Your turn Green Party?

“Third parties are like bees,” the intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1955. “Once they have stung, they die.” It’s an aphorism that aptly describes the anti-slavery and anti-immigrant parties of the mid-nineteenth century, the Populists and Progressives who ushered out the Gilded Age, as well as more recent third-party standard bearers, from George Wallace to Ross Perot. All of these movements and figures influenced American politics dramatically, before fading away and leaving the basic two-party duopoly intact.”

—Ross Douthat in the New York Times, May 15, 2012

Click on: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/the-third-party-fantasy/  

With the collapse of minority government and a minority government’s future guarantor—proportional representation—the national Green Party of Canada has lost any credible prospect of becoming a significant ongoing influence in Canadian politics. It can’t intimidate a majority government. Furthermore, whenever the public is aroused, the Green’s priority concern—the environment—can be easily taken up as a priority by existing political parties, on both the left and the right.

However, it still has a working stinger. And it should use it now. The configuration and leadership of Canada’s opposition forces—the alternative Canadian government—will be resolved over the next year.

Presently, with 3% of the vote, meaningful support in British Columbia, one excellent communicator in the House of Commons, and a nice middle-class brand, it can make a strategic difference: either by joining Thomas Muclair and the New Democrats or by joining the Liberal life-raft in the center.

The Green Party would be a prize for either potential suitor. Mulcair’s prospects in BC and his image as a centrist builder would be enhanced. Joining the Liberals could literally keep them alive long enough for further room in the center to open up.

You could object: This isn’t America! Okay, but don’t try to say that we’re more complicated, that we’re too prickly to express ourselves within two national political parties. There is no compelling evidence that Canadian voters or their political elites want or need a multiparty political system to articulate changing national values and challenges. 

Regional parties do have a legitimate, if temporary, place in the political market place. That’s why, now and then, we have minority governments. Regional grievances, however, are hardly the core business of the Green Party.

Unless a decent majority of Greens soon decides whom they want to support, the Green Party will fade away without ever being a serious nuisance, let alone a game-changer. That would be a sad fate for an institution founded on the principals of sustainable development.

Is Canada’s advantage its majority government?

America’s republican system of checks and balances is receiving an awful beating recently from health reformers, economists, and currency speculators. Now, it’s even looking passé in the eyes of fiscal conservatives and parliamentary democrats to the north. 

This was brutally confirmed by Jonathan Kay, the thoughtful editor of The National Post, in his column “Why Harper Can Trim a Budget and Obama Can’t.” 

Click on:http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/29/jonathan-kay-on-canadas-parliamentary-advantage-why-harper-can-trim-a-budget-while-obama-cant/

Kay claims that Canada’s secret weapon is its Parliamentary system: Prime Minister Harper has a majority in the House of Commons and can get tough, necessary things done; President Obama doesn’t have a majority in Congress and, so, he can’t cut spending or raise taxes. 

Kay believes that—in the economic sphere—the broader powers conferred on Canada’s executive by Parliamentary majorities have been a blessing and have allowed Canada to enjoy stability and greater prosperity, at least over the last couple of decades.

A fresh Parliamentary majority—that’s doing what you want—can be a beautiful sight. I love roses, sunsets, and happy children too, but don’t be fooled. Life north of the 49th can be dangerous and frustrating as well.

The Canadian and United States federations do not hold their collective breaths between electoral majorities in the House of Commons or between those occasions the President easily assembles majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Both countries carry on satisfactorily—or neither country would be intact today. 

Furthermore, majorities don’t just free up new executives to put their respective country’s right—to fix the errors of previous minority and majority governments—they also give them the same license to make their own mistakes. 

During the financial crisis of 2008-09, neither Bush, nor Obama, nor Harper enjoyed secure legislative majorities when they implemented massive stimulus programs and unprecedented bailouts. Nevertheless, they acted successful—well before the European governments of various designs.

Sure. Obama couldn’t possibly get a significant package of tax increases and spending cuts through Congress this year, or in 2010 or in 2011. The moderate conservative measures Kay welcomes in Canada now, however, would still be economically premature in the United States. Sometimes, marking time is common sense, not “gridlock.” 

Most important, let’s recall how the US budget got into a chronic $trillion-plus deficit in the first place.

Most of the deficit today that was actually created in Washington, rather than by the recession, was approved by massive majorities in Congress—majorities that happily did the bidding of President George W. Bush.

The War in Iraq, the Prescription Drug Plan for Senior Citizens, and the massive Income Tax cuts were not the grudging excretions of divided government.

Majorities, of course, are an essential part of the survival of the checks-and-balance systems of both democracies. If big issues can’t finally be resolved, countries decline, fall apart—or turn to brutes. Furthermore, the knowledge that the electorate will get fed up with excessive partisanship and will eventually want someone to decide often forces compromise—even “grand bargains.”

Nevertheless, let’s not romance majority government as an end state. At first, planners and reformers love working for them, but after awhile, majority governments stop listening carefully. They find it increasingly easy to talk big and, then, they start making big mistakes.

Majority governments can serve the majority’s agenda as well

It is widely argued that, if good times permit, it’s nice to have minority governments in Ottawa and a divided congress in Washington. For five years, the opposition in Canada warn that a majority Conservative government would impose “a hidden agenda,” while in the US, Republicans successfully rebalanced Washington by campaigning against a socialist coup. Both messages play on the same fear: once one party gets popular enough to be in charge, it will immediately start doing unpopular things.

This prediction is rather illogical and impossible to prove—or disprove—in advance. (Why would a larger caucus of Conservative MPs who won by broadening their message decide to resurrect issues with marginal appeal and low priority?) The alternative circumstance—a majority government with sufficient time and power to implement major reforms that could enjoy popular support or at least broad acceptance—deserves greater attention.

Canadian history is studded with successes accomplished by majorities—a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Goods and Services Tax, and Free Trade with the US are contemporary examples. None of these were ideologically extreme, and they remain securely in place whichever party is in power. Nevertheless, not one of them would have been possible to accomplish without the secure tenure of a majority government.

Yes, public healthcare in Canada was legislated by a minority Liberal government in the 1960s. However, that federal government was awash with surplus money; nothing needed to be traded off. Furthermore, public healthcare was both credible and widely popular because the Tommy Douglas government of Saskatchewan had had a majority government five years before, when it first implemented universal public health insurance for the province.

The big issues that can’t get on the agenda of today’s minority parliament don’t seem to get the attention of those that may be “hidden.” Still, they are many: legislating strict representation by population for the House of Commons, reforming unemployment insurance in order to support individuals regardless of where they live, a security agreement with the US that would involve legislative changes in Canada in return for an open US border, and, someday, a tax on C02 emissions in order for Canada to do its part to fight climate change.

These issues don’t necessarily divide people on predetermined ideological grounds—rural versus urban voters, or Eastern Canada versus the West. But, the benefits and the costs don’t fall equally, and entrenched interests would be aroused. Also, workable and sustainable answers also require time and a spirit of compromise that only secure governments can illicit.

Ontarians who worry about Albertans and resent Quebec’s political savoir faire should recognize that a new deal for Ontario will require a majority government in Ottawa.