"THE
GOVERNMENT
IS THE SERVANT
OF THE PEOPLE
AND NOT ITS MASTER"
Winston
Churchill
Oslo 1948
Another Minority Government? Lets Hope So
Peter H. Russell
It looks very likely that the election on January 23 will produce another minority government. Contrary to the pundits who tell you that such a result is something to be feared, Canadians should welcome such an outcome. If you value parliamentary democracy, minority government is the best result you can expect.
The main alternative – indeed the only realistic alternative – to a minority government is a government that has a majority in the House of Commons but the support of only a minority of the electorate. This is what I call a “false majority government” and we have had plenty of these n recent years
The three Chretien governments were all false majority governments that all too often acted as if they represented a majority of Canadians. In fact, though the Chretien liberals in three elections never got more than 41% of the popular vote, they enjoyed majorities in the House of Commons ranging from 51 to 60%.
True majority governments – governments that have both a majority in the House and a majority in the country – have become a rare phenomenon in Canada. Since the end of World War I, we have had only 3 – Mackenzie King’s 1940 wartime government, Diefenbaker’s 1958 landslide and Mulroney ‘s first victory in 1984. Of the other 23 federal governments formed over that period, 12 have been false majority governments and 11 have been minority governments.
The reason that political parties so rarely win a majority of the popular vote is that Canada has moved from a two-party to a multi-party political system. From Confederation until the end of World War I, federal elections were strictly two party contests. Canada’s first 12 governments were true majority governments – 6 Conservative and 6 Liberal. The 13th, Borden’s Unionist government, was a coalition of Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals.
The emergence of the western-based Progressive Party in the 1920s produced Canada’s first minority government. Since then we have had three or more parties contesting every federal election and with only rare exceptions we have had minority governments or false majority governments.
Clearly, it is our first-past-the-post simple-plurality electoral system that makes it possible for a party to win a parliamentary majority with considerably less than a majority of the popular vote. All of Europe’s parliamentary democracies, except the U.K., have electoral systems that produce parliaments more reflective of the distribution of citizens’ preferences. In all of those European countries minority governments or coalitions are the norm.
Opponents of proportional representation make its tendency to virtually guarantee minority (or coalition) government their trump card in arguing for retention of the first-past-the-post system. Though I very much favour reform of our electoral system, my purpose here is not to make the case for pr but to show why minority government or coalition government is to be preferred to the alternative we are most likely to get under the existing electoral system - a false majority government.
As we have seen with the Chretien, Mulroney and Trudeau governments, strict party discipline and the centralization of power in the prime minister’s office mean that when a party has a majority in the House of Commons its leaders virtually shut down parliament until the next election whose timing they control. Once prime ministers see that they can dominate parliament, like Pierre Trudeau, they dismiss MPs as “nobodies”. In these situations what we have is not parliamentary government but presidential government without the check and balance of Congress - or to use Jeffrey Simpson’s phrase, “friendly dictatorships”- and some would question just how friendly these dictatorships have been.
Now consider how parliamentary government operates when we have a minority government. To maintain the confidence of the House of Commons (which is its license to govern) a minority government must reach out and become more inclusive in its policy making.
We saw Paul Martin doing this in the fall of 2004 when in the debate on the speech from the throne he was forced to make concessions to both the Conservatives and the NDP. Again, last spring , to avoid defeat in the House, Martin had to incorporate some of the NDP’s legislative priorities into his governments plans.
Media coverage tends to sneer at these developments as unprincipled wheeling and dealing. But to accommodate perspectives that enable government policy to be responsive to the preferences of a majority of the electorate is surely what we should look for in a vibrant parliamentary democracy. Is it really better for a government that represents just over 40%of the people to be able to stick firmly – and often arrogantly – to its own priorities for four or five years?
Critics of minority governments would have you believe that minority governments are too weak and unstable to govern well. But a look back at the accomplishments of minority governments does not bear this out.
King minority governments brought us independence from Britain in our foreign policy and the first measure of old age security. Under Pearson minority governments we got our own flag and medicare. Trudeau’s one minority government inaugurated a process of making modern treaties with Aboriginal peoples.
Minority governments have also functioned well at the provincial level. We should remember the 6 years of minority government from 1975-81 that Ontario enjoyed under the Davis Conservatives - a period during which the government was able to act in a fiscally responsible way while improving social programs such as legal aid and expanding educational opportunities.
Besides providing effective government and more inclusive policies, minority governments are virtually guaranteed to bring us more political excitement and entertainment. Citizens in democracies should learn to lighten up and enjoy the political theatre that results when the political gladiators they have elected must continue their jousting between elections – as they surely must do in minority parliaments. And , say what you will about the last year and a half of federal parliamentary politics, surely it was a great show!
So sit back and enjoy – another minority government (you should hope) is coming our way.
Peter Russell, is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and Honorary Director of the Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy