This is How a Parliamentary Democracy Works

This post originally appeared here:

http://voteagainstapathy.blogspot.com/2011/04/this-is-how-parliamentary-democracy.html

The CBC have an article called "Ignatieff, Harper in war of words over minority scenarios". They've got that right.

So, here's the 411, to use Layton-esque slang. Yesterday, Michael Ignatieff said that if the Conservatives win a minority, but are unable to secure the confidence of the House, and the governor general asks the Liberals if they can form the government, he will try to do so.

He acknowledged that he could try to form a government — without going back to Canadian voters — if a Conservative minority is elected but subsequently defeated in the House of Commons. Moreover, Ignatieff made no apologies for that possibility — saying that this is exactly what would normally happen in a parliamentary democracy.

Ignatieff's comments set up a clear contrast with views held by Conservative leader Stephen Harper over the legitimacy of a government led by a second-place party and promise to be pivotal issues in the remaining days of the campaign.

He's absolutely right. This is exactly what would normally happen in a parliamentary democracy. It's called the Westminster system. In the Westminster system, electors choose the MPs that make up the House of Commons, and whichever party has the support of the House gets to form government whether it has the most seats or not. Usually the party that has the most seats gets to try first, but if things change, that party loses confidence but another party gains it, then that second party can form the government. Here's the hypothetical situation in question, according to Ignatieff:

"If Mr. Harper wins most seats, forms a government but does not secure the confidence of the House — and I'm assuming Parliament comes back — then it goes to the Governor General. That's what happens. That's how the rules work.

"And then, if the Governor General wants to call on other parties — myself for example — to try to form a government, then we try to form a government. That's exactly how the rules work. And what I'm trying to say to Canadians is, I understand the rules, I respect the rules, I'll follow them to the letter and I'm not going to form a coalition."

Seriously. Trust Ignatieff on this. He's right. That's what happens, that's how the rules work. I mean before he was a politician he used to study and teach this stuff for a living at some of the greatest universities in the world!

Stephen Harper sees things another way. He's already mentioned he thinks it's "undemocratic" that the second-place party rule. He also believes that Ignatieff is secretly talking about a coalition:

The Conservative leader said Wednesday he would be “honoured with any mandate” his party receives from voters on May 2.

But refused to discuss what changes to the party’s platform he would be willing to accept to keep the Conservatives in power if they win another minority.

Instead, Harper ratcheted up his rhetoric about the prospect of a coalition, calling it a ‘black hole” that would stall the recovery, provoke more constitutional squabbling, and trigger a “national-unity crisis.” He was likely referring to comments by Jack Layton in the English-language debate, in which the NDP leader said he was open to re-opening the debate on how to get Quebec to sign the constitution.

Harper also declared that an opposition coalition would lead to another referendum on whether Quebec should separate from Canada, even though it would be up to the provincial government to put forward such a vote.

“We don’t know what that government will stand for,” Harper said of a possible coalition.

“But we do know the general outlines. There’s no focus on the economy. There are tax hikes, and of course these parties have very dangerous and conflicting views on national unity and constitutional matters. So as I say, I think the option for Canadians to avoid all of this, is to vote for a strong, stable, national majority conservative government on May the second.”

Okay. First of all, it is FAR FROM a clear choice between a Strong Harper Majority and an Evil Reckless Coalition. Firstly, majorities tend to be more reckless than coalitions, who must remain moderate in order to appease all parties involved. Secondly, Ignatieff has said time and time again that he WILL NOT form a coalition, and in the hypothetical situation he has outlined he's not forming a coalition either. Thirdly, if there is a Conservative minority, what makes a minority stable is having the support of the House. If Harper refuses to co-operate with other parties, any minority he had would be lost very quickly. And I'm not even going to get into the allegations that a Liberal government will mean another sovereignty referendum in Quebec.

But back to the CBC article, where the leaders are bickering and trying to clarify their statements.

"I have never said I will vote against his budget," Ignatieff told reporters in Saint John.

Harper would have to negotiate support with the other parties and govern accordingly, he added.

"What I've said is, I want to form a government. I want to get … the most seats. I then want to offer a budget to the Parliament of Canada and seek its support. If he gets more seats than me or my party, then he will present a budget, and hey, you know what I do with a budget: I read it."

Harper says he wants to form a majority government. Ignatieff says he would be happy to form any government at all. Clearly this makes Ignatieff a volatile vigilante bandito. Even worse, the leader of a gang of volatile, vigilante, separatist, socialist banditos! But Ignatieff responds to Harper's comments about the coalition:

"No. I repeat, no," Ignatieff said to applause from Liberal supporters.

"I don't have a problem about coalition, and I don't have a problem about respecting the constitution of my country. With the greatest respect, I would tell you that Mr. Harper has a problem with both."

Later, Ignatieff said of Harper: "What does he think he is? The king here? It's 'my way or the highway' the whole time .… He has an obligation to present a budget that has the confidence of the House of Commons .… The ruthless, relentless disrespect for Parliament is why we're having an election here."

And Gilles Duceppe weighs in on the issue with clear insight, reminding me that during the leaders' debates some people commented that he has the best understanding of how our government works:

Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe was critical Wednesday of what he called Harper's "no compromise" approach to dealing with the possibility of another minority government, calling it irresponsible.

Speaking with reporters in the Eastern Townships, Duceppe said Harper "needs to respect those whom Canadians choose to send to Ottawa to represent them."

Because, see, THIS is how the Westminster system works, THIS is how a parliamentary democracy works, THIS IS HOW OUR GOVERNMENT WORKS. We, Canadians, choose our MPs, based on the interests they're trying to protect. Then the MPs go to Parliament and duke it out there over who gets to form the government, based on who has interests in common. Your MP will presumably vote to protect the same interests WHETHER OR NOT their party is government. In the case of a minority government, it doesn't have that much more power than the other parties in terms of creating legislation, except it makes the budget. Whether a minority government is formed by the largest or the second-largest party doesn't really make a difference, because either way they have to work and compromise with other parties in order to pass their budgets and their bills. So, as Duceppe pointed out, Harper's refusal to work with the MPs the majority of Canada chose, in the case that he has a minority government, is incredibly irresponsible and WILL result in him losing confidence of the House.

This seriously feels like the King-Byng affair all over again. In that case, Mackenzie King's Liberals, who finished second to Arthur Meighen's Conservatives, formed the government with the support of the Progressives. The next year, when King's government was under threat due to a scandal caused by one of his ministers, King asked Lord Byng, the governor general, to dissolve parliament and call an election, but Byng refused. Since Meighen actually had more seats than King, Lord Byng wanted to give him a chance to form government before calling an election. Meighen was prime minister for only a couple of months before his government lost the confidence of the House. Then there was an election and King won a majority.

Moral of the story? Sometimes the second-place party makes a better government.

Also, I kind of want to be governor general. But that's another story.

Women, the Vote, and Raising One's Voice

This post originally appeared here:

http://voteagainstapathy.blogspot.com/2011/04/women-vote-and-raising-ones-voice.html

Equal Voice, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to getting more women elected to all levels of government, has a new initiative called the iCommit Campaign, basically asking young women to commit to voting in the election, and staying engaged in politics beyond. If you're a woman between the ages of 18 and 24, you should go do just that.

I've already displayed the graphic that shows voting intentions by age. Here's another one, voting intentions by gender:

This isn't as drastic as the youth vs. senior because it cuts across all age groups, but there is still an important difference. And if you, like me, are both young and a woman, well, you've probably noticed that the composition of Parliament mostly reflects the votes of older men (who also make up most of the composition of Parliament). That's why it's important, not only to vote, but to be politically engaged. We do need more women in Parliament. We don't have nearly enough women running for election let alone winning. As Jack Layton points out, it's a historic first that even 40% of NDP candidates in this election are women.

All this has made me reflect on the history of women's votes. Well, no, actually that's a lie. I was already reflecting on the history of women's votes because I wrote a paper about it two weeks ago so it's all fresh in my mind. (I'm a nerd, so sue me.)

You may not know this, but up until the 1840s it was common practice for women in Montreal to vote. When we think about the history of women voting, we usually think of the suffragettes. But I kind of like these earlier women who weren't necessarily fighting for anything, who just went out and voted like it was no big deal.

The thing you have to understand is that before democracy became the big new thing in the late 1700s/early 1800s, position in the social hierarchy was a much better indicator of your power than gender. Anyone who's seen The Tudors or Marie Antoinette will know that women in court had a lot of power. And poor women were just as likely to riot in the streets as their male counterparts.

In order to be eligible to vote in most parts of the British Empire, you had to be a subject of the King/Queen, over the age of majority, and hold a certain amount of property in your name (this was to keep the voting to the more prosperous members of society, rather than the rabblerousers on the street). Traditionally, property was held by men, who passed it down to their oldest son. In the absence of sons, a daughter might inherit some property in the richest of families (think Anne de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice), but not in families that were less well-off (think Mr. Collins and the Bennett sisters). Whoever did inherit would be expected to care for the widow (think Mrs. Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility). So women rarely held enough property to be eligible to vote, although they were not banned from doing so should they meet the requirements.

Quebec, however, maintained French Civil Law even under the British Empire. Under Quebec laws, property was jointly held by married couples, although the husband, as executor, was essentially considered to own the property. However, this meant that upon a man's death half of the marital property belonged to the widow, and the other half was generally split among all children who were of age. This meant that many widows of voters, especially those whose children were under the age of majority, were eligible to vote. It also meant that more daughters inherited property. And the "separation of goods"--a marital contract that stopped property from being held jointly by keeping it in the name of the person who brought it into the marriage--was common for upper middle class families like the Molsons (beer) and the Redpaths (sugar).

So in many parts of Quebec, and particularly Montreal, women were in the habit of voting. This was sometimes controversial, since polls were much more violent places in the early nineteenth century than they are now. And some people were afraid that married women who voted were being dragged to the polls by their husbands in order to provide an extra vote for the husband's chosen candidate. But all in all, women voters were accepted, especially the widows.

And then equality happened. The thing with equality is that it was all men who were born equal, not all people. It was liberté, égalité, fraternité. Women were kind of squeezed out of the political arena, firstly because most women who had power were aristocrats, and also because women were associated more and more with the private sphere: motherhood, domesticity, and being a good little wife. (Think the Victorian era, or maybe the 1950s.)

All of a sudden the idea of a poor little wife and mother being pushed onto the hustings and forced to say, "My name is x, I am a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, I have property worth x amount on x street, and I would like to vote for candidate x," in front of a jeering crowd of thugs, was unthinkable. (Yes, this was how people voted back in the day). Any woman who would do that willingly was clearly of questionable morality, and DUDE GUYS WE NEED TO SAVE THE WIMMENZ WHO ARE BEING FORCED TO PARTICIPATE IN DEMOCRACY!!!!! There was also a thing where they were afraid that if women could vote, women would try to run for seats, and then they would be pregnant all the time and never able to show up to Parliament, but that's just so ridiculous I'm not even going to try to unpack it.

In the Election Act passed in the Province of Canada (ie Ontario and Quebec) in 1849, buried in 30 pages of minutiae on determining county boundary lines and the legitimacy of returning officers, is this line:

Article 46: "And be it declared and enacted, That no woman is or shall be entitled to vote at any such election, whether for any County or Riding, City or Town."

Just one sentence! Just one sentence that in a stroke strips thousands of people of their voting privileges!

And it was such a non-issue that I haven't even been able to find a reference to it in any of the newspapers of the time.

So that's why I think it's important for women to vote. Because our government and our parliament were built in a time when people had that mindset. Most of the Fathers of Confederation were already in politics by the time that bill went through. Sir John A. Macdonald voted on it, probably without thinking about Article 46 because I'm pretty sure that's the shortest article in the entire Act. The only reason women got to vote again in the first place was a political ploy by Sir Robert Borden during the First World War, when he allowed the wives and mothers of soldiers to vote, knowing they would most likely vote for him and keep him in power.

Don't you think we should be reasserting our rights, reinserting our voices? I understand that a system created when the idea of women voting was counterintuitive, doesn't really speak to women. But that's exactly WHY we need to speak up for ourselves, why we need to get in there and MAKE things more accessible for women.

Because the old men that run our country right now? They sure ain't gonna do it.

Looking Deeper

This post originally appeared here:

http://voteagainstapathy.blogspot.com/2011/04/looking-deeper.html

One of my favourite things about being a student is having all of these people, in a very small geographic area, learning about and becoming specialists in all sorts of different things. And then whenever you talk to people, they're all coming at the issue from very different perspectives and backgrounds.

"I'm actually not a fan of the Liberal platform," a friend of mine, majoring in Global Development Studies, mentioned recently. "It's so focused on numbers and money. A lot of social problems just can't be reduced to the economics of it."

I pointed out that the government's job is basically to allocate resources, so the money side of things is really all they can look at, beside making or changing laws. She shrugged.

"I just don't like this focus on the deficit. I feel like they're going to end up cutting programs that provide a lot of good services to communities. You know who's platform is really well thought out? The Green Party."

Fair enough.

Another friend, a business student, told me, "I was reading the Liberal platform, and I wasn't very impressed. They're so focused on getting rid of this deficit, they want to get rid of it too soon. Carrying a deficit isn't necessarily a bad thing. We're so used to hearing about the deficit in the 90's, which shouldn't have happened because our economy was in a good place. But when the economy is doing badly, being leveraged gives you a lot more flexibility."

She explained that worrying about keeping a balanced budget in tough economic times makes you afraid to spend, and the government should spend because it's easier for it to take a hit and go into deficit than it is for individuals to go into debt due to losing their jobs or not having the same social programs.

"The Conservatives are promising to get rid of it sooner," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "Their economic policy has always been for less tax, less spending, and whatever sounds good to the average person, who is not a trained economist. They're pandering to get the votes."

This post isn't intended to be for or against any particular party. I just want to encourage you to approach the party platforms critically, and talk about them with people who are coming from a completely different perspective. Discussion is healthy!