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Trudeau’s NDP deal comes with a catch

CHANTAL HÉBERT TWITTER: @CHANTALHBERT

Over the last 17 years, five out of seven federal elections have resulted in minority governments. On average those have lasted about two years. Over that same period, the electorate has become more fragmented.

With five parties represented in the current Parliament and a sixth one — Maxime Bernier’s PPC — fighting hard to enter the House of Commons, Canada is not about to return to the days when three national parties consistently shared the federal stage.

Going forward, minority governments are more likely to be the norm rather than the exception.

For those who are addicted to the horse race side of politics, this is an exciting development, promising as it does a steady dose of back-toback leadership and general elections — with minimal substance to worry about in between.

But the abbreviated shelf life and the attending short attention span of minority parliaments comes at a price and Canada has been paying it in lost public policy dividends.

That’s because minority parliaments are increasingly treated as little more than opportunities for the parties on both sides of the House to reload for a rematch.

As soon as the losing party or parties have selected new leaders — usually over the first 12 months after the election — the countdown to the next campaign starts.

On that basis, the government looks in earnest for measures that will give it the quickest possible bang for its buck.

The role of government-in-waiting of the official Opposition takes second place to finding wedges to exploit in the agenda of its main rival.

With no party wanting to give its rivals a win, it does not take long for even consensual policies to become fodder for this permanent war. In the last Parliament, the ban on conversion therapy was used as a political football by both the government and the Opposition.

The overall result has been a public policy process that operates in fits and starts and an increasingly truncated political conversation not only between politicians and voters but also within the parties themselves.

If the parties in the House of Commons insist on repeating the same behaviour, they — and the voters along with them — will reap dispiriting outcomes.

This is where proponents of electoral reform would argue that a move to a more proportional voting system would induce a much-needed cultural change in the parliamentary approach to minority rule.

Such a reform would indeed likely result in the need to strike alliances between various parties to craft governing coalitions. Instead of looking for wedges, they would spend more time searching for common ground.

But at this juncture there is no federal consensus as to the desirability of electoral reform or the best formula to achieve it.

To break the vicious cycle that is increasingly rendering the federal conversation both sterile and toxic, the pact concluded last week between the Liberals and the New Democrats may be the next best thing.

It certainly reflects the aspirations of more voters than the winner-take-all result of the last two majority governments.

In 2011 and in 2015, the Conservatives and the Liberals respectively secured governing majorities with a bit less than 40 per cent of the vote. That result gave each of them in turn a license to impose their will on the House of Commons for a full term.

Together the New Democrats and the Liberals earned the support of 50.4 per cent of voters. Their joint plan is based on common ground between the two parties’ platforms that will be familiar to those who supported them last fall.

There is also more built-in accountability in this arrangement than there has traditionally been in majority governments. That applies to both parties to the deal.

Between now and the next election, Canada could end up going to war. Such a development could strain the partnership in ways that the NDP for one has not fully anticipated.

A Liberal scandal could — as the sponsorship affair eventually did in 2005 — come to make sticking with the arrangement untenable for the New Democrats.

Absent such crises, this deal will ensure that the Liberals remain in power for another three years. But the more predictable lease on life Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has secured for his government has a flip side. Come the next election, the onus on his party to have delivered on its commitments will be greater.

By 2025, the national child-care program will have been up and running long enough to see if it does deliver the affordable system Trudeau promised.

It will be possible to verify whether the Liberal environmental policies have resulted in measurable progress on the reduction of carbon emissions or in another lost climate change decade.

At the very least, the extended timeline of the current Parliament should pave the way for a more policy-grounded federal campaign than those of the recent past.

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2022-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

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