-up around the fate of a minority government that would undercut the authority of the governor general and lead to a breakdown of political order. The governor general could end up in an “impossible position” where any decision on the resolution of a crisis would be met with overwhelming opposition from political parties and the public, Russell said.
