A COALITION CONUNDRUM
Party that wins most seats in election could wind up being squeezed out
As prime minister, Harper would retain a number of prerogatives as he looked for ways to hang on to power, one of which would be to avoid recalling Parliament for as long as he could.
Andrew Coyne. It’s not obvious who Johnston will call upon this time, or how long they would last in power.
Perhaps you saw that story the other day about David Johnston’s term as governor general being extended for two years, to September 2017. Perhaps you said to yourself, ‘That’s nice — nice man, looks a little like Johnny Carson.’ Perhaps you didn’t quite twig to its true significance.
Johnston, usually confined to ribbon-cutting and other ceremonial work, may be in for some heavy lifting.
The likely prospect of a hung Parliament, in which no party has a majority of the seats, does not just mean a return to the brinksmanship of the last Parliament. It holds the possibility of even greater uncertainty, and a worse crisis.
There was little doubt, after all, that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would be called upon to form a government after the 2008 election, having won nearly twice as many seats as their nearest rivals. It was only the existential threat of losing their public funding, as proposed in that year’s fall economic statement, that provoked the opposition parties into attempting the coalition gambit.
Much has changed since, as I wrote recently: The coalition that might form after the next election would be a very different one than the one that collapsed after the prorogation crisis of 2008.
More to the point, it’s not obvious who Johnston will call upon this time, or how long they would last in power. Harper, for example, need not win the most seats to get first crack at forming a government. By convention, the incumbent has the option; were he at least a close second, you may be sure he would give it a thought.
But even if the Conservatives do emerge with the most seats, that does not settle matters. For there would be enormous pressure on the opposition leaders, given the depth of hostility to the government in opposition circles, to vote together to defeat the government in the House of Commons at the first opportunity and to form a government — a coalition government — in its place.
Of course, the first opportunity might not come until some months after the election. As prime minister, Harper would retain a number of prerogatives as he looked for ways to hang on to power, one of which would be to avoid recalling Parliament for as long as he could. After the 1979 election that returned a Conservative minority, Joe Clark did not recall the House for five months.
Harper might use the interval to curry favour with voters, or to sow divisions in the opposition, the better to deter them from defeating him. (I do not hold with those who think that, merely for having been reduced from a majority to a minority, Harper would resign as leader or be pushed out. “The longer I’m prime minister” and all that.)
But eventually Parliament would have to sit, which is where the Governor General comes in.
If the opposition did wish to replace the government, they would have to move fast. The longer they waited, the more that Harper might make the argument to the Governor General that his defeat required the dissolution of the House and the calling of a new election, whereas an immediate defeat in the House would seem to make another election, so soon after the last, dilatory. The way would be open for the opposition to propose instead that power be transferred to them.
I say “would seem to,” because it’s not a given Harper that would concede the point.
Power, once possessed, is not easily given up. Indeed, everything he has said publicly has been to pour scorn on the idea as fundamentally undemocratic, a kind of coup, launched by a “coalition of the losers.” The “highest principle of Canadian democracy,” he said at the height of the 2008 crisis, “is that if one wants to be prime minister, one gets one’s mandate from the Canadian people.”
In other words, the prime minister would be tempted to “do a King-Byng” — to re-enact the crisis of 1926, when Mackenzie King, rather than accept defeat in the House as the cue to yield power to Arthur Meighen’s Conservatives (who, after all, had 15 more seats than King’s Liberals), insisted the governor general, Lord Byng, call a new election. Byng refused, Meighen took over (briefly) as prime minister and King used the issue to win the next election. The precedent can’t be far from the current prime minister’s mind.
I happen to think Byng was right, constitutionally, and that in a similar crisis Johnston would be as well. (Experts are divided.) But what would probably settle the issue is which side the public came down on. People were plainly revolted by the 2008 coalition, but there were particular circumstances surrounding it — the weakness of the players, the role played by the Bloc Québécois and so on — that may not be present next time. We simply don’t know whether the public was signalling its rejection of coalition governments in general — whether that was now the new convention — or just that coalition.
All would seem in doubt, then ... except that we may be about to see the whole scenario played out in advance, in the United Kingdom, where the campaign for the May 7 election has just begun.
There, too, the polls are predicting a hung Parliament, and there, too, the air is thick with possible coalitions, involving not just two or three but as many as five parties. Maybe Labour’s Ed Miliband will do a deal with the Scottish National Party. No, Conservative David Cameron will find a way to keep the Liberal Democrats onside. A helpful chart on the Telegraph website covers 31 different possible combinations.
The point is that we may well witness one party (or combination of parties) attempt to form a government, only to be defeated and replaced by a coalition of rival parties — and in the Mother of Parliaments, yet — all before the election rolls around in this country. And what becomes of Harper’s stratagems then?