Our Electoral System Does Not Keep Extremists At Bay

One of the reasons that is being advanced for preserving first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in BC’s election tomorrow is that it supposedly keeps the extremists at bay. This argument suggests that countries with proportional representation like Israel are subject to the whims of radicals like Avigdor Lieberman. The drama played out in Israel in the wake of the last election saw different parties trying to find a way to please Lieberman so that he might enter into a coalition with several more mainstream parties.

That sort of thing never happens in Canada, right? Actually it does. FPTP rewards parties with lots of regional support so we reward not so much ideological radicals as we do regional ones. In the past couple of years we have seen the Liberals, the NDP, and the Conservatives all prepared to enter into coalitions or understandings or what-have-you with the Bloc. So yeah, if some horse-trading is needed here, our system is just as likely to produce radicals who might hold the balance of power.

But FPTP produces more majority governments where mainstream parties don’t have to do deals with fringe players, right? Well, um, not exactly – it still happens but it’s actually more insidious. Take Brian Mulroney’s grand coalition: he won a huge majority but at the expense of giving Lucien Bouchard the platform from which he could launch his separatist ambitions. How many PC voters in 1984 knew that they were voting for a coalition with separatists? Right now the Ontario PC Party is accommodating itself to the radical fringe that is most embodied in MPP and leadership candidate Randy Hillier. Hillier is unlikely to win the leadership but he may well play king-maker and at any rate he’s likely to get a cabinet position if the PCs win an election any time soon.

What this means is that we have extremist views inside the large brokerage parties, however these views are given the venerable stamps of the big parties. Randy Hillier does not have to run as the leader of his crazy Lanark Landowners group, no, he gets the more respectable Progressive Conservative tag – again, the same tag that got Lucien Bouchard a national spotlight. Right now our extremists smuggle themselves in under the banners of mainstream parties, under a proportional system, we could at least name them and publicly understand what they wanted in exchange for membership in a coalition government.

I hope BC voters will consider this when they head to the polls tomorrow.

When Your Coalition is a Centrifuge

As we all know Mulroney’s coalition of Quebec nationalists, red Tories, and Westerners flew apart in the early 1990s. It’s now becoming increasingly clear that the same thing is bound to happen to this coalition under Harper. Curiously the event that starts the whole collapse again may be one that has to do with Mulroney himself. The question now is what element of the coalition can Harper afford to jettison? He’s already lost a lot the soft-nationalist vote in Quebec. So right now it seems that he’s going to have to make do with the rump of the old Progressive Conservatives and his Reform core. But those two sides are quibbling over Mulroney now. Both are likely hoping that the ‘real’ Stephen Harper is on their side. But who is the ‘real’ Stephen Harper – the Harper that we would get if the Cons won a majority? Is he the consensus-building pragmatist that the Reformers resent as a traitor or is he the far-right ideologue that the PCs fear?

If Harper is going to keep the rest of his coalition together, he is going to have to continue to be coy about who he really is. And yet the calls for him to reveal who he really is are going to grow louder as they emanate from all quarters of his party.

Restarting the Right’s Civil War

Andrew Coyne is not a happy camper. In the meantime, Scott thinks (hopes?) that Iggy’s passing of the budget is a plan to really exploit those rifts in the conservative movement. If this play works, it could pay dividends for the Grits – even if there was no formal split in the Conservative party. All that it would take for the Liberals to be whole lot more competitive would be for the old Reformers to do nothing. If they stop campaigning, stop voting, stop donating to the Cons – a distinct possibility since Harper’s party clearly resembles the Mulroney-era PCs that Reformers despised – the Liberals could well be on their way back into power.

Heh, Mulroney, he haunts them still.

To my Liberal friends

This is the first in a series of posts I’m planning to do on what the Liberal Party needs to do in order to win again. I’m going to focus on the Liberals here because I believe that they represent the best chance to put a more progressive party into government. Jack Layton and the NDP tried hard to convince Canada that they were the new mainstream progressive party – but so far voters remain unconvinced. So in the spirit of progressive pragmatism I’m going to address these words to Liberals. Here goes:

Big Ideas: Don’t get any

I thought that the Green Shift wasn’t a bad idea. Insofar as something needs be done about our environmental impact, it seemed like a reasonable solution. The problem though was that it was complicated in practice. I think if you follow politics closely, it’s easy to lose sight of how little many people pay attention to these things. I pushed hard on this blog for electoral reform in Ontario. I thought that the proposal was easy enough to follow – vote for a candidate, vote for a party. Done. Easy. When I tried explaining it to a number of people who weren’t close politics watchers, they furrowed their brows and waved their hands “Who can understand this complicated and weird new system?!” was essentially their reply to the question of electoral reform. Simple, incremental platforms seem to work the best.

What was Chretien’s defining idea? The deficit reduction? He only decided to wipe out the deficit one he got into power, he was way less aggressive on it in the ‘93  campaign than either Campbell or Manning were. What was Harper’s defining idea? Not much, just that the Liberals were stale in government. Canadians seem to prefer go-slow incrementalists to big ideas and crazy dreams. Look at Brian Mulroney: he got the lowest poll numbers of any sitting prime minister in Canada and was defined by two big ideas: constitutional reform and free trade. The Liberals should ditch the idea of an over-arching grand scheme and look for progressive solutions to ordinary problems. It’s not sexy, but it’s something that can generate votes.

The Harper Equation

As far as I can tell, it appears as though Harper is trying to rebuild Mulroney’s coalition of angry Westerners and soft-nationalists in Quebec. When he does that he’ll govern like Mike Harris (look at his team and how many of them are former Harrisites). Here’s a simple illustration, be sure to share it with your friends:

Hey Reformers, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Being the left-leaning type that I am, I can’t say that I’d be a supporter of the old Reform party, yet I can’t help but think that some of the reasons that the party was formed were perfectly reasonable. By the late 1980s the people that were putting together the Reform Party were upset with a Progressive Conservative Party that had, in their opinion, lost its way. Being mainly Westerners, the Reformers felt that their region had been ignored by Mulroney’s PCs who were bent picking up the nationalist vote in Quebec. They also weren’t fond of Mulroney’s deficit-spending, something that they thought wasn’t very fiscally conservative. Last, but certainly not least, Reform sought to create a more grassroots type of party where the rank-and-file could be heard.

Fast forward 20 years. The PC party imploded, Reform became the dominant conservative party in Canada and ultimately engineered a takeover of the PC rump that was disguised as a merger of equals. This new Conservative Party is now on the threshold of a majority government. Reformers should feel justifiably proud. Or should they? Right now it appears as though Harper is going to try for his majority by chasing Quebec votes, spending like a drunken sailor, and running on a platform that is essentially the cult of the leader (sorry, grassroots). So Reformers, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

I want the Mulroney Tax Plan

The Globe & Mail has an article this morning called “Mulroney’s six-year tax gap” about how the former PM didn’t find it necessary to report his $225 000 in cash from Schreiber for some six years. Mulroney apparently didn’t think it necessary to pay taxes on his Schreiber money until the latter was charged. Until then he had considered it as money for covering lobbying expenses, not income. What if Schreiber hadn’t been charged? Uhhh:

When asked when he would have paid the tax had Mr. Schreiber not been charged with fraud, tax evasion and bribery in relation to military deals and political contributions in Germany, Mr. Mulroney replied, “I don’t know the answer to that.”

So he did it because Schreiber was in trouble? Otherwise it was money for expenses? This strikes me as the action of a guilty conscience. If this was really money designed to cover expenses, there would have been no need to pay tax on it. But once Mulroney saw that Schreiber was in trouble, he got nervous. Or something. It doesn’t make sense and all of Mulroney’s righteous indignation cannot change that.

He’s Baaaaack

All through the 1990s I remember there was this sort of understanding (at least among people I talked to – there were no blogs, alas) that any party with “conservative” in the name was made radioactive to too many people because of the spectre of Mulroney. There has been some re-evaluation of the man, hell, even Jason Cherniak seems positively sympathetic to him now.

Still, I think it is worth remembering the visceral hatred this man engendered in so many Canadians by the end of his second term. Some polls had his popularity at 4%! You think Dion has problems? The reality is, if Mulroney and his record are dragged back into the spotlight, there’s a good chance that some of that anger at him will come roaring back. It doesn’t matter that Chretien and Martin largely continued the two policies that made the man hated (free trade and the GST), there was something about Mulroney himself that people just reviled by 1993.

If this anger does come back because of Mulroney’s reappearance in the Canadian political spotlight, Harper had better watch out for the halo effect it will have on his party.

The debate’s on, but my expectations are low

The media, as usual, hems and haws about the importance of a debate in a campaign. Yet there’s only been one “knock-out” debate in my lifetime. You know it, Brian Mulroney’s “You had an option, sir” line. Video of that moment is here.

Jealousy, thy name is Mulroney

Everyone is talking about Mulroney’s rather nasty attack on Pierre Trudeau. The irony of this is that it shows why Mulroney will be remembered in the same way that Trudeau is. What sort of petulant little man would unleash this sort of tirade on a deceased former Prime Minister? I suspect that Mulroney hates how Trudeau is a national icon while he is viewed as a mediocre prime minister at best (if not still outright hated). Mulroney must ponder why his fellow-traveler, Ronald Reagan was so well loved by so many in the US, and why an ideological opponent is so well loved here.

These sorts of stupid outbursts reveal the brittle high opinion Mulroney has of himself, something he can only maintain through the slagging of others.