Where to hang one’s hat in hung Parliament
For the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc Québécois, the big prize on offer in Monday’s vote is the balance of power across from a minority government.
A hung Parliament would offer the third parties the opportunity to yield more influence on federal policy than the majority alternative, regardless of whether it is the Conservatives or the Liberals that hold a plurality of seats.
But when it comes to what they would have to show their supporters for that influence, the partisan affiliation of the government is not a small detail.
In the scenario of a minority outcome on Monday, the colour of the winner would determine whether the third parties in the House of Commons spend the next Parliament with their foot on the government’s brake or on the accelerator.
On some of the issues that matter most to the New Democrats and the Greens, there are more black-and-white differences between Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals than grey areas.
Those differences cover a wide policy field, ranging from climate change and reinforcing the country’s social safety net to Indigenous reconciliation and Canada’s role in advancing a progressive agenda on the world stage.
On all those issues and more, the New Democrats and the Greens want more federal activism.
With the balance of power, it is conceivable that they could advance that goal in tandem with a Liberal minority government.
On most matters that are of primary importance for progressive voters, the distinction between the NDP, the Greens and the Liberals often has more to do with pacing than with ideology.
Paul Martin was the last Liberal prime minister to steer a minority government through a hung Parliament. Over his relatively short time in office, he found enough common ground with the New Democrats to co-write a budget with Jack Layton.
In 2008, it was not disagreements over the policy infrastructure of a proposed Liberal-NDP coalition government that caused the plan to fall apart, but rather the weakened leadership and the fast-fading moral authority over his party of then-Liberal leader Stéphane Dion.
By comparison, there is little commonality between the policy aspirations of the New Democrats and the Greens, as expressed in this campaign, and those of Scheer’s Conservatives.
The Conservative leader is spending the last stretch of the campaign highlighting what could well become a defining and unbridgeable gap between his party and his rivals on the left.
If elected, Scheer is vowing to devote the very first bill of his government to the dismantling of the Liberal climate-change framework. Should his party win a plurality of seats but fall short of a majority on Monday, Scheer might have to reconsider that commitment or risk a short life for a Conservative minority government.
But even in the scenario of a strategic retreat on the gist of the party’s first bill, the best the New Democrats and the Greens could hope to achieve in their dealings with a minority Conservative government on climate change — and on a host of other top-of-mind policies — would be to hold the line until a more progressive government comes along.
And what about the Bloc? On Monday, it will finish either first or second to the Liberals in Quebec.
The sovereigntist party is already certain to win more seats than the Greens and it could yet beat the NDP for third place in the Commons.
There are those who believe the Bloc would be willing to play ball with the Conservatives on climate change and, possibly, pipelines in exchange for some Quebec-specific concessions on immigration or on the delegation of all income tax collection to the province.
But the reality is that there would be hell to pay for the Bloc in Quebec if it were to use climate change as a bargaining chip in such political transactions.
The environment is widely considered as non-negotiable territory by the vast majority of Quebec voters. Leader YvesFrançois Blanchet has acknowledged as much.
Even Premier François Legault, as popular as he may currently be, is vulnerable to the growing perception that he is not willing to put his money where his mouth is on climate change.
There is little that would stand to make the BQ’s resurrection more short-lived than being seen as an enabler of a pro-pipeline, anti-carbon-tax Conservative federal government.
Indeed, the last time the Bloc cohabited with a minority Conservative government — over Stephen Harper’s first two terms — Quebec voters were so unhappy with the results that they turned away in droves from the sovereigntist party and set out to find a national party that could oust the Conservatives from power.
All of which is to say that the New Democrats, the Greens and the Bloc can only hope that if they get the gift of the minority government they covet on Monday, it does not come wrapped in blue.