December 02, 2008
More on the coalition
Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 04:14 PM ET
The Liberal-NDP coalition has great support among the countless disillusioned by the Conservative Party. The Conservative's recent proposals for a "three-year ban on the right of civil servants to strike, limits on the ability of women to sue for pay equity and eliminated subsidies for political parties" struck many the wrong way - notwithstanding the party's eventual reversal on their subsidies decision and ban on civil servant strikes.
Yet despite this, there might be at least one sufficient reason to withdraw one's support for the coalition: it's arguably undemocratic. In today's Globe and Mail, Janice MacKinnon, professor of public policy at the University of Saskatchewan and a former NDP finance minister, had this to say about a coaltion she would normally be inclined to support:
"as a Western Canadian, I fear the reaction of most in this region should they awake one morning to find the Conservative Party, which won 72 of 92 seats in the West just weeks ago, replaced by a coalition with a prime minister from the Liberal Party, the party that came third in every province in Western Canada. This would be especially dismaying since the election results weren't even close: The Conservatives won 37 per cent of the vote and 66 more seats than their nearest rivals."
We might want Harper out, and we might even believe the coalition would work, but we should also keep in mind the way everyone voted.
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2 comments:
But "the way everyone voted" added up to what we have in parliament, and regardless of any actions by the coalition, the parliament will still react to the will of the majority of the MP's.
Indeed the coalition may be a more democratic expression of the will of canadians - a truly broad tent, representing all regions (ok, a little weak in the west)
What it suffers from mostly is its unfamiliarity: it is different. We are used to having a "Party" group in charge. But what is a party? It seems to be a group of politicians who, for many pragmatic reasons, compromise or blunt their personal, regional agenda in the name of coalescence. There are some real hillbillies elected as Conservative MP's, but they don't get to say what they really think. There are raging nationalists in the Bloc who don't make headlines every day.
Now, isn't this the same as what would happen in a "coalition"? Isn't, then, every government a "coalition"?
The tradition of political parties may have served a more useful purpose in the past when information was more difficult to receive or disseminate; today i think it mostly hurts good government (as an example: the federal ag minister, Ritz, won by more than 10,000 votes in his riding withiout making any compaign appearances. He was Conservative, and that was enough)
My anarchist ideal is a parliament with 308 parties of one.
Humans are dumb enough to be sold anything at anytime. What this coalition really needs is a marketer: maybe a rebranding as The Canadian Party. Then all this nonsense about undermining democracy can be laid to rest, the story can again become the business of the country rather than the story of the story, and we 30 million can regain our illusion that things are as they should be.
In many ways I agree with you. Canada is a fundamentally progressive nation in which a majority voted for either the Liberals, the NDP, or the Bloc. A truly representative government would reflect that fact. I also don't believe this coalition government would be exceedingly unstable. Their economic stimulus plan is an improvement in comparison to the Conservative's let's-not-touch-anything "plan".
My initial response to the coalition (despite being a progressive type) was that it's undemocratic. Yet, you do have a point: perhaps we should re-envision what it means to be democractically representative.
I suppose the point of my post was not to defend, unflinchingly, the Conservatives, but to remind progressives about the legitimate and valid concerns some people (Westerners who voted Conservative) may have about this coalition's intentions.
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