Editorial
The eye of the storm
All complex systems have the ability to shut down in case of emergency: nuclear reactors, speeding trains, prisons, carnival rides. Any or all of these, at the moment, are vivid metaphors for Canadian politics.
Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority government pulled the emergency brake hard on December 4, when the prime minister successfully persuaded Governor General Michaëlle Jean to prorogue parliament until January 26, 2009. This astonishing manoeuvre concluded a week that was full of them: First came the government’s economic update, which blithely skated over the details for fiscal stimulus, banned public unions from striking, and would have ended public financing of election campaigns. Then there was the shotgun formation of an unprecedented coalition of the Liberals and the NDP, with Bloc Quebecois support, that threatened to defeat the government in a non-confidence motion less than two months after the federal election. Finally came the constitutional showdown and the precedent-setting choice by the Governor General to allow the government to hit the pause button on parliament after only a few days in session. Seldom in Canada has Harold Wilson’s saying rung so true — a week really is an awfully long time in politics.
With the proroguing of parliament, we’re now in the eye of this storm, and it’s unclear what’s waiting for us on the other side. Plenty of damage has already been done, to public opinion of almost all the parties involved, to our faith in parliamentary democracy and process, and to the increasingly pointless office of the Governor General. And judging by the viciousness of some of the exchanges we’ve seen so far, it’s damaged basic human decency in a few cases. But while the furious partisan hackery is ugly, it has little real substance: we’re floating in legislative limbo, and it’s a good chance to pause and reflect on what we want from our government in the first place.
The emergence of the coalition government-in-waiting was a natural immune response to an attack on our electoral system. The Conservative government’s move to scrap public funding of political parties’ election campaigns is the reason we’re in this mess, however much the coalition leaders protest that it’s about economic stimulus packages. It was a strange and mean-spirited move designed to weaken the opposition, and it backfired. It was a strategic misstep but also a policy blunder, given all we know about the poisonous effect of too much private money on election campaigns (witness the United States’ out-of-control electoral cycle). A coalition government, if that is the end result, will have benefits and drawbacks, but the return of negotiation, collaboration, and compromise to parliament would be a welcome change.
For me, the “shutdown” analogy that comes closest to describing the closure of the House is actually the stock market. Ever since the Great Depression, stock exchanges have included failsafe systems that halt trading if it tips over some mathematical boundary from anxiety into panic: the trading floor automatically shuts down for a little while to let everyone catch their breath and cool their heads. For the Tories, whose stock suffered a spectacular crash late in 2008, the freeze was a miracle last-minute reprieve. But they may find this cooling-off period merely postpones the inevitable chaos to come.
Graham F. Scott
editor@thismagazine.ca
