Clegg: is he good for the Canucks?

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 23, 2010 at 1:56 PM - 34 Comments

You’ve probably heard about the startling eleventh-hour rise in the polls that Britain’s Liberal Democrats have enjoyed since their leader Nick Clegg, a reformed skirt-chaser and unreformed atheist, leapt out of the tall grass to win an Apr. 15 televised election debate. It’s time Canadians started contemplating the domestic impact of a strong Lib-Dem performance in the May 6 vote.

Lately you can find individual UK polls that have the three major parties in almost every order except for those that have the ruling Labour Party at the top. Conservative leader David Cameron, until recently a heavy favourite to win the election and capture a majority, suddenly finds himself confronted with the possibility of a historic, 1964-Phillies-esque collapse down the stretch. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been reduced to near-irrelevance on the hustings—but because of his Labour Party’s regional strength, his party is likely to control more seats than the Liberal Democrats even if Labour finishes third in the vote.

Punters at UK gambling site Betfair are currently forecasting better-than-even odds (57%) of a hung Parliament and a reasonable chance (fractional odds: 7-to-1) of someone other than Brown or Cameron becoming Prime Minister. Under such chaotic circumstances it is entirely possible that “someone other than Brown or Cameron” could end up being a coalition leader other than Clegg himself. And the price of the exotic “two elections in 2010″ prop bet has soared, implying a 27% chance of a quickie second vote. Also, dogs and cats have been spotted living together in Scunthorpe.

The Clegg boomlet may not end up changing anything in the long run. But even though the UK parties map awkwardly onto ours, it would appear to have relevance to Canada on at least a couple of fronts. The Lib-Dem moment is the very same one of which the New Democrats have been dreaming since the Winnipeg Declaration, and of which they caught a brief glimpse in ’88; to wit, voters finally get tired of the choice between Coke and Pepsi and start getting curious about Dr. Pepper.

I went to rabble.ca expecting to find a lot of excitement about this. More fool me. The online left is far too busy tilting at Zionist windmills and trying to win the All-Canada Summarize Chomsky Competition to pay any heed to the model for our democracy. But a strong electoral performance by Clegg would provide data for a future debate about the fate and usefulness of a social-democratic party that no longer believes in socialism—and one that, given the excess weight given to labour unions in its leadership balloting, arguably isn’t all that strong on democracy either. Recall that the “Democrat” half the Liberal-Democrat DNA derives from light-pink Labourites who got tired of trade-union bullying and wanted to build a non-militant home for the Left. Thatcher crushed the unions, Labour became neoliberal, and thirty years zipped by, but somehow the Lib Dems have recovered a raison d’être.

It seems highly speculative to imagine that such a thing could ever happen to the NDP. (I’m not aware that there exists some brand of “awareness of one’s own irrelevance” fairy-dust that can be sprinkled on NDP supporters.) Of more immediate concern to Canada is the possibility that a strong Lib-Dem result could a) create pressure for the adoption of proportional representation in the UK and b) bring about the conditions for its immediate adoption as the price of Liberal-Democrat participation in a governing coalition. If the three UK parties were each to get the exact same numbers of votes on May 6, with the regionally distorted riding-by-riding distribution remaining about the same, the seat distribution in the Commons would end up being roughly LAB 300-CON 200-LIB 100.

I don’t think there is necessarily a major ethical problem with this, particularly since what it practically amounts to is giving Scotland and Wales something more like an equal say in British government and protecting them from being demographically overrun. Only a crazed extremist for “democracy” in the strictest technical meaning of the term would argue that Scotland and Wales should have influence on Parliament not one iota greater than their nose count. The effect of “first past the post” in current British politics is much the same as that of the U.S.A. giving equal representation to the states in the Senate, and, by extension, giving smaller states a disproportionate say in the Electoral College.

Still, this election may provide a tough, maybe destructive test of tolerance for that arrangement—particularly in the light of ever-louder murmurs of English nationalism and English awareness of the West Lothian Question. (The existence of Welsh and Scottish assemblies considerably weakens the argument that Parliament can never revise constitutional arrangements in a manner contrary to the interests of Wales and Scotland, and the argument isn’t totally decisive anyway.) A fiasco for first-past-the-post would be bad news for its future here; its abandonment in the UK as part of a power-sharing deal would make us stick out like a sore thumb. Even pro-FPTPers can’t deny that.

Why Michael Ignatieff is hard to find these days

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 7, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 95 Comments

We are pleased with reports that the New Democratic Party is thinking of dropping “New” from its name. This is welcome news. No “New” is good news, you might say. Yes, you’re right, you probably wouldn’t say it, but you might. I am younger than the New Democratic Party and absolutely nobody thinks of me as New Paul Wells. Well-Preserved Paul Wells, maybe. Rumpled and Lovable Paul Wells, if you insist. No, really, go ahead, I’m powerless to stop you. But not New.

The downside with the whole N-less DP thing is that dropping the New would leave “Democratic Party,” leaving the party of Tommy Douglas and Alexa McDonough semantically indistinguishable from a party which (a) supports parallel public and private health care systems—“two-tier medicine,” as it’s sometimes called; (b) overwhelmingly supported the Iraq invasion in 2003; (c) is American. Continue…

Text of Stephane Dion's remarks (English)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 7:29 PM - 20 Comments

Canada is facing the impacts of the global economic crisis. Our economy is on the verge of a recession. Canadians are worried about losing their jobs, their homes, their savings. Every economist in the country is predicting increased job losses and deficits for the next few years. 

The federal government has a duty to act and help Canadians weather this storm.

Stephen Harper still refuses to propose measures to stimulate the Canadian economy. His mini-budget last week demonstrated that his priority is partisanship and settling ideological scores.

The Harper Conservatives have lost the confidence of the majority of Members of the House of Commons. In our democracy, in our parliamentary system, in our Constitution, this means that they have lost the right to govern. 

Canadians don’t want another election, they want Parliamentarians to work together. That’s our job. Canadians want their MPs to put aside partisanship and focus on the economy. Continue…

Text of the Prime Minister's remarks (French)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 7:25 PM - 0 Comments

Bonsoir.

Les Canadiens et les Canadiennes sont fiers de l’histoire de notre pays, l’une des plus anciennes démocraties durables du monde. Depuis 141 ans, les partis politiques naissent et disparaissent, les leaders vont et viennent, et les gouvernements changent.

La constante, cependant, est le principe selon lequel les gouvernements au Canada ont toujours été choisis par la population.Et à la lumière de cette tradition démocratique, les Canadiens et les Canadiennes ont bâti l’un des pays les plus pacifistes et les plus prospères que le monde ait connu. Le Canada est une terre d’espoir et de possibilités qui inspire des pays dans le monde entier et attire des millions de nouveaux immigrants.

Le 14 octobre, pour la quarantième fois depuis la Confédération, les Canadiens et les Canadiennes ont voté dans le cadre d’une élection générale nationale.  Continue…

Text of the Prime Minister's remarks (English)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 7:16 PM - 13 Comments

Good evening.

Canadians take pride in our history as one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies.  During the past 141 years, political parties have emerged and disappeared, leaders have come and gone, and governments have changed. 

Constant in every case, however, is the principle that Canada’s Government has always been chosen by the people.  And following the light of this democratic tradition, Canadians have built one of the most peaceful and prosperous countries the world has ever known – a land of hope and opportunity that inspires others around the globe, and has drawn millions as new immigrants to our country.

On October 14, for the 40th time since Confederation, Canadians voted in a national general election.   We are honoured that you returned our Government to office with a strengthened mandate to lead this great country through the most difficult global economic crisis in many decades.  Canada’s Government is acting to deal with the crisis, right now. Continue…

Is that all there is?

By John Geddes - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 20 Comments

Jack Layton barely seemed to break stride after the Oct. 14 election. Prime Minister Stephen Harper slipped from view as he hunkered down to work on appointing his new cabinet, and begin drafting the Throne Speech that will set his second minority government on course later this month. Liberals licked their wounds, mused about rebuilding, then began manoeuvring into position for the inevitable leadership contest to come. But Layton went on talking much the way he always has since jumping from Toronto politics to the national scene as New Democrat leader in 2003.

He called on Harper to support peace talks with the Taliban, an old Layton position, once ridiculed by the Tories, now solidly mainstream in Afghanistan. He urged Conservatives to come up with a plan for Ottawa to backstop company pension plans jeopardized by the stock market plummeting. He demanded that Harper co-operate more humbly with the opposition parties when Parliament resumes sitting. In short, Layton has sounded like he’s pronouncing securely from a position of strength. And with his NDP caucus expanded to 37 MPs, seven more than before the election, perhaps he is.

In an interview, he told Maclean’s he saw the NDP’s gains as “laying the foundations” for steady, if unspectacular, future growth. He argues global economic uncertainty offers him a historic chance to win converts to the party’s long-standing interventionist policies. There is, however, a gloomier way to read the NDP results. For the first time, the New Democrats spent as much as the Tories and Liberals on a campaign, yet they won just 18.2 per cent of the popular vote, only a shade up from the 17.5 per cent they took in 2006. Those 37 MPs, while up from 13 when Layton came to Ottawa, still number less than half the Liberals’ 76, and fewer than the record 43 the NDP elected under Ed Broadbent in 1988.

Robin Sears, who served as Broadbent’s campaign director in that election, praises Layton’s 2008 run as “flawless” and the party’s “most professional ever.” All the more troubling, then, that it wasn’t more successful. Slick TV ads, a nearly error-free performance by Layton, all stacked against a lacklustre centre-left rival in Dion—and still the NDP failed to threaten the Liberals’ status as the main alternative to the Tories. For Sears, now a communications consultant for the Toronto firm Navigator, and no longer a party member, the next step is obvious: he lays out the case for a Liberal-NDP merger in the upcoming issue of Policy Options, the journal of the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy, which is widely read among political insiders.

Sears discerns little daylight these days between Liberals and New Democrats on policy. Nevertheless, he doubts a unite-the-left push, even if the case for it is compelling, would succeed any time soon. “The tribal loyalties and hatreds of political life,” he said in an interview, “are greater than any doctrinal issues.” Indeed, Layton rejects bringing together the left-of-centre parties the way Harper united the right. “The Liberal party,” he says, “runs using quite a few of the ideas we talk about, but in government goes the other way.” He has often railed in the past about Liberal governments failing to make good on promises in areas like child care and greenhouse gas reductions.

So he proposes to keep painstakingly building up what remains the fourth-place party in the House. It looks like a long slog. In three tries as leader, he has added an average of eight seats per election; at that pace, the NDP would form a majority government after another 14 or 15 more campaigns. Layton, 58, laughs at the prospect of trudging toward power until he is an old man. He argues he’s laying crucial groundwork for swifter success, putting particular emphasis on how the NDP’s share of the Quebec vote has climbed from less than two per cent in 2000, the last election before he took over, to just over 12 per cent in last month’s test. Still, that was good enough for just one seat on Oct. 14, a close win by MP Thomas Mulcair in the Montreal-area riding he first took for the NDP from the Liberals in a 2006 by-election.