Some Canadian dopers (usually left-er ones) seem to blame Stephen Harper for something, but it’s not clear what. I gather he pissed off the opposition. It seems like they were legally-but-shadily getting cash from the government instead of trying to get public donations, and Harper decided to end this. This was both a good budgetary measure and would kneecap the Liberals, but obviously pissed them righteously off. The opposition is now making a Hail Mary pass using a legal-but-extremely-shady measure to put themselves into power as a minority leadership somehow, using an official appointed by the Queen of England.
Harper proposed ending the taxpayer fiscal contribution to political parties, which was instilled by the previous Liberal government, and was based upon the number of votes a party received in the last federal election. This funding replaced previous corporate contributions. However, after a backlash, Harper’s Conservative minority decided to remove this proposal from the table and leave well enough alone, since the opposition parties currently rely more upon this funding than the Conservatives. But the damage was done and yes this did piss off the opposition.
The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc parties have the constitutional right to form a coalition government, since between them they hold more seats in the House of Commons than the Conservatives do alone. This is not a totally unprecedented move, but one used, I believe, only once before at the Federal level, and a handful of times at the provincial level in Canada.
Harper has a minority government and went into this parliamentary session with guns a blazing like he held a majority government. The Liberals were already facing a leadership quandary and Harper felt he would have an easy time pushing a Conservative agenda on the rest of the House; he learned otherwise.
Truth be told however, it is apparent that the other parties were plotting a coalition before the aforementioned economic update was tabled. The other parties say they have lost confidence in the minority Conservatives to govern. I say they’re sore losers and are threatening to take their ball and go home.
I hope another election is called; the Conservatives would win a majority based on current polls.
The government funding political parties is a measure by which all parties get money based upon how many votes they got in the last election. It’s legal, and not shady (however disagreeable I happen to find it). Harper’s Conservatives have been vastly better at fundraising than the other parties, so while the cut was introduced as a “money-saving measure”, it appears to me that the only reason it was attempted was to hobble the other parties.
Opposition WAS making a Hail Mary, but now that’s unclear. Liberals are replacing their leader as of today, and Ignatieff–a long-time Harvard prof before returning to his native Canada to run for the Liberals–has not expressed significant support for a coalition. The method by which this would have (and could) happen would be by a vote of non-confidence, long-established as a trigger for the fall of a government. It is also accepted that a Governor General (appointed by the Queen, yes, but in the modern era, always by suggestion of the then Prime Minister) could ask someone else in the House if they can form government. Many seem to agree that seeking this kind of outcome is constitutionally supported and fully legal, but that the outcome would not be a moral one.
I thought the hatred for Harper was because he was unable to lead.
IE he wasn’t able to get all of the cats herded in the same direction. Likewise, a lot of people are pissed off at the Liberals, NDP, Bloc, etc, for not playing nice and allowing themselves to be herded. There is no reason for the opposition parties to bring down the government so soon after the election. I think minority governments are the most Canadian style of government. Everyone is jus’ givin’ 'er with all the fighting eh? But no one is able to really do anything, and the end result of all the fighting seems to be either status quo, or a close approximation of what Canadians want.
Honestly, all the government needs to do is make sure to water the plants, and pay the Hydro bill. We managed not to follow the Americans into Iraq, we lent less money to people who couldn’t pay it back, homophobes are ignored, and we like Japanese cars. There is nothing for the politicans to do. The “economic crisis” seems to be something the politicians are trying to create so that they can do something.
As I understand it, there is nothing shady about what the coalition did. Whoever commands the most votes gets to lead, but usually, it is the single party that has won the most ridings*. However, the coalition didn’t try to instal themselves, they were going to vote against a “confidence measure”. If a bill that is also a matter of confidence fails to pass, then the PM is automatically out. The opposition is not putting themselves in power using " . . . Hail Mary pass . . .", the PM is keeping himself in power by suspending parliment for a few weeks. I thought the only reason the coalition was forcing the issue was that they thought they had a better chance of winning the next election.
That would be something. We started and finished our election while the Americans were in the end game of their own election, and we may have another one before Obama becomes president (if there is snow and he is delayed for six days getting to the White House).
I think I remember being told about a time when the party that won the most seats appointed the leader of the #2 party PM so that they would have #2’s support, but I’m not sure about that. I know that other party’s members are sometimes appointed to Cabinet.
The Conservative government tried to eliminate the public financing of political parties. Of course the opposition parties were going to be pissed off, especially since they benefit from it more than the Conservatives do. Not only the most left-wing Canadians are angry at Harper for this (though leftists are likely to be since they probably didn’t vote for the Conservatives, while rightists probably did). RickJay, who is quite centrist in Ontario terms, is also very angry at Harper, and at most other federal politicians as well.
Nothing shady about it. It makes sense to publicly fund political parties because it ensures that parties that may not have strong allies in business (notably left-wing parties, or relatively new parties) can get some money for campaigning if they have some amount of popular support. It also actually reduces shady political maneuvers, because politicians don’t have to rely on cash envelopes from lobbyists for their campaign money. Especially if there is a cap on private donations as well.
There are also good arguments in favour of not financing political parties with public money and instead making them rely entirely on private donations. Really, this is a political question.
What the opposition does is totally legal and not shady at all. In a Parliamentary system, the government must have the confidence of the House. What the opposition did is say they would vote down the government on the next confidence measure (frequent, happened last time to the Liberals in 2005 which led to Harper’s election) and then, instead of going for another election mere weeks after the last one, try to convince the Governor General (who’s actually appointed by the Queen of Canada, under the advice of the Prime Minister) to appoint a government made up of members of the (former) opposition. This government would be a coalition government, which means it would contain members from several parties.
This is very frequent in many Parliamentary systems, but it’s kind of rare in Canadian political practice. Usually when a government falls on a confidence measure in Canada, the Prime Minister asks the Governor General to dissolve the House and call a new election, and this is what happens. But since the last election was only a few weeks ago, and the opposition parties know they can form a government that would hold the confidence of the House (they’ve signed a formal accord about it), the Governor General would have the option of asking them to form the government. But there is little constitutional precedent in this regard, so nobody is totally sure what the Governor General should be doing.
Harper, knowing he would lose this confidence vote, decided to ask the Governor General to prorogue Parliament. Prorogation means ending the session, taking a short break and starting anew with a new Speech from the Throne. It is a prerogative of the Crown, exercised under the advice of the Prime Minister, so Harper was in his right to ask for it. There was talk that maybe the Governor General could refuse prorogation seeing how there were confidence votes on the table, but it would probably have set a bad precedent, so I believe she took the right decision. The new session will start in January with a new Throne Speech and the (Conservative) government’s budget, so we’ll see what happens then.
Up to now, there has been no constitutional breakdown. This is a political crisis, but not a constitutional crisis. Everything has happened according to the rules; there has been grumbling that the purpose of prorogation isn’t to save the government from confidence votes, but since they’ll resume in just over a month it’s not a big deal.
What people are objecting to in the proposed coalition government isn’t so much that it’s “shady” – it’s a common part of many Parliamentary systems – but mostly that it’s felt that most Canadians did not vote for such a government. The Liberal/NDP coalition would have only 114 seats in the House to the Conservatives’ 143 and would require the support of the Bloc québécois to govern, and the Bloc québécois is present only in Quebec (only ran candidates there) and is officially in favour of Quebec independence. Conservative voters especially oppose the coalition, for the reason you’d expect. The pro-coalition side says the same thing, namely that most Canadians didn’t vote for the Conservatives, who got less than 38% of the vote across Canada, so a coalition of opposition parties would be more representative of the will of the people. Liberal and New Democrat voters are usually pro-coalition (again, for the reason you’d expect), and Quebecers are also more pro-coalition than the average Canadian.
This is not correct (at least the “shadily” part). In June 2003, Bill C-24 (brought in by the Liberal Gov’t of the time), eliminated political contributions from business and unions. In their place, a public funding model gave a certain amount of public money to each party, depending on the % of popular vote they achieved in the last election.
Yes, Harper decided to end it. A “good budgetary measure” Eh, not really. It would have only saved 30 million - a rounding error on the budget. He decided to end it because it would bankrupt the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc, and seriously handicap their ability to fight another election.
The opposition basically said “we will not vote on this measure”, and since they are in the majority (Harper is leading a minority government), this means that the government would fall (since it was a “money” vote) What the opposition was suggesting is that instead of going back to another election so soon, they would propose to form a government with a coalition of two parties (Liberal and NDP), with the support of the Bloc for budgetary measures. (incidentally, the Bloc supported the last two of Harper’s Conservative budgets - I guess the “filthy separatists” were OK enough to work with then)
The Liberals were entirely within their rights to propose such a thing. It was not a “hail mary pass”
To forstall the downfall of his government, it was Harper who went to the Governor General to ask her to Prorogue Parliament - essentially to stop Parliament from sitting until he feels like it. She assented to this decision, since she is appointed by the Prime Minister, and can be fired by the Prime Minister (the Queen really has nothing to do with it these days).
This decision of Harper’s to prorogue Parliament is unprecedented; Essentially it means that the Prime Minister can “pause” parliament whenever a vote of non-confidence is proposed to bring his government down.
In summary - the opposition did not get cash “shadily” from the government, and it was HARPER, not them who when to the Governor General to get parliament suspended in order to delay the fall of his government in an unprecedented move.
If there’s another attempt to prorogue Parliament before the next Throne Speech is voted on, I’m sure the Governor General would be constitutionally required to refuse it.
Well, I still think the liberals were on the legal-but-shady side of life, but anyway understand a lot more about this. I’ve seen the whole thing written about in several places, but didn’t quite get the exact placement of each group and what was going on. Probably because the situation was changing significantly every other day, and because some commentators were themselves confused.
Nope. She’s not required to refuse a request from the Prime Minister.
It’s also my understanding that Parliament is prorogued for up to a year. It is entirely up to Harper as to when they reconvene. He says January 26, but it’s up to him. The GG had no say in how long the proroguation was to last.
He could reconvene, do a Throne Speech and then ask her to prorogue again. She’s under no constitutional requirement to say “yes” or “no” to that request. It’s up to her.
Nothing was shady legally speaking (IANAL), although some of it may “feel” shady emotionally / politically.
Harper was trying to cut off taxpayer subsidies to the federal political parties and make the parties more dependent on raising public donations. Chretien (as part of his reforming of political financing) had pushed this into law previously while also pushing through legislation that made corporate donations illegal, which had previously provided about half of the Liberal party’s operating funds. Here’s a link that I’ve posted before about this topic in another thread. This change had impacted all the parties, but the Conservatives less than the others because they seem to be better able to raise public donations currently. This was going to be put through as part of a confidence vote (finance issues I believe are just about always a vote of confidence for a minority government), which meant that either the opposition parties were going to have to support a measure that would hurt them badly in the short term to keep the current government going or they were going to have to vote the government out of office. If a confidence vote fails, it is supposed to indicate that Parliament as a whole does not have confidence in the ability of the governing party to govern, hence this concept of seeing if anyone else can get the confidence of the House to govern.
The opposition parties chose to indicate that they were all not going to go with door #1. Door#2 leads to some more choices in our Parliamentary system - either we go to another election or we look for some coalition of parties that can win confidence votes in the House and govern, without proceeding immediately to an election. The opposition parties did not want to go through another election so soon after the last one and therefore telegraphed to all and sundry that they had come up with an agreement that would (if the G-G decided to take them up on it) give Canada an alternative government without us having to go through another election right now. It may feel wrong, but is legal. Harper is buying time by having obtained the G-G’s consent to prorogue Parliament, but when things start back up at the end of January he has to win that confidence vote if he doesn’t want to be looking at the same two options that follow the route through Door #2.
As to the G-G, she is the Queen’s representative in Canada but is appointed by the Queen on the basis of the Prime Minister of Canada’s recommendation (done by Paul Martin in G-G Jean’s case). The Queen is Queen of England but also of Canada (at least until we officially change the rules, which we haven’t yet). Our rules as they stand force the Prime Minister to go to the G-G for her in this sort of situation.
I happen to think the Governor General should follow the advice of the Prime Minister in almost all cases where it’s not unreasonable to do so. So I think that Jean was right to grant prorogation in this case, and if the government loses its next vote of confidence in January and asks for dissolution, she may even be right to grant this, despite the presence of a viable alternative. I guess it depends on how much Parliament has been able to do since the last election.
But if Parliament comes back for a new session and the Prime Minister asks for a prorogation before his government can even face a single confidence vote, namely the vote on the Throne Speech, I think this would be an unreasonable request, and the Governor General should refuse. Similarly, if Parliament is meeting for the first time since an election and the government loses the vote on its first Throne Speech, the Governor General would be similarly required to refuse any requests for dissolution if there is a possible alternative government.
In this case, though, since Harper’s first Throne Speech actually passed and it was only a week later that the coalition started to form officially, a request for prorogation was acceptable, and a request for dissolution may even be as well.
I have no argument with anything you say - I was just commenting that the GG is not constitutionally required to either accept or refuse a request from the PM.
In fact, today, the Governor General is selected on the advice of the Prime Minister of Canada. Michaelle Jean was chosen by then-Prime Minister Paul Martin. The Queen’s signoff on the choice is a formality.
Governor Generals are usually asked only to perform ceremonial functions.
Note, however, that the GG has a great deal of Constitutional power if she/he chooses to exercise it. Unlike the US model, which frequently refers to “advice and consent”, the parliamentary model merely requires that the GG act with the advice of the PM (and formally, it’s the PM and Cabinet in their Constitutional role as the Governor’s advisors/Ministers - i.e. “the Governor in Council”), and is not required to follow that advice. Like the Queen’s powers in Britain, however, there are strong political reasons for using these powers only in exceptional circumstances. The current situation may become one of those exceptions.