Conservatives are often the culprits in both countries though not exclusively as the reference to Clinton shows.  It is not really that the Liberals are all that chaste.  But Conservatives are always lecturing us to be choirboys, seemingly forgetting that being a choirboy can be hazardous to your virginity.

Some of us are old enough to remember the Gerda Munsinger Affair that scandalized the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker.  Apparently Gerda had done the rounds of the Conservative party leadership including the minister of defence.  She was rumoured to have connections to the East German secret police.  The story was disseminated in the early 1960s, likely by the Kennedy administration who worked tirelessly to oust poor old Dief and install the more likable (at least to Kennedy) Lester Pearson.

More recently there was the scandal over Maxime Bernier leaving secret documents at his girlfriend’s home.  Pundits at the time wondered why he would risk his political career by dating a  woman with biker connections who had once worked as an exotic dancer.  Ah! our intrepid media, a brain trust if there ever was one.  I can give you two very large reasons up front it you would like.  If the reporters don’t realize why they should talk to their cameramen because they always seemed to place the reason front and center.

I always knew Betty Davis eyes were a popular look but Sarah Palin hair?

Now we have the dynamic duo of scandal, Rahim Jaffer and wife Helena Guergis.  Allegations have been brought to the prime minister’s attention of some shenanigans by Ms. Guergis and she was asked to resign from cabinet and was at the same time expelled from caucus.  Although no official word has surfaced as to what specifically she is supposed to have done rumours abound.  The only observation I will make is that having a minister resign is a common tactic to ease pressure and embarrassment for the government.  But also expelling the member from caucus in one fell swoop is not an every day occurrence.  Whatever this is Harper must think it makes him and his government, which is the same thing, look really, really bad.  I can hardly wait I am so excited with anticipation.

In the meantime, let’s have a look at her husband Rahim Jaffer a former Conservative MP from Alberta, land of cold hearts and toxic waste.  Apparently, Mr. Jaffer was internalizing some toxic waste of his own last September when he was pulled over by Ontario police.  He was speeding, drunk and cocaine was found in his car.  In a plea bargain the more serious impaired and drug possession charges were dropped and he pled guilty to the lesser charge of careless driving.  Wait for it.  That’s not the best part.

The reason for pleading Mr. Jaffer down was the Crown’s decision that conviction was unlikely.  Why you might ask?  Well the Ontario Keystone Cops refused to let the man see his own lawyer on request and made the poor man get naked.  That’s right, naked.   Now I know we hear constantly in the media that there is a shortage of cops out there and the workload is getting pretty heavy.  Dalton McGuinty says these little slip ups will happen from time to time.  But really now, give these poor guys some R and R and let them see their wives and girlfriends once in a while.  We can’t have police roaming the highways looking for some unsuspecting speeder to fulfill their fantasies.

Now I could be interpreting this wrong.  After all I am reading it in a CBC report where the wording could be read another way.  The actual quote is “… repeatedly denying Jaffer access to his own lawyers and a strip search after he was pulled over on a rural road …”.  So was Jaffer asking for a strip search.  Maybe he’s thought the silhouette of his body in the moonlight would bring a soft sigh and a warning rather than arrest.  Either way our police need to find better ways to relieve the tension.  Perhaps that could be a new use for those tasers they are so fond of.

Of course, even if the Crown had moved forward on the cocaine charges Jaffer could have used Richard Hatfield’s defence.  Hatfield, then Conservative premier of New Brunswick, was found at Fredericton airport with a bag of marijuana in his luggage.  He denied it belonged to him and had the police dust the bag for prints.  When his weren’t found charges did not proceed.

So thank you for being consistent, Conservative party.  Hypocrisy is what you are best at.  Good thing cause you aren’t good for anything else.  The Liberals may be slimy, power-hungry spawn of Satan who would pimp their mother for a vote, but at least they admit it.  The Conservative choir may sing like angels but up close there cassocks smell of booze and stale sex.

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.

But back to unemployment and the current financial situation.  Disasters like the current crisis should be learning tools.  They are opportunities to rethink a number of previous ideas and practices, from how we regulate financial markets to how we respond to citizens in crisis.  On the latter our system of assistance at all levels needs to be reviewed.  Our social safety net developed ad hoc, various programs appearing at various times as needs arose or ideas presented themselves.  It is time now to systematize their delivery. 

Every Canadian political party has at one time or another toyed with the concept of a guaranteed annual income.  The Conservative Party preferred to call it negative income taxing.  But all parties have considered this basic idea.   There are a number of draw backs which prevented implementation of the policy; start-up costs, bureaucratic reorganization and federal provincial relations.

Under a guaranteed annual income scheme the government would sent every citizen a flat monthly stipend.  Whatever a citizen earned over that would be taxable.  Therefore those who are not in need of the money would have it taxed back.  Our current Old Age Security program works in a similar way.  It is universal.  Those Canadians of wealth declare it as income and end up paying it all back to the government.  A guaranteed annual income would work differently in that it would not be taxable.  Only income earned over that amount would be taxed.  But there would be no personal deductions on your income tax including dependency deductions (because your dependents would be receiving their own guaranteed income).  Not only would personal income tax deductions disappear so would virtually every welfare program now in existence.  Old Age Security (mentioned above), provincial old age supplements where they exist, employment insurance (no need to worry about eligibility arguments), general welfare, disability pensions, family allowance, child tax benefit and the list goes on which shows the waste involved in the current delivery of our social safety net.  Not only would these be replaced by the guaranteed annual income but their bureaucracies would become redundant thus saving millions off the civil service payroll. 

The first year of a guaranteed annual income would be costly.  After the first year though the program would begin to pay back in savings more than it cost initially.  Within a few years governments would have the luxury of lowering taxes or investing the surpluses created.  Of course this idea of short term pain for long term gain would reverse the current philosophy of all Western governments who advocate long term pain for short term gain.  There would need to be a transition plan as the size of the civil service shrank substantially but this problem is not insurmountable.  One of the benefits of a guaranteed annual income is the stability it provides to the economy.  A secure and stable economy would create sustainable growth which would over time absorb the loss in government jobs.  Further, the ability to rely on a base income would encourage individuals to pursue ideas they might now forego for fear that basic family needs could not be met during start-up periods.  This also counters the argument that such a scheme would sap people’s initiative.  That criticism is based on the cynical myth that people only work because they have to.  Like all half-truths this myth has persisted.  The full truth is that people only work at jobs they hate and where they are abused because they have to.   Employers would certainly have to behave better than they currently do to keep valued employees.  A huge stumbling block here in Canada is the idiocy of our federal-provincial relationship.  But once the Canadian public was properly educated in what a guaranteed annual income would mean for them and the country, pity the ignorant government who tried to screw it up.  They might well face the kind of political assassination that happened to the Progressive Conservatives back in 1993.  The Canadian electorate is a fickle lot so piss them off at your peril. 

In the end a guaranteed annual income is the logical solution to our income supplement programs.  Citizens in most modern democracies expect their governments to play a supportive role in their lives.  Therefore, a guaranteed annual income is rational, cost effective, efficient and just plain the right thing to do.

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.

So what comes next?  The Liberals and NDP are talking coalition.  They would still need the support of the Bloc Quebecois in order to govern but the Bloc, at least at this point, will not be a part of the coalition government.  The Conservatives are going to argue, if it comes to that, that a coalition is unconstitutional and that the governor-general should call an election instead.  Most Canadians are unaware that nothing of our governing system is in the Constitution.  The only vague reference in CA1867 (formerly the British North America Act) is in the preamble where is mentions forming a government similar in kind to that of Great Britain.  Our current governing system does reflect, in its basic structures, the Westminister model of government.  The prime minister was not even mentioned in the Constitution until the 1982 amendment.  So what Mr. Harper is hanging his hat on is something called constitutional conventions.  These are unwritten bits of the constitution.  A constitutional convention is another way of saying tradition.  Those practices that have arisen and stood the test of time are understood as constitutional by the courts.  It is equal to the precedent concept.  While the courts do recognize them, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be overruled if it seems that they have outlived their usefulness or are in some way injurious to the society.  They are much easier to change than anything that is actually written into the constitutional documents. 

Are there precendents?  The closest would be the Liberal-NDP Accord in the Ontario provincial legislature in 1985.  This was not a coalition.  In exchange for the passage of specific legislation, the NDP committed to not defeat the government on a confidence motion for two years.  At the time the Conservatives held the most seats in the legislature but were finding it impossible to govern as a minority.  When Frank Miller resigned as premiere, David Peterson, with the Accord in hand, presented the lieutenant-governor with the option of allowing him to form a government, thus avoiding an election so soon on the heels of the last.  The other precedent that comes to mind is the Union Government of 1917 but in that case the coalition was arranged prior to the election and ran as such.  There are other examples of deals between parties to support a minority government such as the ‘Shopping List’ presented by the NDP to the Conservatives and Liberals in 1972 (for those of you who don’t remember or are too young to remember the Liberals won the bidding).  So all in all while there is no direct precedent, a federal coalition government in no way contridicts what has gone before.  We have a history of cooperative efforts between parties and a coalition would be just another level up. 

It would create a greater constitutional crisis for Canada if the governor-general were to deny the request of the Liberals to form a coalition.  Another fact that Canadians don’t fully understand is that we, the people, do not elect the prime minister.  We elect a person in our riding.  That person belongs to a specific party in most cases (leaving independents aside for the moment).  When the seat count is added up the party with the most seats usually forms the government.  That’s right, usually.  While there is not an actual vote for prime minister the House of Commons nonetheless does make the choice.  A prime minister remains in office as long as she/he retains the confidence of the House.  At any moment, whether in majority or minority, if a prime minister loses on a confidence vote she/he must resign.  Of course this has never happened in a majority situation in Canada and is not likely to.  But it is a real possibility in minority.  On the other hand, if a party leader can provide proof that they would enjoy the confidence of the House, the governor-general would be hard pressed to deny them the opportunity.  This is the situation which appears to be forming up.  Therefore, if Stephane Dion (providing he is still leading the Liberal Party) approaches Governor-General Michaëlle Jean and proposes a coalition government with the NDP supported by the Bloc with all parties in agreement, her only answer can be to give him the opportunity. 

Is all this hullabaloo necessary?  Probably not but it was inevitable.  Stephen Harper had shown himself incapable of working in a minority situation in the last parliament when he had even fewer seats.  Now with the scent of majority in his nose there would be no dealing with him at all.  Stephen is one of those people whose look matches their personality.  He really is just as anal as he looks.  Hell you couldn’t pull a needle out of his butt with a backhoe.  Anal retentive people tend to be control freaks unable to compromise and successful minority governments are all about compromise.  And in the end that is what a democracy should be. 

We must wait to see how this all plays out.  The Conservatives may find a compromise or the opposition parties may get cold feet before the December 8 vote in the House of Commons and all this speculation will be for naught.

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.