The American system of government is a shockingly messy and complicated one, but the way it gets covered –- with glitzy, big-money races for the presidency every four years, a narrative that elides congressional and Senate races, the electoral college, the actual responsibilities of the three branches, etc. — makes it seem like a simple war between two roughly equal opposing camps. Even the players like to pretend that there are two “benches,” thus encouraging all kinds of pointless armchair quarterbacking.
In comparison, parliamentary democracies at least have the decency to keep a lot of their complications right out in the open. All the same, here in Canada, because we were so used to majority governments mostly being passed back and forth between two parties, with one (the NDP) acting as spoiler, we saw our government as essentially simple, too.
The recent string of minority governments should have taught us all a lesson, but it hasn’t.
Certainly, the leaders of the various parties are still trying to push the notion that there are clearly demarcated “sides” in the House — as opposed to shifting, overlapping areas of self-interest. Which just makes them look worse when that reality becomes clear again.
The federal government became a coalition of the reluctantly willing Wednesday when the NDP announced it would back the Conservatives in coming confidence votes, suddenly sending the prospects of a fall election from probable to unlikely.
Stephen Harper, who stoutly maintains he doesn’t want an election — even though his party is ahead in polls and fundraising — is about to get his wish.
And a Prime Minister who has railed about the dangers of the Liberals forming a coalition with “socialists and the separatists” now governs at their sufferance.
Harper knows that a good chunk of his supporters crave simple narratives, so he gave them one about last year’s attempted Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition (even though he’d been part an informal coalition himself to bring down the Paul Martin government). Now he has to explain to those same supporters why things just got messy. Norman Spector in the Globe thinks he has nothing to worry about on that score, this new situation not being a formal coalition (“I know it’s hard for opposition critics and even for some journalists to resist hoisting Mr. Harper on his own socialist-separatist petard….”), but arguing semantics is just about irrelevant to how politics actually get played on the ground. Harper demonized the two parties that will now be keeping his government in power. He sacrificed long-term consistency for short-term gains. That parties switch tactics and support former opponents is not unusual, so slagging off potential allies is losing strategy. Minority governments make for strange bedfellows, so it makes little sense to accuse others of being sluts.
As for Ignatieff, having blown his earlier announcement of a coming election, he gets to act like the Last Honest Man, the only one willing to hold the ruling Tories to account, despite the fact that it was his own party that kept them in place this long. It’s already begun:
The Liberals have offered to speed passage of Tory EI legislation, hoping to rob the NDP of its rationale for propping up the Harper government.
The Liberals proposed Thursday that the bill — worth up to $1 billion in extended employment insurance benefits for about 190,000 long-term workers — be whisked through all stages of the legislative process in the House of Commons by Friday.
[...]
The move is clearly designed to embarrass NDP Leader Jack Layton, who has said his party will prop up the government at least until the EI reforms are implemented.
“We don’t want to give Mr. Layton any alibis,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said.
It makes me yearn for the Natural Law Party – they would have got along with everybody.
