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Article Excerpt
"The art of minority government is engineering defeat on the most favourable terms." (1)
Canada's politics, consistent with Britain's history under the same plurality electoral system (known as "first-past-the-post," or FPP), considers majority governments to be the norm. The largest party in the House of Commons usually has more than half the members of Parliament (MPs). Through the quarter-century between 1980 and 2004, Canadians elected six consecutive majorities. Since Canada's voters reduced Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin to a minority position in 2004, and then replaced him in 2006 with a minority under a right-wing Calgary economist, Conservative Stephen Harper, Canadians once again have had to deal with minority situations. (2) The seven post--Second World War minorities before Harper's lasted less than two years on average; they took up barely twelve years of the six postwar decades. In Canada's majority-oriented plurality electoral system, the parties, the public, and the media perceive minorities, and expect them to operate, as "fragile constructs, capable of providing a short bridge between majorities but otherwise untrustworthy as governing instruments." (3) This self-fulfilling prophecy should not surprise us. The influence of electoral systems on party systems, electoral outcomes, governing styles, and political cultures is well attested in the literature on Western democracies. (4) Indeed, most European and other countries with proportional electoral systems regard at least one minority or coalition government model as normal.
In this article, I do the following:
* Assess and attempt to explain how and why Canadians operate under minorities, using Harper as the current case study.
* Review proportional systems' performance, especially given that some Canadian provinces are considering a shift to New Zealand--style mixed-member proportional elections.
* Consider Ontario's unusual two-party contract in its 1985-1987 FPP minority government.
* Identify and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian approach to minority government.
* Argue that Prime Minister Harper, although he evidently covets a majority and wishes to trigger an election as soon as he thinks he can secure one, derives advantages from his minority position, and from the plurality electoral system itself. Harper might further his cause better in his FPP minority than with a majority or in a different electoral system; moreover, the circumstances of his minority afford him an opportunity, which he has been exploiting, to effect far-reaching changes to Ottawa's domestic and foreign policies.
Minority and Coalition Politics under Proportional Representation
Minority and coalition governments are common and often enduring outside plurality electoral systems. Under proportional representation (PR), large parties and one or more small parties negotiate coalition and support pacts. As European political scientists observe, they sometimes maintain long-term formal nexuses. According to Michael Gallagher et al., small European parties eagerly negotiate agreements with large parties in return for policy concessions. The smaller parties effectively exist for this very purpose. They harbor no ambitions or illusions that would make them aspire to lead the government themselves or to maneuver to attain that position. (5) Jorg Steiner and Markus Crepaz use the term "contract parliamentarism" for the post-election inter-party bargaining that regulates governing and support parties' roles and functions. (6) Under contract parliamentarism, a country's parties employ their understood "decision rules," or rules of the game, to secure coalition or minority agreements that often survive for a full parliamentary term. (7) Gallagher et al. point out that the small parties in coalition or minority pacts usually do not repudiate such an agreement, potentially forcing an early election, so long as the government honors the agreement's terms. (8) After all, by influencing policymaking, small parties uphold their raison d'etre. Minority cabinets, where the largest party and its coalition partners (if any) hold less than a majority of seats among them, are common in Scandinavia and New Zealand. The small parties that negotiate support pacts maintain their independence by remaining outside the government. They then may criticize government policies beyond their support agreement, and avert co-optation by the governing party. Steiner and Crepaz observe that "governmental life can continue in an orderly way for quite a while" in not-so-fragile European minorities, as well as in coalitions whose members make up a parliamentary majority. (9) Many European countries, including Germany and all of Scandinavia, feature successive coalitions. They hold elections at relatively regular, usually four-year, intervals.
Canadians might account for Europe's durable minorities and coalitions by contrasting their own Westminster party solidarity with Europe's comparatively consensual political cultures. But since 1996, New Zealand has grafted a German-modeled mixed-member proportional electoral system (MMP) onto a typically partisan Westminster polity. (10) It seems that, when it comes to PR and small parliamentary parties, "if you build it, they will come." PR helps minorities and coalitions to endure in two ways: it supplies self-defined small parties to serve as contract partners, and it convinces all party leaders that a new election is unlikely to return a majority. PR changed New Zealanders' expectations by creating a political context that makes elected representatives turn fragile constructs into trustworthy governing instruments, if only to avert successive early elections. New Zealand has held four MMP elections. Each one has generated a coalition and/or minority government led by a center-right National or by a center-left Labour core, sustained by small coalition and support partners.
Some Canadians have proposed that Canada follow New Zealand's example. Henry Milner asserts that MMP would afford Canadians a series of coalitions that eventually would lead to a less partisan politics of consensus, as is found in much of Europe. (11) Perhaps so, but MMP has not transformed New Zealand's political culture to that extent; the relationship between government and opposition remains as adversarial as ever. Even so, after every MMP election in that country, the largest party in the House of Representatives has implemented the new rules of the game by using contract parliamentarism to negotiate reasonably successful coalition and support deals with small parties. Some small parties, such as the Greens, have emerged under MMP expressly for this purpose. Coalition and support partners often have had strained relations. Small parties sometimes cancel their contracts. But all governments to date have survived, at times in a disorderly way, for the full three-year parliamentary cycle. New Zealanders gave MMP poor marks after the contentious month-long negotiations that followed the 2005 election, in part because of the length of...
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