WHAT HAPPENS IF NOBODY WINS?

Wynne’s best play, says expert, will likely be to make it clear that she’s not going yet

If none of Ontario’s parties wins a majority of seats Thursday, the first thing their leaders will have to do is try to work out governing deals with people they’ve spent the last month calling lunatics, wastrels and radicals.

No matter how messy a legislature we elect, it’s their problem to try to sort out.

“The governor general (or lieutenant-governor) has the conventional duty to let, to the extent possible, the political parties and their leaders determine among themselves who must form the government following a general election,” writes Hugo Cyr, the dean of law and political science at Université du Québec à Montréal, in a 2017 paper meant to slap journalists, especially, into understanding how minority governments really work.

“Since the process is not automatic, it is not possible to determine who will form the new government simply by looking at the number of seats obtained by each party,” he writes.

Politicians themselves say that, we repeat it, and when that happens “the media pre-empt the role of duly elected parliamentarians in choosing the next government.”

One scenario is that Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives win the most seats but not quite a majority, Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats get more votes but not quite as many seats, the Liberals hold onto a handful in their strongholds, and the Greens get leader Mike Schreiner elected in Guelph.

Lieutenant- Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell’s duty is to find a new premier who’d stand the best chance of forming a stable government. Often that’s the leader of the party with the most seats but not always. How Dowdeswell goes about deciding will largely be up to the one leader who’s taken herself out of the running for the job: Kathleen Wynne.

The key question is whether Wynne resigns as premier on election night, says Philippe Lagassé, a political scientist and expert in parliamentary formalities at Carleton University, who helped translate Cyr’s paper into English.

Wynne could fire off a resignation letter and go home, dumping everything in Dowdeswell’s lap. That would be a crisis. The gap between premiers is supposed to be a few minutes at most, just long enough to swear in a new one.

“If she creates that void, the lieutenant-governor is left without clear direction and in all likelihood will gravitate toward the party with a plurality of seats,” Lagassé says.

But otherwise, Ontario needs a government leader and unless Wynne refuses, she’s it for a little while. Even if she loses her own Don Valley West seat.

Lagassé says Wynne’s best play, even if her Liberals collapse to third place, even after she’s admitted she won’t stay on as premier, will probably be to remain in office a little while longer.

The lieutenant-governor would seek her first minister’s advice on what to do next. To ensure that, on election night Wynne would make it clear that she’s not going quite yet.

“She would stand up and say, ‘I will resign the office of premier as soon as it’s determined which of the other parties will form the government’ — that’s a way of holding it off,” Lagassé says. Then she’d try to reach a deal with one of the larger parties. “The lieutenant-governor, as a matter of tradition, would ask the outgoing premier, ‘Who do you think would carry confidence?’ “

Dowdeswell wouldn’t have to obey, as she does at other times when the premier “advises” her what to do, but she’d have to listen.

FINDING A DEAL

To make this work politically, Wynne would have to declare that she’s pursuing negotiations with one of the other parties. Despite Wynne’s warnings that the New Democrats are dangerous ideologues, they seem as though they’d be a better philosophical partner for the Liberals than the Tories.

“She has to be pretty clear about what she’s doing,” Lagassé says.

Exactly what a deal would look like depends on the numbers in the legislature. A year ago, B.C. New Democrat John Horgan became premier when he and the Greens combined for 44 seats in the legislature to the Liberals’ 43 and worked out a “confidence and supply” agreement, a 10-page deal outlining what Horgan’s government would do and not do in exchange for the Greens’ support. It took a renegade Liberal agreeing to serve as speaker, but the arrangement has held.

The Ontario New Democrats supported a minority Liberal government in such an arrangement from 1985 to 1987, even though the Tories had the most seats.

A theoretical possibility is a formal coalition, a temporary merging of two or more parties, with Liberals given cabinet posts in a government led by Andrea Horwath or Doug Ford. Constitutionally this is fine but we don’t really do it in Canada. It tends to go badly for the junior partner: in 2010, Britain’s Liberal Democrats joined the Conservatives in a coalition and then five years later were reduced from 57 seats in Parliament to eight.

Or there could be no deal. Harper governed with a naked minority for five years before winning a majority in 2011 and the Ontario Liberals did the same between 2011 and 2014. They each won votes issue by issue and benefitted from weakened opposition parties that weren’t equipped to fight elections.

That seems most apt to be the situation for a Progressive Conservative minority government. Its plans are the least compatible with any of the other parties’.

“If (Doug Ford)’s smart, he tries to delay calling back the legislature for a certain amount of time,” Lagassé says. Name a cabinet and just be seen governing for a couple of months. Get voters used to him.

Would an agreement among two (or even three) smaller parties be preferable to the largest party going it alone? If the politicians presented Dowdeswell with both options she’d have to decide which seemed more likely to work.

A problem both Cyr and Lagassé see, and the reason for Cyr’s paper, is that politicians themselves have misled voters about what’s supposed to happen in a minority situation. Even election-losers often say that the party with the most seats should get to govern, and during campaigns the parties usually swear off any talk of working with the others.

“It’s an irresponsible thing to say, to be honest, because it narrows your options so much,” Lagassé says. Especially when wielding the balance of power is a party’s only hope for influence. “When the Liberals say that, it just gobsmacks me.”

Abetted by politicians who disparage coalitions and parliamentary alliances, some voters have come to see them as illegitimate, when sometimes they’re the only way a legislature can function. An arrangement that is totally proper constitutionally can be impossible politically.

“The rules of government formation, what’s acceptable and what’s not, has shifted,” Lagassé says.

“I don’t think we would have been as quick to write off cooperation in the past.”

THE STAKES ARE HIGH

Bringing down a government is unusually difficult in Ontario, thanks to a rule in the legislature that non-confidence motions can only get to the floor if the government’s house leader agrees to schedule one.

I KNOW, IT’S WEIRD

“The standing order is meant to provide some degree of stability so the government can pass its agenda and it won’t be surprised by a vote of non-confidence,” Lagassé says.

The opposition can’t pounce on an opportunity just because the government lost count of the MPPs it has on shift. Governments can still fall on budget votes and votes on throne speeches laying out legislative agendas, but governing parties can see those coming and usually can buy opposition parties’ support or at least manoeuvre them into abstaining.

So practically, any leader who gets through a first confidence vote is likely to be premier for a good while. No takebacks.

IF ALL ELSE FAILS

If no leader could get a confidence vote through the legislature — probably if one failed and all the others refused to try — Dowdeswell’s last resort would be to call a new election and make voters try again. dreevely@postmedia.comtwitter.com/davidreevely