ONE THING IS CERTAIN — NOTHING IS CERTAIN
Would Harper, if called upon, form government with 110 or 105 seats?
We have reached the end of the “phoney war” stage of the campaign. From Labour Day on, the parties will be using live ammunition.
That said, it was a surprisingly frisky August: from the revelations at the Mike Duffy trial to last week’s Liberal-NDP policy-swap on the deficit, there was no shortage of electoral fodder for the interested voter to chew on. And the result? The same close threeway race at the end of the month as at the beginning, plus or minus a percentage point or two.
That doesn’t mean we won’t see bigger shifts in the weeks to come. The parties will have saved their most dramatic gambits, their nastiest “oppo research” for the final six weeks. Moreover, the dynamics of a three-way race, in a highly polarized political environment and with more than 50 per cent of the electorate, according to a Nanos Research poll, undecided, makes for a high degree of fluidity.
The efforts of the parties may in fact be secondary. More important, perhaps, may be the interaction between the polls and strategic voters. Such is the loathing of the Conservatives among the two-thirds of voters who say they want a change of government that we could see a strong last-minute move toward whichever opposition party appeared best placed to defeat them.
Conversely, should the NDP seem headed for power, it is possible to imagine Liberal and Tory voters coalescing in a “stop-the-NDP” movement — though Tom Mulcair’s strenuous efforts to play up his centre-right credentials may take some of the steam out of this. Let us just hope, after the experience of the recent British election, that the polls guiding voters’ calculations are accurate.
So it’s an unusually unpredictable election. But that doesn’t begin to describe how uncertain the outcome is. Because it isn’t just the results on election night that are impossible to predict: it’s what happens after. Even if the polls as they now stand turn out to be an exact reflection of each party’s share of the vote on Oct. 19, that still doesn’t give us the first clue who will be governing us.
For one thing, it is always difficult to know how precisely the polls will translate into seats. But suppose the current projections are right: that the NDP wins about 125 seats, to the Conservatives’ 120 and the Liberals’ 95. What then?
Among the imponderables: who does the governor general call upon to form a government? The answer is not, as popularly believed, the party with the most seats. Rather, by convention it is supposed to be the incumbent who gets first crack. Probably that is what would happen, and probably Stephen Harper would accept. But what if the gap in seats between the NDP and the Conservatives were larger? Would he try to form a government with, say, 110 seats? 105?
Suppose he does (out of power, he would almost certainly be out of a job). The supposition is that the other parties would combine to defeat him at the first opportunity. So the next question becomes: when does that first opportunity arise? In countries with properly functioning parliamentary systems, convention dictates that the prime minister recall Parliament within days, weeks at most. The prime minister must command the confidence of the house at all times. Without that having been tested, his mandate to govern is uncertain.
But this is not a country with a properly functioning parliamentary system; the convention that the prime minister must face the house as soon as possible is among the many that have been allowed to fall into disuse. Joe Clark, parliamentary man that he was, did not recall Parliament for five months after his election in 1979 (yes, there was a summer in between: so what?).
It is not hard to imagine Harper holding off for many months, while he toured the country in an attempt to gin up popular support, unveiling policies he was not legally in a position to enact and not conventionally in a position to announce, in the hope that, by the time Parliament is recalled, the opposition parties would think twice about defeating him.
Suppose he does recall Parliament, either soon or late. And suppose the opposition parties do combine to defeat him? Does he accept his fate, and recommend to the governor general that he call upon one or more of the other parties to form a government? Or does he follow Mackenzie King’s example in 1926, and insist he dissolve the House and call fresh elections? What then?
I wish I could say the convention was clear here. It seems pretty clear to me that, Harper having lost the confidence of the house, the governor general would be under no obligation to accept his advice. But there are respected authorities who disagree. I could well imagine Harper making such a demand. And it would be a nervy governor general who disregarded it.
But was our previous supposition correct? Can we, that is, take it as read that the Liberals and NDP would, in fact, defeat the government, given the chance? To persuade the governor general not to dissolve the house, after all, they would have to present themselves as a credible government in waiting, most likely meaning a coalition, or at least some sort of durable electoral pact.
The conventional wisdom is that they would; that if the alternative were to leave Harper in power, they would be under irresistible pressure to do so. But coalitions don’t tend to work out too well for the smaller party in the arrangement: ask Britain’s Liberal Democrats. And besides, they hate each other.
So let’s close on one last imponderable. Is it inconceivable that one or the other of the opposition parties might instead strike a deal to prop up the Conservatives in power? Maybe on condition that they dump Harper as leader?
To persuade the governor general not to dissolve the house, after all, they would have to present themselves as a credible government in waiting, most likely meaning a coalition, or at least some sort of durable electoral pact. Andrew Coyne For one thing, it is always difficult to know how precisely the polls will translate into seats.