[R-G] Podur: A break in the Conservative-Liberal coalition

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.killingtrain.com/node/666

A break in the Conservative-Liberal coalition

Justin Podur
December 2, 2008

In Canada, the Conservative minority government might just become the  
opposition in parliament this week, replaced by a Liberal-NDP  
coalition with support from the Bloc Quebecois from the outside.

But it is far from a done deal. Something like this almost happened in  
2005 when Paul Martin's Liberals were in power. The election that  
later (in 2006) brought Stephen Harper's Conservatives into power as a  
minority was deferred by a surprise event: a Conservative MP, Belinda  
Stronach, crossed the floor, left the Conservatives, and joined the  
Liberals. A surprise event could save Harper's government too. A week  
can be a long time in this kind of game.

I have argued before <http://www.killingtrain.com/node/655> that a  
better frame for understanding Canadian politics in recent years isn't  
alternating Liberal and Conservative minorities, but a stable  
Conservative-Liberal majority. Instability in this system is  
introduced by the Conservatives, who don't want to play by the same  
rules as their coalition partners. Conservatives and Liberals are in  
agreement on pro-US foreign policy and economic policies that favor  
investors and corporations over working people. Both have proven  
willing to persecute indigenous movements and stoke fears against  
Muslims. But Conservatives want to do this more brutally. And, perhaps  
because so much of their politics is based on fear and bigotry,  
they'll play those up against whoever is in front of them - including  
Liberals.

There are two dimensions to the current (temporary) cracking of the  
Conservative-Liberal coalition: the real reason and the pretext. The  
beauty of the situation for the NDP and Liberals is that the  
Conservatives have already backed off of the real reason, but can't  
seem to back off of the pretext, which is all their opponents need.

The real reason is the Conservatives' refusal to play by the rules.  
Temporarily secure in their private sector funding and the state of  
their party organization, they decided to try to defund their  
political opponents. When that united their opponents against them,  
they tried to back off of it. But their current campaign to stay in  
power is still based on the notion that huge parts of the country, the  
18% that voted NDP and 10% that voted Bloc (the 7% that voted Green  
don't even exist in their estimation) are illegitimate. The Liberals,  
they say, are about to enter into a coalition with "separatists and  
socialists". Implicit in the accusation is that no political  
association with these parties is legitimate. The question can't but  
arise: what do the Conservatives think Canada should do with the  
"separatists and socialists" that live here? If you lump the NDP,  
Bloc, and Greens together, as the Conservatives would, you get 35% of  
the popular vote. Considerably less than the Conservative-Liberal 64%,  
admittedly, but their eagerness to demonize this huge chunk of the  
electorate (a favored tactic during Mike Harris's years in Ontario) is  
just more evidence of how the Conservatives view politics, and their  
political opponents. By trying to defund them, they showed the  
Liberals that when they feel strong enough, they won't even accept  
them as junior partner.

Once their defunding proposal had united their opponents, they backed  
off of it. But the now-united opposition can't anyway campaign on  
something so self-interested as public funding for themselves. They  
can, however, accuse the Conservatives of being irresponsible economic  
managers. And Finance Minister Flaherty, who oversaw the pillage of  
Ontario's finances under the Mike Harris/Ernie Eves Common Sense  
Revolution, certainly presented an irresponsible economic package,  
based on avoiding deficits (which Harper later admitted he would run -  
and which Harris/Eves happily ran in Ontario, even as they slashed and  
privatized the public sector) and tax increases (which are,  
unfortunately, still a taboo, though the current US President-Elect  
managed to win despite acknowledging that it might be necessary to tax  
the wealthy) by plundering what is left of Canada's public assets.

This is bad economics. If there is an economic crisis going on, with  
unemployment, spare capacity, and deflation, who will have the cash to  
buy public assets? How much cash would such one-time sales, which  
could only fetch extremely low prices, generate? If the assets are  
underperforming, why would the private sector want them? If they are  
not underperforming, why get rid of them when little else in the  
economy is working?

Conservative economics is not about responsible management, however.  
The policies make sense if the purpose is to transfer public assets  
into the private domain and destroy the capacity for public services  
and governance (see Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", or more recently,  
Thomas Frank's "The Wrecking Crew", for more about this type of  
economics).

There is just enough disagreement on this specific aspect of economic  
policy, and on climate change, to crack the Liberals and Conservatives  
now. The Conservatives can't back off of it completely, and this gives  
their opponents the pretext they need to continue.

As for Harper's accusation that the opposition is being  
"undemocratic", it reveals a confusion about his mandate and the  
parliamentary system in which he operates. Canada is not the United  
States. In the US, the electorate votes for a President. In Canada, no  
one votes for a Prime Minister. They vote for a party. A minority  
government is one where no party won a clear mandate, and must  
therefore present policies that are non-partisan and have the backing  
of at least some of the opposition. Harper failed to do so. The  
accusation of "undemocratic" could be equally applied to the  
Conservatives, but would best be applied to the entire electoral  
system, since it lacks proportional representation.

On the other side, a mutually suspicious coalition of liberals and  
social democrats can work if they agree on a minimum program. In  
India, the Left parties supported the Congress Party from the outside  
and allowed it to form a government based on some basic social  
democratic policies. When the Congress Party moved ahead with the Indo- 
US nuclear deal, the Left parties stopped supporting Congress, which  
still survived in power by finding other allies (and, quite possibly,  
buying votes).

Back in Canada, Liberal-NDP coalition could move forward on a more  
sensible social democratic economic program. The NDP showed in 2006  
that it is willing to bring the Liberals down if forced to do so. I  
believed then that the NDP was correct in their decision, even though  
Harper won the ensuing elections. The junior partner has no  
credibility in a partnership unless they show a willingness to walk  
away. If the Liberal-NDP coalition succeeds in ousting Harper, both  
parties would do well to take the right lessons from those days.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. He can be reached at justin at killingtrain.com 
.