Scotch’d, not killed

The political scholar Eugene Forsey called the 1957 Canadian federal election, the defeat of St. Laurent’s Liberal government and the entry of a Conservative minority, “our great deliverance.” The infighting and indecisiveness of the Conservative government in later years tarnished that assessment, but in many ways, 1957 provides a useful point of comparison with the recent election, where the Conservatives under Stephen Harper — as cerebral as John Diefenbaker was visceral — have entered the Commons in a minority.

Under the Liberal government of Paul Martin, parliamentary government in Canada was every bit as sick as at the time of the 1956 Pipeline Debate, when the Liberal government simply cut off Parliament every time the opposition tried to speak. Liberals, of course, have spent eight decades resisting letting Parliament have any role other than rubber stamp for the cabinet — witness C.D. Howe’s ugly moment in a debate in 1951, instructing Howard Green: “Don’t take yourselves too seriously . . . If we wanted to get away with it, who would stop us?” The marvel is that a supposedly democratic country has electors that let them get away with it, time upon time.

This election didn’t bring in a new government with a clear parliamentary mandate, but like 1957, it at least cleared the Liberals off the government benches. The voters have scotched the snake, not killed it, but that’s victory enough for democracy, for now. It offers the opportunity to change the way the public debate is framed, which is the one chance to see the party of institutionalized corruption off for good.

The Harper Conservatives are in a minority, and the three opposition parties could vote it out unless one or more can be brought on board to support the throne speech and the budget. Our guess is that the other parties will find that hard to do.

For the speech, the new government comes in with five stated priorities, none of which is part of the “hidden agenda” that the Liberals and left-of-centre fellow-travellers were so ready to accuse the Conservatives of harbouring during the course of the campaign. The first — the one the Liberals fear most — is a package to clean up government, and the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Qubcois are likely to support both better rules and a rigorous investigation of the corrupt practices of the former government.

Another is a crackdown on gun crime, which probably requires the government to amend the Criminal Code and to ditch ineffectual Liberal gun control programs. Those programs were costly enough that the Conservative program is likely to be a money-saver, so no government is going to fall over this priority.

A third is to solve the problem of long waiting times for health care, a responsibility the national government has taken on as a substitute for letting the provinces raise the revenue for a head of power that is the provinces’ responsibility. Health care is the tar-baby of Canadian politics, needlessly passed from one national government to the next, only because of the political advantage the Pearson Liberals gained from sponsoring it in the 1960s and the cravenness of later governments about insisting provinces should pay for their own mismanagement. Politically savvy Canadian governments kicked that can down the road; Martin’s government simply bought the premiers’ silence; but maybe a sufficiently bold government might find a way, other than blank cheques, to put that problem back in the laps of the premiers.

One of the proposals being quietly floated is to do away with Ottawa’s habit of writing cheques to the provinces, meant to cover spending on the two big provincial tickets — health and education — but going, in practice, into general provincial revenue. The boldest idea is to cut national income tax, along with the payments to provinces, and leave it to the provinces themselves to raise the money they spend. It could put both the province-worshippers and the political left in a cleft stick: the national government gets out of a provincial jurisdiction, but gives the other level of government plenty of room to make up the revenue. The “fiscal imbalance” — probably a fiction, but popular among provincial true believers — then becomes the provinces’ to solve. That should be easy; provincial premiers are well known to have all the answers.

The other two priorities are both budgetary items: the Conservatives mean to cut the Goods and Services Tax to 5%, in two 1% jumps, and to issue an allowance for child care, presumably through the income tax system. It would be a brave opposition that brought the government down over either measure.

Not listed as a priority, but good to see, is a proposal to defer capital-gains tax on securities for six months, and to lift it if those gains are reinvested. A measure like that would excite the capital markets, particularly venture-capital markets, where almost all the gains that come are taxable. It would not be necessary to hold stocks in a tax-sheltered plan (like a retirement savings plan) to avoid the capital gains tax, and the tax incentive to reinvest would provide plenty of buying support in the stock markets. It’s another measure that the other parties would find politically hard to oppose.

Also weighing in Harper’s favour is the state of the opposition parties. The Liberals are leaderless and fractured. They relied on corporate Canada for donations and now, deep in debt and outside government, may find it difficult to have their phone calls answered.

They remain pretty much unrepentant, and for sheer mental obstinacy we can cast our gaze on the surviving Liberal cabinet ministers. The Privy Council was never more aptly named.

Ex-Finance Minister Ralph Goodale, to take one example, was returned in Wascana in defiance of the evident leak — we no longer have much doubt that it happened — about his office’s planned changes to the tax treatment of income trusts and dividends.

Nobody suggested he was the immediate source of the leak; it may not even have come from the Department of Finance; but Ralph has the wounded-innocent routine cold, protesting the “tone and the tactics and the personal abuse, the insinuation that percolated through the campaign.” This, from the party of the martial-law-in-Canada advertisement, is pure gall.

Ujjal Dosanjh — minister of health under Martin and head temptress in the Liberals’ attempt to draw former Conservative member Gurmant Grewal over to their side of the House during last spring’s confidence votes — survived in Vancouver South. He’s fighting mad about the aspersions cast on him after it emerged that he and Martin’s chief of staff, Tim Murphy, were caught on audio tape dangling carrots to bring Grewal across the floor. As political columnist Andrew Coyne has pointed out a number of times, it was up to Murphy and Dosanjh to cut off discussions, and they never did.

“Cleared” by the Ethics Commissioner, who found it unnecessary to listen to the tapes, Dosanjh is now looking for someone to sue. Transcripts of the tapes — presuming the tapes are real, and we have no reason to think they are not — show Dosanjh and Murphy in negotiations to buy Grewal’s vote in the Commons. That’s a Criminal Code offence, and Dosanjh evidently doesn’t like to be reminded of it. Our address for service is on the masthead.

In its way, the party is weaker even than it was in 1984, when only 40 Liberals were elected. At least then, there were a few nasty hard-cases ready to give the government a tough time in question period. Now the party’s energy is as vanished as its morality, and 103 members, few with any experience in opposition, are little more than time-servers.

The Bloc had been looking for a near-sweep of seats and a popular vote of 50% in Quebec, as a sort of play-money referendum victory. They got 42% and lost seats, and even share the opposition benches with a radio shock-jock that ran as an independent and beat the Bloc candidate in Portneuf. We might one day look back on this election as the one that st
arted the Bloc’s final descent.

The New Democrats gained seats and took profits from the decline of the Liberals, at least in Ontario and British Columbia. They can make common cause with the Conservatives on issues like ethical reform, and have little reason to force a new election over the other conservative measures. We expect a minority government to last for quite a while.

So what might it bring us? Adults in charge, for a start; the miracle worked by the Chrtien and Martin governments was to clothe the oldest, tiredest nostrums in the most thoughtlessly adolescent rhetoric. There was no problem for which those governments didn’t have an unserious solution. Even the most partisan Liberals don’t accuse Harper of not being serious.

And despite the frenzied gesticulation from the UN-besotted left, the Conservative government looks ready to resume an adult relationship with the rest of the world. As a trading nation with wide international interests, and citizens working all over the globe, Canada badly needs to be taken seriously again.

What we might also see is the best legacy from the old Reform Party: an end to the idea of government-as-automatic-teller that has plagued us since the Trudeau years. The Mulroney Conservatives, it has sometimes been said, wanted new people turning the levers on the Liberal patronage machine. The Harper Conservatives, if they mean what they have always said, want to dismantle the machine, along with the Liberals’ l’tat, c’est notre parti view of government. If they do, that “great deliverance” may finally have arrived.