[R-G] If only the Liberals listened to me...

[Anthony Fenton]

If only the Liberals listened to me...
Submitted by Justin Podur on Fri, 10/17/2008 - 14:49
http://www.killingtrain.com/node/655

It's too bad that liberals don't look to leftists for advice. Every  
once in a while in this blog I come up with brilliant ideas for what  
Canada's Liberal party should do. The following is another instalment  
in that long and futile tradition.

Two months and a few hundred million dollars later, Canadians have - a  
Conservative minority, same as they've had for the past two years. The  
Liberals lost a few seats to the Cons and a few to the NDP. The  
Greens, after running a good campaign, got almost 7% of the popular  
vote, getting out 250,000 more votes than in the previous election.  
Turnout was low, with every party except the Greens getting fewer  
actual votes than in the 2006 election.

It is often instructive to look at numbers of votes rather than just  
percentages and seats. The Cons, who ended up with 143 seats, had 5.20  
million (38%), the Libs 3.62 million (26%) and 76 seats, the Bloc 1.38  
million (10%) and 50 seats, the NDP 2.52 million (18%) and 37 seats,  
and the Greens 0.9 million (7%) and no seats. It has been said before,  
but the differences between the popular vote and seats won show a  
system crying out for proportional representation. The NDP, with 13  
fewer seats and 1.1 million votes more than their nearest rival, and  
the Greens, with 0.9 million votes and no seat in Parliament to show  
for them, must feel this strongest. But the real question is how the  
Liberals will react.

Canada's electoral system is designed as a two-party system. "First  
past the post" is not unfair if the electorate is fully represented by  
two options. The pretense of a two-party system has been dispensed  
with. The electorate does not behave as if there is a two-party  
system. But the system itself has not been changed to reflect this.

The thing about a two-party system is that it needs *two parties* to  
hold it up. In Canada, these have been the Conservatives and the  
Liberals. They agreed to the system partly because of tradition but  
mainly because they benefited. If you have a good chance of being the  
winner, why not play in a winner-takes-all game? The Bloc Quebecois  
also benefits from the lack of proportional representation, but their  
progressive and sovereigntist platform is popular in Quebec and they  
would probably do fine in a representative system anyway, especially  
one that was properly designed.

Towards the end of the election campaign, the Liberals started to  
blame 'vote-splitting' for the possibility of a Conservative victory.  
The notion was that everyone to the left of the Conservatives ought to  
unite behind the Liberals. The NDP replied, correctly, that the  
Liberals had governed much as the Conservatives had, with  
privatization, social cuts, and militarism. Beyond governing that way,  
the Liberals had supported most of the Conservative legislation in  
Parliament, as they will in the coming years.

Besides vote-splitting, Liberals are blaming Stephane Dion, their  
leader, who will likely step down. They claim that if he had been more  
dynamic, like Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae, the Liberals might have  
won. I am not convinced of this counterfactual. I may be blinded by my  
disgust at the sight of these two men falling over each other to  
endorse Israel's massacres and war crimes in Lebanon in 2006, or  
apologize for their accidental and very brief flirtation with stating  
the obvious. But Dion got to the leadership not because he looks slick  
or polished but because is more progressive than either Ignatieff or  
Rae on environmental, economic, and probably foreign policy questions.  
If the Liberals had Ignatieff/Rae, they would have even less  
opportunity to claim 'vote-splitting', except perhaps in the 8 ridings  
the Liberals lost to the NDP because of 'vote-splitting' between the  
Liberals and Conservatives.

A better frame for Canadian electoral politics over the past decade  
would be to think of it, rather than as an unstable series of Liberal  
and then Conservative minority governments, as a stable Liberal- 
Conservative coalition with growing challenges from a much more  
progressive electorate trying to break into the system. The Liberal- 
Conservative coalition has an expansive basis of unity, based on  
economic, political, and foreign policy subordination to the US.

Because their electoral ambition is merely senior partnership in this  
coalition, the Liberals can't really label voter rejection of them for  
more progressive options as 'vote-splitting'. It is true that the  
Conservatives are more destructive and less democratic: they don't  
play by the same rules - they want to transform society in reactionary  
ways. But they will accept, as they have accepted, the Liberals as a  
junior partner as they work towards this.

The Liberals have two options. They could make a decision to quit the  
coalition with the Conservatives, abandon their two-party system  
ambitions, campaign for proportional representation and make Canadian  
politics much more interesting. They would be reduced to a party that  
gets 1/3 of the electorate, but so would the Conservatives, and  
occupying the centre of a complex political spectrum would give them  
extra influence.

Instead, at least partly for lack of imagination, they are likely to  
accept junior partnership, dump Dion, and watch for an opportunity to  
make a bid for senior partnership down the road.

Meanwhile, Canadians will have lost precious opportunities to  
stabilize the atmosphere, to quit occupying other people's countries,  
and take care of one another.