Ending Harper's Parliamentary Dictatorship

Having won 38 per cent of the popular vote and 142 seats in the House of Commons in the recent federal election, Stephen Harper is acting as though he has a mandate to lead Canadians through the financial crisis that is at hand.

His tactic, which he deployed repeatedly during the year prior to the calling of the election, was to declare not merely the budget, but a long list of other items, matters of confidence for his government. If the Liberals, New Democrats and the Bloc who held, and still hold, the majority of seats refused to bow to his will on virtually everything, that would precipitate an election. Then when he saw his chance, the prime minister violated his own legislation that had fixed the date of the next election and plunged the country into a trip to the polls most citizens did not want.

On election day, Canadians refrained from giving Harper an exclusive mandate. The essence of minority government is that the Conservatives share a mandate with the three opposition parties, the parties that won the majority of seats, as well as the majority of votes cast. Those three parties now have the power to force the prime minister to adopt a cooperative approach to governing or they can defeat him and form a government with a program they all agree in advance to support.

There are compelling reasons for the three opposition parties to forge a common strategy. These parties have positions on social programs, the environment, gun control and crime that are much closer to those of one another than to those of the Conservatives. More important still, they share views on how to deal with the economic and financial crisis that are fundamentally at odds with those of the Harper government.

The global financial meltdown involves much more than a typical economic slowdown. The collapse signals the demise of the paradigm that underlay government economic policy making in the West for the past thirty years----unbridled free enterprise, with a minimum of regulation.

It is that discredited ideology that has been and remains the raison d'etre of the Harper Conservatives. As head of the National Citizens Coalition, leader of the Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance before that, Stephen Harper has devoted his entire career to the cause of reducing government and shredding regulation.

Recently he has taken to proclaiming that what has made Canadian banks the envy of the world has been the solid regulatory system in which they are embedded. In truth, if the Conservatives had had a majority in the last parliament, they would certainly have deregulated Canada's financial institutions so that taxpayers would now be bailing them out on the same scale as is occurring south of the border.

At the meeting of G 20 countries in Washington last week, Stephen Harper sided with George W. Bush, the Herbert Hoover of our time, in advocating a minimum of regulation in the global financial system. This leopard has not changed his spots.

The Harper government's idea of how to get close to the incoming Obama administration is to negotiate an energy deal that would be bad for the environment and that would virtually cede sovereignty over the Alberta oil sands to the United States. Here's how it would work: in return for a Canada-U.S. pollution reduction deal that falls far short of the targets set under the Kyoto Accord, Canada would guarantee to the United States long-term secure access to the synthetic crude of the oil sands.

On the central matter of reviving the economy, saving the manufacturing sector and promoting a bold new agenda for rebuilding our cities and infrastructure, the Harper government has no appetite for the scale of action that is needed. Harper sometimes sounds like a Keynesian who might come up with a bold plan to stimulate the economy. And then, his finance minister, Jim Flaherty---the man who mused about selling the CN Tower---says that any stimulus plan will have to wait months for his next budget.

In the leaders' debates during the recent election campaign, Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe showed that they shared a good deal in common in their approaches to economic management, or at least to the idea that there ought to be government intervention in the economy.

Could the three parties work out a platform to govern for the next two or three years?

If so, they could defeat the Conservatives in the House and form a coalition government. Alternatively, the NDP and the Bloc could commit to support a Liberal government in enacting the agenda on which all three parties were agreed.

The opposition parties ought to do this for the good of the citizenry, but there are a number of self-interested reasons that could also impel them in this direction.

Following two successive electoral defeats, and having embarked on a leadership race in which the two front runners are re-treads from the last race, the Liberal brand would benefit immensely from a demonstration of leadership during a time of deep crisis. To make this work, Stephane Dion would have to step aside in favour of an interim leader until the new party leader is chosen next May.

Despite Jack Layton's best efforts during the election campaign to present himself as ready to be prime minister, the NDP remains mired in fourth place in parliament, its long-term strategy to surpass the Liberals in tatters. Participation in governing the country could give the party the traction it needs to end its days as a perennial bridesmaid.

The long shot is the Bloc, a party whose reason for existence is to make Quebec a sovereign country. Or is it? In the current financial climate, the Parti Quebecois is doing little to promote the cause of Quebec sovereignty during the provincial election campaign that is now underway. While the party has not backed away from the ultimate goal of sovereignty, its platform insists that the PQ would not be obligated to hold another referendum on the issue should it win the election. The PQ and the BQ are both well aware that the last thing Quebecers want to hear about right now is another referendum.

That leaves Duceppe's party as the permanent odd man out in Ottawa, a party that holds a majority of Quebec's seats but cannot participate in governing.

The Bloc would not have to join a new governing coalition in Ottawa, but it could agree to support it on the basis of a much more interventionist approach to managing the economy than it will ever get from the Harper Conservatives. Bringing the Bloc into responsibility for governing can open the door to a political era in Quebec in which the choices are no longer restricted to sovereignists versus federalists.

The place to start is with a dialog among the three opposition parties to map out areas of mutual agreement. Next, they need to put the Harper government on notice that unless its members are willing to cooperate in mapping out the new agenda that is needed, they will defeat it and establish a new government in its place. Either way, the days of Harper's parliamentary dictatorship would be ended.