Russell’s Nightmare
Canada changed last night. It was a change which voters made consciously and deliberately. In doing so, they ignored the warning of one of Canada’s best known constitutional scholars. A week before the election, Peter Russell appeared in what will become a seminal video. “This is the most important federal election in my lifetime,” he declared:
What is at stake is nothing less than parliamentary democracy. If the electorate rewards Mr. Harper with a majority, it will mean that he will be able to operate as a presidential prime minister without the check and balance of Congress. It will also mean that two out of five Canadians think very little of the need to hold government accountable to Parliament. Mr. Harper has reduced parliamentary debate to “bickering” and the role of parliament in the formation of government to irrelevant constitutional stuff. I hope and pray that the parties of parliamentarians win a majority next Monday.
Russell warned Canadians that Stephen Harper has absolutely no respect for Canada’s constitutional conventions. Retiring Speaker of the House Peter Milliken made the same point when he found the Harper government in contempt of Parliament.
A significant number of Canadians have forgotten that it was respect for those conventions which helped us through some of our most trying times. When Quebec separatists chose the Algerian terrorist model as the way to independence, Rene Levesque moved the cause from planting bombs in mailboxes to seeking legitimacy through ballot boxes. When he lost the 1980 Quebec Referendum, it was Levesque’s respect for those conventions which was behind his pledge, “A la prochaine!”
And the next time, when Quebecers voted again on Quebec Independence — and lost the vote by one half of one percentage point — they returned to their homes, secure in the knowledge that they still had a voice in the House of Commons through Gilles Duceppe. Respect for those conventions allowed for a party dedicated to the breakup of the country — a party which, for awhile, served as the Loyal Opposition. It was those conventions which have allowed Canadians, despite their differences, to talk through their problems.
Last night Canadians elected a man who does not talk to his opponents. He demonizes them. He demonized the Bloc Quebecois in 2008, when his decision to cancel vote subsidies — a decision he made without consulting his caucus — almost cost him his government. He belittled Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, a man whose international reputation will survive, even in defeat.
Canadians now have the government they deserve. Only a little more than 61% of us cast our ballots — a result foreshadowed in an earlier Angus Reid Poll. I suspect that — like voters in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan — it won’t be long until voter remorse sets in. But the nightmare has just begun.
Canada’s Owen Gray grew up in Montreal, where he received a B. A. from Concordia University. After crossing the border and completing a Master’s degree at the University of North Carolina, he returned to Canada, married, raised a family and taught high school for 32 years. Now retired, he lives — with his wife and youngest son — on the northern shores of Lake Ontario. This post is cross posted from his blog.
12 Responses to “Russell’s Nightmare”
I understand you’re aghast at any reversal of a Euro-style trend in Canadian politics, sir. And you’re not alone. Look at this in the Al-Guardian, for example:
Stephen Harper is our version of George W Bush, minus the warmth and intellect
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/03/canada-stephen-harper-american-politics
We could always use more oil and gas. And water, someday, too.
[grin]
Liberals can never take the hint, even when it is spelled out as much more than a hint.
And of course, rejection of their message is ALWAYS ‘ignorance’.
Apparently Harper has looked at USA’s own problem child, the GOP, and used it for a role model. What is worse, Canada’s electorate seems to have caught the same disease our electorate has suffered from over the past few decades. You have my deep and abiding sympathy.
I’m not aghast, DL and Indef. Mr. Harper is a known quantity here. He has spent his entire adult life in politics; and his views are well known. The issue in Canada goes far beyond the usual Liberal-Conservative divide.
Parliamentary democracy goes all the way back to the Magna Charta, which established the principle that King John had to report the real costs of government to Parliament, and that Parliament had the right to approve them or reject them.
Harper’s government was brought down because it refused to tell the House of Commons what his programs would cost. He claimed that those figures were protected by “cabinet confidentiality” — the Canadian equivalent of what Richard Nixon called “executive privilege.”
He has argued during this election for the king’s dispensation. Imagine a resurrected George III occupying the White House, and you will appreciate what Canadians gave their consent to last night. They were willing to suspend the basic right of Parliament, if Harper essentially promised to make the trains run on time.
And again, if one truly respects Democracy, one has to accept when the voters make decisions you don’t agree with.
Perhaps had the Liberals not run Canada like elitist overlords, the voters would not have felt so desirous of putting them in their place.
And the message could hardly have been stronger. They should learn from it, but won’t.
Mr. Gray, don’t you mean what Obama would call “presidential perogative”? Or if ordered by a federal court not to do it, he’d do it anyway and openly tell us so?
[wink]
Mr. Gray, why aren’t the trains running on time? Have Canadian Crown Corporations become the equivalent of Amtrak lately?
[grin]
An interesting commentary.
But hasn’t Canada had plenty of majority governments before ?
Historically, Canadians have preferred majority governments, Patrick. Majority government is not the problem up here.As Peter Russell points out, the problem has been Mr. Harper’s refusal to accept a minority government other than his own.
Throughout the campaign he railed about a “wreckless coalition” of other parties. He argued that a coalition was not possible unless there was an election.
That’s simply not the case. For almost a thousand years, coalition governments have been an accepted part of Parliamentary democracies. Mr. Harper has tried to rewrite parliamentary conventions to suit himself — an echo of the Bush adviser in Ron Suskind’s book who complained about the “reality based community” which refused to recognize that the Bush administration created its own reality.
Mr. Gray — yes, you’re being Euro-style about things, including about the evil Dubya, Pardner.
I’m unfamiliar with all of the details: Could your parliament hold a no-confidence vote on Harper and at least then Harper might dissolve parliament as you feel he is effectively doing now?
(I’ve told others in the US already, consider a no-confidence vote on President Bush before 2006; before 2008, the result would be obvious.)
That’s only partly in jest; many parliamentary systems have a complimentary pair of no-confidence votes (forcing replacement of the executive head or head and cabinet) and dissolving parliament (“snap elections”).
(Imagine a snap election in the USA about the lib Dem Congress as early as mid-late 2009!)
So DLS, where is this so-called “lib Dem Congress” you always speak of??? All I see are moderates. That old effort to drag the spectrum to the right (even more) by the mere repetition wornout talking points is pretty fossilized by now.
Mr. Spencer, your vision has been distorted (from bias) before, and it is so here. The 2010 voters punished the Dems for going way too far to the Left, which (almost) nobody voted for in 2008 (it was rather an anti-GOP vote, in large part for them going left at times).
Yes, the far to extreme Left insisted that the Dems’ problem is that they didn’t go leftward enough, and no doubt they’d say the same thing if the Dems had done so and lost even more badly in 2010. It’s a shame such people don’t have Baghdad Bob to add to their far-left talk radio commentary or MSNBC commentary, etc.