Such is the dilemma of the Canadian people this fall.  Michael Ignatieff vows he will bring down the government at the first opportunity.  An easy vow to make knowing the NDP is in no shape for an election and would be inclined to support the Harper government rather than fly into debt they cannot pay.  Actually Layton and the NDP had been using the same strategy vowing never to support the Conservative government in the knowledge that the Liberals at that time feared an election.  And so the brinkmanship and the nonsense continue.  Caught in the middle of the sandbox, surrounded by surly children each wanting to be King for a day or however long a government lasts these day, is the Canadian people.  Mired in recession, casualty counts from an unpopular war rising and being shafted by the so called friend (U. S.) that dragged us into this mess, Canadians are in no mood for childish behaviour.

The sad thing is that minority governments can be the best government.  Forced as they are to compromise in order to govern, history has supplied us with numerous examples of successful minority governments.  Much of the social safety net we are so proud of today was the result of minority government as were our national anthem and our flag.  Minority government can also be full term government as in the Davis minority in Ontario during the early 1980s and the King federal government of the early 1920s.  Both of those lasted four years.

In this round of minorities the egos of the players get in the way.  Mr. Harper strikes at Mr. Ignatieff’s narcissism and lengthy sojourn to the land of the drive-thru gun shop.  Mr. Ignatieff parries and replies with a thrust at Mr. Harper’s dogmatism.  The King-makers are the 2 court jesters.  Painted harlequins they prance around the two main party leaders, now getting smacked aside, now being embraced and cajoled.  Their patrons laugh and sneer at them at caucus meetings and use them as they wish in the House of Commons.  They stand as the most fitting symbol of the current state of Canadian politics:  parliament would be funny if so many people weren’t getting hurt.

Arguing that we should avoid an election now because we would just get more of the same begs the question whether we should ever again bother with such an ineffective, expensive farce.  More of the same is what we will get for the foreseeable future.  Even if one of the head knobs were to form a majority government, nothing much would change except that the opposition parties would feel even more secure in mugging for the cameras, portraying themselves as the great champion of the Canadian people.  No my friends Canadian politics has changed.  We can hope that Harper’s Hamlet and Ignatieff’s Laertes politically die on each other’s swords but the hope is probably vain as who might follow may be no better.  No my friends we must come to the realization that the only lions left in Rome are in the arena.

The Good

The Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago focused among other things on the exclusion of Cuba.  President Obama appears ready to engage Cuba but on what terms.  A return to pre-Castro Cuba is not an option, at least for the people of the island.  Fidel Castro was an icon of the 20th century.  His legacy will live on in Cuba for generations to come.  Some people hate him, some people love him.  Castro has done marvelous things for Cuba.  Did he make mistakes?  Yes, of course he did.  But the benefits to the island far outweigh any negative. 

It is true that elections as we know them have not been held in Cuba since Castro marched into Havana to seize power January 1, 1959.  Oh wait, elections hadn’t happened in Cuba for a long time prior to Castro occupying the presidential palace.  So maybe U. S. hatred of Cuba wasn’t about democratic ideals.  I know, it was about land reform.  How dare Castro distribute land legally owned by faceless American corporations to those greedy campesinos.  Or maybe it was the public education or health care that offended the moral sense of America.  Whatever it was, for the sake of the Cuban people, I sure hope the Americans don’t get their way and dismantle it. 

The Bad

I have always wondered what the Castro revolution might have looked like had it not faced the enmity of the world’s most powerful state since its infancy.  All states while under siege from a foreign power centralize authority and keep a fairly tight reign on political factions.  For example Canadians should read the War Measure Act.  To think that U. S. behaviour did not affect Cuba would be naive to the extreme.  With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its patron and source of much of its foreign capital.  The island has been facing economic hardships since the 1990s, not because Castro’s economic policies were flawed, but because the United States won the Cold War. 

People will follow anyone who offers them bread.  Castro gave them bread but much more in the bargain.  While he was forced to keep tight political control he did not sink to using death squads as most American supported Latin American regimes have done.  Cuban jails hold political prisoners as does America’s today.  Just ask Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement.  Barak Obama has a chance here to show that he is truly a different kind of American politician.  Can he reach out America’s hand in friendship without clenching the fist and forcing a wad of America political culture back down the throat of Cubans.  A minor incident gives me some inkling of what is to come.  When questioned about a book he received as a gift from Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, Obama made a joke.  The book was a chronicle of the abuses of the South American continent by American and European powers.  I know that would leave me laughing in my

The Ugly

armchair.  (The book is The Open Veins of Latin America:  Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano) 

Our intrepid leader, Stephen Harper, in his usual right off the hay wagon style said that he supported warming up relations between Washington and Havana but reassured his supporters back home that he was still an anti-communist conservative.  I must have missed that class back at university.  The one where we studied pro-communist conservatives because I have never heard of them before.  It just shows that none of us are as smart as we think we are.

For the Cuban people, Fidel Castro passing from the political scene, should be and I suspect is for most, a moment of reflection.  Fidel’s health has been failing in recent years.  He has had to hand over political control to his brother Raul although I suspect he is no farther away from the levers of power than his health forces him.  Raul reminds me of those reasonable facsimiles one could send in instead of actual boxtops to receive a baking soda submarine.  He is just not the real thing.  Regardless it is not Raul that the Americans have to deal with, it is the legacy of a giant, Fidel Castro.

Anyone who has ever sat in on an Anglican Church Board of Management meeting will be familiar with the words, ‘We’ve never done it that way before’.  Change is a scary thing to most people.  So why should we change our electoral system.  We have elections.  Governments get created.  So what is wrong?  In the United States, which uses the same system, the answer is a simple nothing.  America has a very narrow political culture and this is reflected in their two party political system.  The United States lacks a genuine conservatism and an indigenous socialism.  All Americans are some shade of liberal, from the classical laissez-faire liberalism of a George Bush to the reform liberalism of a Ted Kennedy.  With only two parties in play the single seat plurality system works just fine because it mimics a majoritarian system.  Once the universe of ideas expands the system begins to break down and cause problems. 

Proponents argue that the single seat plurality system (SSP) or first-past-the-post is preferable because it can produce a majority government with a minority of the vote.  The underlying assumption here is that majority governments are better governments because they are more stable.  The evidence in Canada shows that SSP fails to deliver on this approximately half of the time.  Half of all elections since 1921 when Canada’s political landscape began to expand beyond the Conservatives and Liberals, have resulted in minority governments.  Most of those minority governments have lasted two years or more with the odd exception.  Some like Mackenzie King’s 1921 minority lasted a full four years.  Provincially in Ontario, the only province with a healthy multi-party system, the final Davis Conservative minority government lasted from 1981 to 1985.  It is difficult in the face of the evidence to argue that minority government is inherently unstable.  Minority governments have often shown themselves to be very legislatively active as well.  Many of our most favoured policies such as our current health care system were the product of minority governments.  So good policy gets passed and elections are not held every other day, so what is so terrible about minority governments?  Of course you have to know how to govern.  A minority government forces compromise, negotiation and cooperation among the parties.  If you are a simple minded ideologue who cannot fathom that other people might have ideas and you must always get your own way then yes a minority government would be a problem (Not to mention any names but we all know who we are talking about here).    But those sorts of people should be discouraged from public office anyway.  Look what happened to Germany when they elected someone like that in the 1930s. 

The most consistent problem facing Canada is unity.  At times it has reached crisis level as in 1995.  SSP contributes to and exacerbates this very problem.  Our current system rewards regional parties and punishes national parties.  Let’s look at the 1993 election results.  The Bloc Quebeςois received 13% of the national vote to win 54 seats in the House of Commons and become Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (great irony); the Reform Party received 19% of the national vote to win 52 seats just behind the Bloc; the Conservatives received 16% of the national vote to win 2 seats.  Now you don’t have to be a mathematician or a political junkie to look at this and know that something is wrong.  The two regional parties (the Bloc in Quebec and Reform in the West) received 27  and 26 times respectively the number of seats in the House compared to the Conservatives with 3% less and 3% more respectively of the popular vote.  Therefore in our system it pays to focus on a regional agenda fanning the flames of distrust between the West and Central Canada and between English and French Canada.  If there ever was evidence of the absence of character of our elected representatives this is it.  Our electoral system is tearing our country apart and they refuse to change it because they receive petty personal benefits from it.  Any parliament can change the electoral system in a matter of days if they want to.  It requires only a simple majority vote in the House of Commons and Senate.  Shame on them that they have so little regard for the nation they purport to represent.  

The more obvious and general problem with SSP is its distortion of democracy.  Democracy is supposed to mean rule by the people or the mob depending on your view.  Aristotle, from whom I derived the name for this blog, saw democracy as the best of the worst systems of government.  It appears today that many who claim to defend it are really supporting what Aristotle called a Polity, rule by the many.  In reality we are actually an elected Oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and powerful.  SSP supports this system very well.  Proportional representation would weaken but not undermine it.  As you know from my previous post no electoral system meets my standard for democracy.  But proportional representation (PR) is a step in the right direction. 

The critics of PR say it leads to perpetual minorities but I have already established that minority government does not necessarily equate to bad government.  They argue, even in the face of the historical evidence in Canada that minority government in this country is relatively stable, that should PR be adopted this would break down and elections would be a constant fact of life.  The example of choice is invariably Italy.  Now it is true that at some times Italy changes prime ministers more often than I change my underwear.  There coalition governments have been known to be quite fragile.  But that is the result of Italian political culture and not proportional representation.  Anyone familiar with Italy knows that North Italy and Southern Italy are almost two different planets.  Critics never seem to want to talk about Sweden or Germany or The Netherlands, only Italy.  Governments are stable in stable political cultures and unstable in unstable political cultures.  So there is no reason to believe that Parliament Hill would become a grand national game of musical chairs because we adopt PR.

Does the tail wag the dog in PR systems?  This is another common argument.  Proportional representation gives too much power to small parties.  I have alluded to something of that difficulty in my previous article on the upcoming Israeli elections.  Yes smaller parties become necessary partners to form governments in this type of system.  This can be a problem in Israel particularly because it is a pure proportional system.  The entire country is one single constituency so that even a party with one or two percent of the vote can win a seat.  If we were to adopt PR here in Canada it would be absurd to attempt to make the entire country one large political constituency.  As now we would divide the country up in numerous constituencies, much larger than our current ridings.  For example we might take six of our current ridings and meld them together.  In that new riding the vote would be counted and six seats would be apportioned to the parties.  This is but one example.  We might divide Canada in any of a number of ways but divide we must.  If we take the six example I have used a party would need at least 10% of the vote in the enlarged riding to receive one of the six seats.  So in Canada we are not talking about parties with one or two percent seating members in the House.  Smaller parties would still have influence and a voice but would not wag the dog.  And as much as larger parties need the smaller parties to form governments the smaller need the larger to influence policy so it is in both interests to compromise, negotiate and cooperate. 

Proportional representation would benefit Canada by easing our regional tensions and expanding our democratic culture.  Liberals, Greens or NDPs in Alberta would finally be recognized and have MPs who sympathize with and share their views to appeal to as would Conservatives and NDPs in Quebec.  There is only one real argument against adopting this system:  The self-serving pettiness of the people who have the ability to make the change.

Last month Canadians were treated to a federal election a year before Prime Minister Harper had promised one would be held.  He had said that governments should not play with election timing to benefit partisan interests so he would set a date at the outset that would be election day unless the evil opposition parties defeated him on a vote of confidence and forced an election.  Did I miss that?   I don’t seem to remember a motion of confidence being brought forward and the government being defeated.  Prime Minister Harper rationalized that he needed a new mandate from the people of Canada for the urgent business which lay ahead for the government.  Translation:  He thought he could win a majority. 

Still, what was this urgent business, particularly?  You and I both know that when times get rough we all hunker down and blame the government.  Well the going is getting kind of rough.  U. S. banks are failing, unemployment rates are rising on both sides of the border, and the North American auto industry faces collapse.  Gee, you don’t think ol’ Stephen knew this was coming and figured he better get an election out of the way before the subprime hit the fan?

What could be a more cynical manipulation of the power of the prime minister than that?  But that fresh faced farm boy who led the opposition to Jean Chretien and Paul Martin would never have done that.  I really wonder what happened to him.