How to make this federal minority government work
Personal interaction between parties is key, but the signals seen so far coming out of Ottawa are not encouraging
One of the keys to the surprisingly successful minority government negotiated in Ontario between David Peterson and Bob Rae in 1985 remains unknown to all but a small circle of insiders.
Under Bob Nixon’s chairmanship, a small group of ministers and key NDP leaders and staff would meet, at least monthly. Nixon was then finance minister and a former Liberal party leader. A jovial but firm chair, he was widely respected. Over dinner in a private room of a restaurant near Queen’s Park he would arbitrate grievances, and push each side for agreements on upcoming bills.
The meetings were a pressure valve and a trust-building forum, in a tense and uncertain environment. Many public breakdowns and confrontations were avoided. It was harder to stomp and holler about the treachery of your minority partner during question period if you had shared wine, war stories and pledges of co-operation the night before. Such a set of secret meetings would be unacceptable today, but we need to do better in managing minority governments now using different tools.
Canada may be approaching a unique status among the western democracies. With U.S. cities and states flirting with ranked balloting, we have become the only western democracy still clinging entirely to a 19th-century voting model: first past the post wins. We may now also become the only country in the developed world without proportional representation that still cannot elect a majority government.
We seem destined to keep electing minorities for several reasons. None of the big three parties has deep roots in every part of the country. Beyond the Bloc Québécois, we have two other parties that seem likely to elect MPs in the near future, the Greens and the PPC. Six parties alone frustrate winning a majority. For the Liberals and the Tories, the challenge is compounded by their increasing tendency to rack up huge, wasted riding majorities in their regions of strength, with weak performances elsewhere.
The daily sabre-rattling and perfunctory contacts between the party leaders are tiresome to watch, and obstruct Parliament’s ability to deliver real change. As we emerge from the pandemic, there is a large backlog of issues and halffinished legislation that requires urgent action. They won’t get it without substantive agreement among the parties about priorities.
The prime minister’s phone calls with opposition leaders last week were indicative of how far we are from an adult discussion about how to manage successive minority governments. First, a phone call? Why not a serious meeting with an agenda, staff and agreements? No, it was just more sabre-rattling on all sides.
Building trust between the leaders, the house leaders, the whips and the key critics is essential to any hope of stability. A trust deficit has been getting deeper for the past two decades, since the days of the shambolic Martin government. Members of each party bellow at each other in public and have very few serious private exchanges. A different approach is needed. Three changes deserve consideration, if we want to avoid annual elections.
The party leaders need to meet before the new session and then monthly to agree on priorities, boundaries and time frames. There should be weekly formal meetings between whips, and separately between their staffs, to assess what went right and wrong in the past week and to lay out the following weeks’ priorities.
Finally, the critics and ministers covering key designated bills require a forum to discuss their needs and demands.
None of this would remove partisan bickering, sharp-elbowed tactics in committee, or theatrical outrage on the floor of the House. But it might help create a framework allowing substantive disagreements to be hammered out with less time wasted on political posing. Any of these changes would require some commitment, based on each leader’s assessment of their self-interest, to have any hope of success.
They might be encouraged by Canadians making it clear we will reward those who help deliver anxiously awaited post-pandemic legislation — and that we will punish those who make that impossible. The outrage at the calling of a “nothing election” should be a warning to all players about the risks to a party seen as having triggered another such foolish exercise.