Filibuster Cartoons
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There is a very huge and dramatic political crisis brewing in Canada as we speak.
Over the course of the last four days Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberal Party who was soundly not elected prime minister in the 2008 election held two months ago, has been plotting a scheme to depose the recently re-elected Prime Minister Harper get himself installed in his place.
The plan centers around using the powers of the Governor General of Canada (who we recall is the unelected representative of the Queen of England) to fire Mr. Harper and hand over power to a so-called “coalition government” consisting of Liberal and NDP MPs. Mr. Dion and Mr. Layton, the NDP leader, signed a formal coalition agreement this afternoon, and Mr. Duceppe, the leader of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, the third-largest party in Parliament, has agreed to support the deal as well. Harper has predictably denounced it as a stealth coup to overturn the results of the last election.
And I solidly agree.
Coalition governments may be all the rage in Europe, but they are certainly not the Canadian tradition, and there is absolutely no precedent for any prime minister coming to power in such a backdoor way. Similarly, Dion lost the election. Our system of government may not be perfect, but it is a system with rules. Voters go to the polls with certain understandings of how this system operates, namely, the party that wins the most seats forms the government.
Even if we add up all the seats of the Liberals and the NDP they only have 113 seats to the Conservatives’ 143. That would be a number even lower than what Harper had in his first term as leader of a minority government, and would be one of the tiniest governments in Canadian history.
I am often offended with what goes on in the Canadian government, but never before have I felt as genuinely outraged and disgusted with what is presently taking place in Ottawa. To live in a country where elections are virtually meaningless, where there is no direct line between how the votes go and the government that results, is to live in a country where all notions of a clearly-understood social contract between citizen and state is thrown out the window in favor of government by and for the crass partisan opportunism of the day.
The Governor General has no right to subvert a democratic election and install a new prime minister. I pray that she does not, and obeys the instructions of Stephen Harper, the democratically-elected leader of Canada, rather than the pathetic, power-mad men that evidently control the opposition. It is frightening to think that an unelected representative of a foreign monarch holds the future of Canada’s executive power in her hands. Yes, this is exactly what we needed at a moment of economic crisis. If the rest of the world thinks Canada is descending into Banana Republicanism, they are right.
I suppose I should add a few words on how this crisis even arose, eh?
The Liberal Party often complains that it hates the Conservative party’s agenda, but it still votes for a lot of their bills anyway. The voted in favor of continuing the war in Afghanistan, they voted in favor of tightening immigration restrictions, they voted in favor of increased jail time for first time offenders, and so on. But this week, they finally found something they could not support- ending taxpayer subsidies for the Liberal Party.
Under a regime the Liberals themselves dreamed up when they were in power, every vote a party wins in a federal election automatically generates them about a dollar or so in “public financing” for the next one. The Liberals brought this in alongside rules that placed limits on how much money a single individual or corporation could donate to a party.
These reforms were controversial within the party itself at the time, however, mostly because no party benefited more from the donations of the wealthy and corporate sector more than the Liberals. The Conservatives, by contrast, were much better at grassroots fundraising, and much of their funding continues to come from lots and lots of small, individual voters across the country. According to some estimates, as much as 70% of the Liberal Party’s election budget may now come solely from public subsidies, as their private donations continue to decline and their previous backers find their hands tied.
Last week Prime Minister Harper rubbed further salt in the wounds, introducing a bill that would have cut the public finance scheme in its entirety, on the basis that it was too expensive for the government to maintain in a time of financial crisis. This would have obviously been a crushing blow to the Liberals, and thus, he we are.
The Liberals were faced with a dilemma in which they had to consider their own partisan interests vs. the interests of their country. And it’s clear where their priorities were.
