What turned Layton into a Liberal and Harper into a socialist?

At the beginning of December, I was mad. Little over a month after the Conservatives were reelected with a strengthened minority government, the three stooges of coupscam threatened to topple the newly elected government by forming a coalition. While there was nothing illegal about this, I saw it as fundamentally undemocratic and immoral. Therefore, a closer look at the status of the coalition was a natural starting place in my foray into inter-party politics in a minority parliament.

I argued that the coalition was unlikely to come to fruition. It turns out that I was right and the coalition idea has now been officially abandoned. However, despite never coming to fruition, this near-constitutional crisis ended up having a significant impact on Canadian politics. As a result of the coalition threat, Stephane Dion was permanently exiled from the Canadian political scene and Michael Ignatieff was able to seize power of the Liberal Party in a bloodless coup of his own. This also gave Ignatieff the power to force Harper to introduce a budget that will have Canada swimming in red ink for years to come

The just war

My next post dealt with the Canadian government’s response to the war in Gaza. I had two primary reasons for touching on this subject. First, the war was dominating the headlines and it is a subject near and dear to my heart, so I felt a need to comment on it. Second, I was desperately searching for some sense of civility in the House of Commons and this was the one issue that Ignatieff and Harper seemed to agree on. While the war in Gaza is now officially over, rockets are still being fired out of Gaza on an almost daily basis, which threatens to reignite the conflict. Also, Ezra Levant reports that Ignatieff may be waffling on his support for Israel. At least there seems to be widespread agreement between our two main political parties on the merits of Keynesian economic policies.

God money I’ll do anything for you

The big story in Ottawa for most of January was the budget. To the south, Obama was busy making plans for a massive economic stimulus package. Up here, Ignatieff was busy blackmailing Harper into adopting similar measures. This was a big turn-on for special interest groups and corporate welfare bums on both sides of the border. This is why I thought I’d take a look at all the people that were lining up to get their hands on your money. It would appear as though most, if not all, of these groups are going to get a nice cheque in the mail pretty soon. The unfortunate side of this is that when I’m old, our social welfare system will be bankrupt and my taxes will be sky high. On the bright side, this gave me ample fuel for two additional blog posts on the subject.

Senatus Populusque Canada

A study of the Canadian parliament would not be complete without looking at the Upper House. Harper was criticized for appointing senators and essentially abandoning his plans for Senate reform, but I chose not to focus on this because I believe it is a non-issue. First, it is unfair to criticize Harper for doing the same thing as just about every prime minister before him. Like it or not, the Senate is still an appointed body. Second, I don’t believe the government’s plan for Senate reform is a good one. I, therefore, focused on why the Senate is ineffective and why the government’s plan to reform it is the wrong thing to do.

The controversy over the Senate appointments has all but faded from memory now, except for issues surrounding Patrick Brazeau’s appointment and the quest to replace Mike Duffy on CTV.

pol·i·tics n. From the root words poli meaning many and tics meaning bloodsucking creatures.

For most of the time I was writing this blog, parliament was prorogued, so coming up with story ideas took a bit of creativity on my part. Imagine my excitement when parliament resumed with a budget that would make or break the Harper government. Then, like a swift kick in the junk, the full gravity of Harper’s budgetary compromise became apparent. I asked myself why Harper would sell out; why he would institute policies that he knows won’t work? The answer quickly became apparent. Our institutions are setup in a way that rewards big government, big spending, and shortsighted policies, while at the same time punishing creativity, honesty, and fiscal responsibility. Don’t blame me. Democracy made me do it.

My God—It’s full of stars

Finally, I looked into the possible political and economic ramifications of budget 2009. I took a look at the concerns that many small-c conservatives had about the Mulroney government and found that the very same issues are cropping up with the Harper government. Regardless of the financial mess that Harper may have caused, I hope that Conservatives don’t fracture this time around. This is not only important for anyone who wants the possibility of a Conservative government in the future, but also for people who want a vibrant political debate in parliament and in the country as a whole.

A giant pair of nut graphs

So what does it all mean? Like George W. Bush, I will let history judge the merits of my blog. Optimally, I hope I have made you wrestle with a contradiction that continually haunts me. On the one hand, our government has such a profound impact on our lives, yet many Canadian pay no attention to it and cannot be bothered to even show up to the polling booth. I hope I have shown that Canadian politics is interesting and that the decisions our politicians make are important. On the other hand, our entire system of government leaves a foul taste in my mouth. Our politicians lie to us, they deceive us, they waste our money on inefficient bureaucracies, they limit our freedoms, and they try to civilize us by teaching cowardice. The whole exercise of government, I believe, undermines the legitimacy of the system itself and calls into question the social contract on which it is based.

However, if at any point in reading my blog you have said to yourself: “That’s a good point, I never thought of it that way,” or “This guy is full of crap, who the hell does he think he is?” then I have done my job. And remember, you can continue to read my thoughts and opinions on the issues of the day by heading over to my personal blog.

The Harper government’s latest budget (labelled the NDP budget by some commentators) projects an $85 billion deficit over the next five years and represents one of the largest annual spending increases in Canadian history. This flies in the face of fiscal conservative values, which advocate smaller government, meaning less taxes and less spending. Despite the fact that the government was leaking details of the budget for some time before it was released, the full extent of the economic stimulus measures caught many Tory supporters off-guard. A budget like this would be expected from the Bob Rae’s and Jack Layton’s of Canadian politics, but not from Stephen Harper.

Reaction to last Tuesday’s budget from conservative pundits, bloggers, and economists was swift (see here, here, here, and here). Now, the media is asking the question: is the Canadian conservative movement dead? And while there are competing views on this, it seems clear that Harper has managed to alienate his base in order to appease the Liberals.

One thing is certain. After this budget, there is a gaping hole on the right side of the Canadian political spectrum. With the Conservatives loving embrace of Keynesian economic policies, there are no longer any parties in the House of Commons advocating for fiscal restraint. In a recent blog post, Andrew Coyne highlighted this very point:

The government will be everywhere, and everything. And why not? When there is no longer any budget constraint, when deficits are not evidence of incontinence, but “stimulus,” why should any project, any sector, any region be denied? More to the point, when there is no political constraint—when no party is pulling to the right, while four pull left—spending can only go in one direction. And for the foreseeable future, that’s where the action is going to be: sucking money from the gushing spigot of the state. Starting a business? Only a chump would spend his time worrying about pleasing the consumer. It’s the politicians you want to keep happy, mate.

The policy vacuum on the right not only has potential consequences for Canada’s financial future, but for its political future as well. I seem to remember another era in which small-c conservatives were disenfranchised with the Conservative Party.

Mulroney’s government was also criticized for its lack of fiscal responsibility, huge deficits, and its failure to reform democratic institutions such as the Senate. The breakup of Mulroney’s “grand coalition” saw the emergence of new political parties, including the Reform Party, which split the Canadian right and led to over a decade of Liberal majorities. While Harper was able to “unite the right” and bring the Conservative Party back into government, he was unable to escape the political paradox whereby Liberal governments have been able to slash program spending and balance the budget, while Conservative governments have increased government spending, often due to a public perception that they are secretly out to destroy the welfare state. I just hope the conservative movement is strong enough that it doesn’t fracture this time around.

The sad part of all this is that the economic stimulus measures introduced in the budget won’t work and Harper knows it. Increases in government spending during the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations did not pull the United States out of the great depression. Neither did it work for Japan in the 1990s. So who are we going to get to clean up this mess? When the business cycle drives the economy back up, as it inevitably will, and the country’s left with a large deficit and an ever increasing debt, who’s going to come in and make the necessary cuts to balance the books? For this, I don’t have an answer. Does anyone know what Ralph Klein is up to these days?

“But didn’t you want a Conservative majority?” I was asked the next day, after expressing my approval of the election results to one of my colleagues. No, not really. I quite like the idea of minority governments.

I’ve never been a big fan of a legislative branch with few checks and balances placed upon it. One of the primary roles of parliament is to create laws. Laws are rules and regulations that are imposed upon society. In other words, they generally limit our freedoms in one way or another. Legislatures, by definition, must legislate. How can they not? It’s right there in the name. Since our parliamentary democracy has very few checks and balances, a minority government is a good way to slow down the process, to ensure that the legislation that does pass gets a little more consideration than it would if the opposition did not posses a veto.

Another thing that parliament does, as has become abundantly clear in recent days, is spend our money. And it would seem as though a minority parliament does not stop the government from doing that. In fact, quite the opposite. On Tuesday, the government released its budget, which projects a $64 billion deficit over the next two years. The Conservatives have been flying around the country for the past little while telling us why they think a massive economic stimulus package is needed, but don’t believe them. Don’t believe a word they say. This budget has very little to do with economics and everything to do with politics.

The return to big government and massive deficits goes against everything that Harper and his former Reform colleagues believe in. Here’s an excerpt from the Reform Party website in 1996:

We’ll reduce the size of government and lower taxes, to create real jobs… Overspending, over-taxation, and bureaucratic inefficiencies must be eliminated if we are to prosper and create real jobs. A Reform government is prepared to liberate the economy from excessive government, creating a future filled with growth and opportunity.

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Wait a second. Reduce government spending to create jobs? But I thought we had to increase government spending to create jobs. So what happened? The answer is simple: the constrains of our democratic system got in the way.

When the opposition threatened to topple the government, Harper realized his political career was on the line. At this point, he had two problems. First, Ignatieff gave Harper a choice: introduce a budget with massive increases in government spending or be defeated by the coalition. Second, with the American media and Canada’s opposition parties comparing the recent economic downturn to the great depression, Harper was forced to take a more pessimistic view of the economy. Dan Garner explains:

This is a grand demonstration of one of the problems of democracy. Democracy’s wonderful, but it ain’t perfect… If one politician is talking in alarmist tones and you don’t join in and you say actually I don’t think the problem’s that bad, everybody should calm down. Of course you will get hammered for being callus, for not seeing how serious the problem is.

There are inherent biases built into our democratic institutions. It’s hard to reduce the size of government because of our electoral system. People like it when the government buys them things and politicians know this is a sure-fire way to win votes. Likewise, it’s hard to stay principled when your job is being threatened and hard to remain calm when your enemies are spreading fear among the populace. John Ivison sums up the situation:

In the life of every ministry, there comes a moment when convictions have been worn down by the constant pressures of power, leaving the government on all sides of every issue, standing for everything and nothing. Stephen Harper’s government may well have reached that point with this budget.

So Harper gets to keep his job and our children are left to pay off the debt leftover by his socialist economic policies. How unfortunate.

The Canadian Senate was designed to be a body of “sober second thought” to check the democratic excesses of the House of Commons. However, it has never been an effective check and balance on the power of the House of Commons due to the fact that senators are unelected. Any time the Senate clashes with the House, they are accused of trying to subvert the will of the people.

While I have always accepted that the Senate suffers from a lack of democratic legitimacy, I never thought that it might have been intentionally designed that way. Yet, in his book 1867, Christopher Moore argues the Senate was designed so that it would not have the power to challenge the House of Commons:

The Canadian Senate chamber.

The main body of reformers did not want the Senate elected quite simply because an elected Senate would be a legitimate and powerful body.… [George] Brown… did not want a conservative upper house that felt itself entitled to challenge the House of Commons. Election was the one sure way to give senators that sense of entitlement.

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Since then there have been numerous proposals on how to reform the Senate. The idea behind reforming the body is to create a Triple-E Senate, one that is equal, elected, and effective. However, it’s unclear if Harper’s proposed reforms would create such a body, or if they were even designed to do so.

There were three pieces of legislation involved in the government’s plan for Senate reform. First, it introduced a bill to amend the constitution, which would have limited new senators to an eight year term. The second piece of legislation was designed to put a structure in place whereby the provinces could elect senators, who would then be appointed by the prime minister. The bills never made it into law. The government’s first attempt to amend the constitution was sent to a Senate committee. The committee raised numerous questions about the government’s ability to unilaterally change the constitution and recommended the legislation be referred to the Supreme Court. The government stubbornly reintroduced the bill, which died when parliament was dissolved in September.

Of course, this piecemeal approach to Senate reform is unlikely to produce a Triple-E Senate. First of all, the legislation would have allowed existing senators to serve out their term until age 75. How long would it be before we’d have a house in which all its members were elected? Does anyone really think that a body made up of both elected and unelected members would be any more legitimate than what we have now? So much for the elected and effective part. The third ‘E’ was supposed to come from the Senate, which introduced a bill in 2006 to give more seats to the western provinces. However, this would also require a constitutional change and the bill has yet to leave the Senate.

The biggest problem with Senate reform is that it requires constitutional changes, which are virtually impossible to do in this country. But if Harper’s reforms wouldn’t have created a Triple-E Senate, then what’s the point? Political Science Professor Gerard Horgan has one theory:

The advantage of what is being done with the incremental reform, as I see it, is that it is introducing instability into the system. Right now we have what most people would think of as a stable suboptimal system. By introducing these incremental reforms, it will perhaps cause instability and drive the process forward.

In other words, it’s all together possible that the upper house was designed to be ineffective and is being reformed into a body that will be even less effective than the original. Perhaps we should ask ourselves what we want to get out of Senate reform and have a national discussion about how to achieve it. Because reform, just for the sake of reform itself, is unlikely to produce results that are in the best interests of Canadians.

(Photo courtesy Montréalais/wikipedia.org licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License)

Ever since the government announced they would be unlocking the federal treasury, it seems as though everyone is coming out of the woodwork with their hands out. The following is a list of just some of the people that would like your hard earned tax dollars in something I like to call: ‘Who wants your money now?’

The Liberals

The Liberals hold all the cards in this scenario. The NDP has already stated that they will vote against the budget, so it’s up to the Liberals to either make or break the Harper government. So what do the Liberals want out of this budget? The problem is that no one really knows. Ignatieff has stated that the budget must meet three goals: “Will it protect the most vulnerable, will it save jobs, and most important of all, will it create the jobs of tomorrow?”

These conditions are vague enough that Ignatieff will easily be able to claim victory no matter what actually makes it into the budget. And while media reports make it sound as though the Liberals have been instrumental in crafting the budget, Harper says they have not given him hardly anything at all. “We do not have detailed proposals… [but] we have reason to believe we’re on the same track,” said Harper. Now there’s a statement that inspires confidence in the stability of our federal government.

The NDP

If anyone is good at talking about spending money, it’s the NDP. They are looking for a $32 billion stimulus package. However, the NDP no longer have any leverage over the situation, so their demands are unlikely to make it into the budget.

The Provinces

Late last week, Harper met with the premiers, as well as territorial and aboriginal leaders in an effort to secure a broad range of support for the budget. Of course, in order to do that, billions of dollars will have to be transferred to provincial governments. The premiers are asking for spending on infrastructure, job training, education, employment insurance, and stimulus for key industries including the auto sector, forestry, mining, agriculture, and the oil industry. Wait a second! The oil industry? The same companies that have been posting record profits for years now? The same companies that continue to gouge us at the pump? Heck, why not? After all, we are talking about borrowed money. We’ll just let our children pay for all this.

Speaking of children, let’s not forget our cities. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has a list of more than 1,000 infrastructure projects, valued at $1.37 billion, that they would like to get funding for. Likewise, the Assembly of First Nations is also looking for $3 billion worth of stimulus money for infrastructure, housing, education, and businesses.

Everyone Else

This list is by no means exhaustive. Other groups trying to get their greedy hands into federal coffers include the military, aerospace industry, affordable housing groups, charities, arts groups, tech companies, banks, and money lenders just to name a few. At least we’re not the only country dealing with this issue, as Lewis Black points out.

With the new found appreciation for government spending taking place in Canada, and around the world, it would be nice to know that this money is actually going to benefit the economy. Unfortunately, there is a growing amount of evidence that it does not. Now I just feel used.

This ideological ambiguity prompted talk show host Dave Rutherford to ask the prime minister: “What does it mean to be Conservative today?” To which, by the way, the prime minister could not provide a very good answer. The ideological orgy now taking place on Capital Hill may result in both the government and opposition parties taking a similar stance on foreign policy issues. And the less we hear about the bickering going on in Ottawa, the more we can get back to pretending that they actually have the power to fix the economy.

Beryl Wajsman, president of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal recently proclaimed that, “we may be very well moving into a new era of bipartisan foreign policy.” He was speaking in relation to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s stance on the war in Gaza, an issue that has been polarizing for Canadians, but seems to have united Canada’s two main political parties.

“Canada has to support the right of a democratic country to defend itself,” said Ignatieff. “Hamas is to blame for organizing and instigating these rocket attacks and then for sheltering among civilian populations.”

This puts the Liberal position firmly in line with that of the government. “The position of the government of Canada is that Hamas bears the burden of responsibility for the deepening humanitarian tragedy,” said Peter Kent, Canada’s minister of state for foreign affairs.

Many are applauding the Liberals firm stance on the issue, which is a change from their previous approach, as explained by Lorne Gunter:

Canadian diplomats and ministers claimed to see merit in the demands of both sides. Our official policy goal was to become an “honest broker” by putting as much stock in the integrity of terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO as we did in the Israeli government.

Of course, as a journalist, I have no opinion on this issue. Therefore, I’m not going to debate the merits of supporting the right of a sovereign state to defend its citizens from a terrorist organization that routinely fires rockets at them. The National Post sums things up quite nicely:

The war in Gaza is not a morally complicated event. On one side is a terrorist group that provoked the conflict with rocket fire, uses civilians as human shields and has gone on record with its desire to exterminate its enemy wholesale. On the other side is a democratic Canadian ally that is seeking to minimize civilian casualties as it fights back against ruthless killers. We’re gratified to see that these facts have not escaped the notice of our country’s leaders.

What this all means is that with the Conservatives moving to the left, the Liberals moving to the right, and agreement between the two parties on some key foreign policy issues, we may actually see the House of Commons work for a change. This is something that I think many Canadians can rally behind.

At first, it seemed as though Harper had only postponed the inevitable. Yet, a month later, the issue has all but disappeared from the headlines. Of course, a lot has happened in the last month. First, a number of polls showed the Conservatives moving into majority territory as a result of all the coalition talk. If the opposition were to defeat the Conservative budget, which is set to be tabled on January 27, they will be faced with a choice of either pushing ahead with the coalition or facing an election. If the Governor General were to approve an opposition coalition, the Liberals and NDP would likely be punished at the ballot box when their coalition eventually crumbles. A recent poll confirms that a majority of Canadians outside Quebec would prefer an election over a coalition government.

A second impediment to the proposed coalition is the new Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who was able to swiftly discard of his leadership rivals and take over the reigns of the Liberal party in mid-December. Ignatieff did not appear very interested in the coalition from the beginning and will probably want to give Canadians a chance to get to know him before risking an election.

Kelly McParland has a few more reasons why the Liberals are unlikely to vote against the budget:

The chances of the Liberals defeating the government are pretty much zip, for several pretty obvious reasons: Neither party wants an election; the Liberals in particular remain woefully unprepared; Mr. Ignatieff wants nothing to do with the coalition (which is so discredited that the MP who negotiated it, Marlene Jennings, now claims it never happened); and Mr. Flaherty has already met most of the Liberal benchmarks, or has signalled he intends to.

Even the NDP seem to have distanced their party from the coalition that Jack Layton was so excited about only a month ago. In fact, it would appear as though Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe is the only one who still thinks the coalition is a good idea.

So, is the coalition dead? The decision now rests with Ignatieff and while he hasn’t ruled out the possibility, it’s unlikely that his rhetoric is anything more than a thinly veiled threat designed to get Liberal economic policies included in the budget. While anything can happen between now and January 27, there’s now a growing possibility that we will finally be able to put this ugly coalition business behind us and perhaps even return some degree of civility to the House of Commons.