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Tory minority in jeopardy as opposition talks coalition. Will there be another election?

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Ottawa Citizen web site, is an excellent article by Richard Van Loon that explains, quite clearly, why the aborted coalition was and remains unacceptable:
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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/coalition+doesn+stack/1149585/story.html

Our coalition doesn't stack up

Canada's much-debated alternative government doesn't compare well to properly formed coalitions in other countries


BY RICHARD VAN LOON, CITIZEN SPECIAL

JANUARY 7, 2009COMMENTS (6)

While the furore has abated somewhat with the appointment and subsequent near disappearance of Michael Ignatieff as Liberal leader, the coalition agreement to replace the Conservative government remains formally in place, and the debate continues.

On one side, those opposing the coalition have trumpeted its illegitimacy on the grounds that Canadians voted to keep Stephen Harper as prime minister, albeit with distinctly limited enthusiasm. Canadians certainly did not, the opponents say, vote for this coalition. The co-operation of the avowedly separatist Bloc Québécois has deeply troubled many critics. Even within the Liberal party itself, doubts about the arrangement have been strong. And certainly Canadian voters, even Liberal voters, have not had the opportunity to vote for any government led by Mr. Ignatieff.

Proponents of the coalition cite the fact that, in early December at least, the PM had clearly lost the confidence of the House, and that only 37.7 per cent of those voting in the 2008 election had voted Conservative as opposed to 43.8 per cent for the two formal coalition partners and 53.8 per cent if the Bloc voters are included. The formal legitimacy of coalitions in the Westminster and virtually all other forms of democratic government is often cited, as is the fact that strictly speaking only about 38,500 voters in Calgary Southwest actually cast ballots with Stephen Harper's name on them. The legitimacy of the coalition is further buttressed in the eyes of its supporters by its willingness to put forward ideas to deal with the current economic recession.

Yet the coalition is not popular with Canadians. In polls soon after the coalition was put forward, 60 per cent of Canadians were opposed to its taking power, and Stephen Harper maintains a 10 percentage point lead over Michael Ignatieff in polls this week as the best person to be prime minister.

In taking Prime Minister Harper's advice to prorogue Parliament, thus effectively rejecting the coalition at least for the time being, Governor General Michaëlle Jean was clearly in line with public opinion if not that of some parliamentary experts and commentators.

Although it is not yet formally dead, the coalition may die either immediately when Michael Ignatieff emerges from hiding or, more likely, if the Harper government can cobble together an economic statement which at least marginally satisfies the Liberals and avoids any further shots amidships of the opposition parties' financial interests.

But should it die so untried and so soon? At first glance I was inclined to say no. But when you look at how coalitions are formed and take power in other democracies, Westminster parliamentary and otherwise, the answer is unequivocally, yes.

Coalitions are a common feature of many European systems and they are not unknown in Westminster parliamentary democracies. They are usually underlain by some form of proportional representation but, much more importantly, voters generally have a good idea that they are voting for a potential coalition partner and, with occasional exceptions, they have a pretty clear idea of what the coalition will look like if the partners are given a mandate.

The 2006 Swedish election is a good example to consider, particularly since it, like the current Canadian coalition but unlike most other coalitions, is not led by the party with the most seats or the plurality of the popular vote in the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag. The current government is a four-party coalition called "The Alliance for Sweden" led by the Moderate Party. The Social Democratic Party, Sweden's long time governing party, actually polled 35 per cent of the vote and won 129 seats compared to the Moderate Party's 26.2 percent and 93 seats. However the Social Democratic prime minister quickly concluded that he would not be able to govern even with the support of minor parties which normally supported his party, and so he resigned and the Alliance took power.

So far this sounds a bit like the Canadian situation, but there is a major difference even aside from the un-Harper-like willingness of prime minister Goran Persson to quickly cede power. The Alliance coalition was formed and developed a platform two years before the election. And while the partners maintained their separate identities -- three of them even publishing their own manifestoes -- it was perfectly clear to Swedish voters that they were voting for a coalition if they voted for members of any of the four Alliance parties. By contrast, Canadian voters in 2008 had no inkling that they might be voting for one. The operative principle is an electorate informed about the possibilities before the vote, and that is the reason Persson so quickly ceded defeat.

In other European countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Ireland or Italy, voters know that a coalition is likely and they generally have a good idea of probable member parties. The normal consequence is that the party with the plurality of votes and seats (since these are proportional representation systems that result is usually guaranteed) form a coalition with one or more sympathetic minority parties and the result, unless one lives in Italy, is often a stable government until the next scheduled election.

Both Australia and New Zealand have had coalition governments. In Australia, the Liberal Party has been in a virtually permanent coalition with the much smaller National Party, the National Party leader holding the position of deputy prime minister in the last coalition government. Government alternates between that coalition and the Labour Party. In practice, while the Liberals and the National Party run separate campaigns, the arrangement is so stable that most analysts tend to treat Australia as essentially a two-party system at the national level. However, for our purposes the important point is that voters always have a clear idea what they are voting for.

New Zealand has had several coalition governments as far back as the 1930s and they have sometimes been controversial. After the 1996 election, the National Party which had a plurality of seats in Parliament bolstered a tenuous hold on power by a coalition with the anti-immigration New Zealand First Party, a coalition which eventually disintegrated.

This coalition was formed after the election, the first held under a new mixed-member proportional system, and it would be fair to say that voters did not know that it was likely.

Prior to the next election in 1999, the Labour Party, recognizing the probable impact of the new proportional representation system, came to a public agreement with the smaller Alliance Party that they would form a coalition, and so it was viewed as legitimate and was supported by other minor parties following the election. Labour Party prime minister Helen Clark then led three consecutive coalition governments, although her coalition partners changed over time.

Arrangements known in advance proved more stable and legitimate than one formed after the election. But even in the latter case, the lead party in the coalition had a plurality in Parliament, something which does not apply in the Canadian case.

Both Britain and Canada have had coalition governments during wartime but these have been in response to dire national emergencies and have been led by the party with a plurality or, more often, a majority in the House of Commons.

So what really makes a coalition legitimate?

International precedents suggest three conditions. One is that the country faces a compelling national emergency, usually a major war. A second, broadly applicable in less troubled times, is that voters must know in advance that they are voting for potential members of a coalition, one which will govern if its members can claim a majority of seats in the legislature immediately after the election. A third is that a party with a plurality, already in government or immediately after an election, forms the coalition and immediately seeks support of the legislature. But as the New Zealand experience in the late 1990s suggests the latter is not always a successful strategy. Stable coalitions in peacetime are virtually always underpinned by the results of an election in which voters were aware of the possibility of their formation.

The current coalition agreement in Canada does not meet any of these tests. While it may be formally possible under the rules of Westminster parliamentary democracy, it is not democratically legitimate and it does not meet international standards. If Stephen Harper's government proves not to have the confidence of the House, the Governor General should dissolve Parliament.

Richard Van Loon is former president of Carleton University and is now professor emeritus at Carleton's Graduate School of Public Policy. He is co-author of The Canadian Political System.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

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In other words, if Iggy really wants to be PM all he has to do is say, during the campaign, is: “Vote for either your Liberal or NDP candidate, it matters not, ‘cause if we get a combined majority we’ll form a coalition – we Liberals believe in the NDP’s economic, social, defence and foreign policies.”

Equally, if he really wants to be Deputy PM, all Taliban Jack Layton has to say, during the next election campaign is: “Look, my fellow Canadians, I know you don’t want me to be your PM but Olivia and I really, really want chauffeured limos and all that so we approve of all things Liberal and we’ll join them in a coalition. Anybody but Harper, right?”

Then we can have a coalition … if any Canadians want one.
 

 
Do we really need a coalition if the Liberal leader is trying to outflank the CPC from the right? (The real question is how well the Liberal party will hold together under this violent lurch back towards the centre?)

http://mesopotamiawest.blogspot.com/2009/01/is-ignatieff-going-to-outflank-harper.html

Is Ignatieff going to Outflank Harper on the Right?

Are you getting the feeling Michael Ignatieff is going to outflank the Conservatives on the right? That's certainly the impression you get listening to his recent statements on tax cuts, Israel and job retraining.

Indeed, is he sounding more conservative than the Conservatives? And is this why he's got the Liberal Party running even with them?

Here are two things to watch for; his position on the Canadian Human Rights Commission and on Pakistan.

If he says Section 13 of the Human Rights Act should be abolished and our tilt in South Asia should be away from Pakistan and towards India, he will have outflanked the current Government.

He says he is devising tests for the Conservative budget. Well, hey, I'm devising some tests on his positions. I've named two above and I have some others on issues such as gun rights, parole, prisons, the Newfoundland bridge, the Vancouver Island bridge and the Canadian Interprovincial Highway System.

If he passes, and Stephen Harper does not, things could be different at Mesowest, and in the Country. We need a conservative government in Canada, whatever party leads it.
[/quote]
 
....the two front-runner parties are neck 'n neck, but respondents seem to want Harper as PM more than Iggy.  More detailed numbers in attached news release by the polling company.

(....)

Methodology
Polling between January 3 and January 7, 2009. (Random Telephone Survey of 1,003 Canadians, 18 years of age and older). A survey of 1,003 Canadians is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, plus or minus, 19 times out of 20.



Ballot Question: For those parties you would consider voting for federally, could you please rank your top two current local preferences? (Committed Voters Only - First Choice)

The numbers in parenthesis denote the change from the last Nanos Omnibus Survey conducted in November 2008.

Committed Voters - Canada (N=902, MoE ± 3.3%, 19 times out of 20)
Liberal Party 34% (+4)
Conservative Party 33% (+1)
NDP 19% (-1)
BQ 7% (-2)
Green Party 7% (-3)
(*Note: Undecided 10%)

Best PM Question: Of the following individuals, who do you think would make the best Prime Minister? [Read and Rotate]

Canada (N=1,003, MoE ± 3.1%, 19 times out of 20)
Stephen Harper 36% (+1)
Michael Ignatieff 23% (+12)*
Jack Layton 15% (-5)
Gilles Duceppe 5% (-2)
Elizabeth May 5% (-1)
None/ Unsure 17% (-5)
*The number in parenthesis denotes the change from Stephane Dion to Michael Ignatieff as leader.

Ignatieff's Net Impact on Impression of Liberal Party: As you may know, Stephane Dion recently stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Michael Ignatieff was made interim leader. As a result of these changes, has your impression of the Liberal Party become more favourable, less favourable or has it not changed?
(Net Impact is derived by subtracting less favourable from more favourable)
Canada +26
Atlantic Canada +23
Quebec +36
Ontario +29
Western Canada + 17
 
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail is an interesting column by <gasp> Lawrence Martin:
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090114.wcomartin15/BNStory/politics/home

Here's how Obama can raise Harper's game

LAWRENCE MARTIN

From Thursday's Globe and Mail
January 15, 2009 at 12:00 AM EST

Stephen Harper has about as little in common with Barack Obama as John Diefenbaker had with John Kennedy.

It's not just that one is liberal and the other conservative. They clash on myriad levels. One's a visionary, the other more of a plodder. One's a renowned communicator, the other spent almost his first term trying not to communicate.

The Obama approach is that of a consensus builder. The Harper approach is divide and conquer. The Obama world view is of one family. Mr. Harper inclines more toward the "clash of civilizations" template. The new president is about to shut down Guantanamo; the Prime Minister didn't have much of a problem with it. The new president is soon to shut down the Iraq war; Mr. Harper didn't have much of a problem with it.

In style, Mr. Obama is GQ, Mr. Harper Rotary Club. Mr. Obama is a fine wine, Mr. Harper lime juice. Mr. Obama is relaxed, Mr. Harper suspicious. One is inspirational, the other isn't. One makes Americans feel proud. The other makes Canadians - except when he's almost overthrowing his own government - feel indifferent.

Mr. Harper and other leaders suffer unfairly in comparison to Mr. Obama. The new president's gaining all these glorious notices without even having served a day on the job.

But what's striking about the incoming American leader is that he's probably closer to the Canadian mainstream than the Canadian leader, who's closer to the Calgary or Texas mainstream.

As might be expected, Mr. Obama has more similarities to Michael Ignatieff. From his years at Harvard and elsewhere, the Liberal Leader has several close contacts in the Obama camp and will no doubt, with time, be cultivating them.

Put it all together and you might get the impression that Mr. Harper is dreading the advent of Mr. Obama. But you could be wrong. Mr. Obama's arrival has Canadian Conservatives optimistic. In contrast to George W. Bush, who was a barnacle, the Democrat presents Mr. Harper with a big opportunity.

If the PM plays it properly, he can share in Mr. Obama's winds of change. By building rapport with the new president, he can establish for himself a more moderate, modern and attractive leadership personality.

Economic conditions are already forcing a commonality of approach from the two leaders. Deficit spending, stimulus spending and tax cuts are the way each is going. Mr. Harper's outlays will be more along the lines of a dime-store New Deal than Mr. Obama's, but that's because we don't need as much of an overhaul.

On the environment, each favours a cap-and-trade system to combat global warming. The PM has moved slowly on this issue, but Mr. Obama's arrival prompted him to quickly propose a mutual accord on the environment. If he can be seen to be at one with Mr. Obama on this issue, it will help Canadians forget his three years of foot-dragging.

On border barriers, a problem Mr. Harper unsuccessfully raised with Mr. Bush, he should be able to make more headway with the new president. Mr. Obama campaigned against Republican politics of fear, which has led to America's putting up walls around the wall, including along the Canadian border.

Mr. Obama has a vested interest in quickly building rapport with the Harper government. One of his priorities is getting Americans off their dependence on foreign oil from unstable states. For that, he needs Canada. His style is bipartisan, so he won't come at Mr. Harper with a closed mind.

The potential is there for Mr. Harper to bask in some of the Obama limelight for as long as it lasts. The two leaders will never be buddies. At root, Mr. Harper is too different for that to happen.

But if he can be seen as working shoulder to shoulder with the new president in fighting the great recession, he will succeed in doing what he cares about most -- scoring political points. His finding common cause with the exalted American liberal would be too much for Canadian Liberals to bear.

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Despite the fact that Martin cannot resist the opportunity to paint Harper is a less than flattering light, his main thesis - Obama and Harper ought to get along just fine and this will discomfit, at least, the Liberals - is spot on.

 
In style, Mr. Obama is GQ, Mr. Harper Rotary Club.

And to my mind that comparison speaks volumes to Messrs Obama, Martin and the Chatterers generally.  Style over Service.

Thank you Mr. Martin.

I too agree that Obama and Harper will find ways to accomodate each others needs.
 
In todays society when people can name every kid that the Brangelinas have but not know who the PM is or the Premier of Ontario, that should send a message.

There were some COs I really didn't like, but you knew where you stood with them.

It's all about "style" these days isn't it?

Sad. Really sad.
 
Electing Senators
1/15/2009
Article Link

The all-party committee looking at electing Senators in Manitoba has a series of public meeting scheduled for later this month and next.

Since the federal government has committed to moving forward with Senate reform, Manitoba struck a committee to ask Manitobans how Senators should be elected.

The first of the nine meetings will be in Steinbach January 26th. The last is in Winnipeg February 21st.
End
 
The latest from Canadian Press, shared with the usual disclaimer.....

The Liberals want an amendment to the federal budget requiring periodic economic status reports to Parliament starting in March, says Leader Michael Ignatieff.  He said that's the price of Liberal support for the budget, which Finance Minister Jim Flaherty brought down on Tuesday. "We are putting this government on probation," he said Wednesday.

The NDP and the Bloc Quebecois have already said they'll vote against the budget and the Conservative government must have Liberal support to survive.

Ignatieff said the budget doesn't have everything he'd like to see, but it does contain some good elements forced on the Tories by the united opposition.  Still, he wants to keep a close eye on how it's working.  "This is a government more inclined to make commitments than to meet them," he said.

(....)

Ignatieff's amendment is designed to let the budget pass for now but give the Liberals a chance to revisit that decision three times over the coming year.  If Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government falls short, "we will be ready to defeat him and lead in his place," Ignatieff said.

The amendment is aimed at keeping the government on a short leash, facing the recurrent threat of defeat if it doesn't actually implement the budget's measures or if those measures fail to have the desired effect.  "We will be watching like hawks to make sure that the investments Canadians need actually reach them," Ignatieff said.

The Liberals want the government to table fiscal updates in the Commons by Mar. 26, June 23 and Sept. 10, along with detailed reports showing how the budget is being implemented.
 
Tories put on probation; coalition declared dead
Article Link

BILL CURRY
Globe and Mail Update
January 28, 2009 at 12:49 PM EST

OTTAWA — Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said his party is prepared to “swallow hard” and support the Conservative government, provided they agree to table regular updates outlining how they are living up to their commitments outlined in the federal budget.

The Liberals will move a budget amendment today that will force the government to provide reports updating its progress on implementing the stimulus in March, June and December.

The Liberal Leader said he informed his would-be coalition partner, NDP Leader Jack Layton, in advance of his decision. However Mr. Layton told reporters the budget failed to meet the criteria Mr. Ignatieff himself had laid out in advance: that it protect the vulnerable, protect the jobs of today and prepare for the jobs of tomorrow.

As a result, Mr. Layton declared the coalition dead and said Stephen Harper will remain Prime Minister for a considerable amount of time thanks to the support of the Liberals.

“We have a new coalition now on Parliament Hill: It's a coalition between Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff,” said the NDP Leader, who dismissed the Liberal amendment as “a fig leaf.”

“Today we have learned that you can't trust Mr. Ignatieff to oppose Mr. Harper. If you oppose Mr. Harper and you want a new government, I urge you to support the NDP.”

Mr. Layton's decision to oppose the amendment means the Liberal proposal will likely require the support of Conservative MPs when it comes to a vote next week.

More on link
 
Just a quick opinion on good old Taliban Jack. To say you will vote against a document without knowing what is in said document reveals a close-minded, ignorant outlook. To have it pointed out to you that the document contains almost everything you called for and you still say you will vote against it, reveals a rather shallow, little man who will do anything to grab a tiny piece of power in an attempt to appear relevant. For someone who constantly brays about cooperation between the parties, just not the conservatives, reveals an out of touch oxygen thief.

Just my 2 pesos.
 
I'm no political scholar, I'm also no fan of liberal (small and large L) government, however this to me seems like the opposition is doing what the opposition is supposed to do, keep the government in check. I express no grief with the amendment if and when it passes.
 
And the text of MI's speech.....
http://www.liberal.ca/story_15596_e.aspx
....this afternoon, I will move to amend the budget motion to include new measures to ensure the government is held accountable for its promises.

We are putting this government on probation.

Accountability is something that Stephen Harper has always said is important. I agree with him.

But this budget does not include one word about accountability.

We will require regular reports to Parliament on the budget’s implementation and its cost – one in March, one in June and one in December.

Each of these reports will be an opportunity to withdraw our confidence should the government fail Canadians....
 
The Liberals will move a budget amendment today that will force the government to provide reports updating its progress on implementing the stimulus in March, June and December.

If, as the Bank of Canada predicts, the economy turns the corner in June, will the honourable leader of the opposition permit the government to cease and desist on the spending that at that time will have been rendered surplus to Canadian requirement?

Or, is this entire exercise driven by a combination of the opposition wanting to spend and the government having entered into an international agreement to "share the pain"?

To me, beyond the domestic politics, it looks as if the entire OECD has agreed to devalue their currencies to the tune of 2% of GDP in order to bail out the US Treasury.
 
Following is a long (six part/20,000± word) series by NDP insider Brian Topp about the aborted BQ/Liberal/NDP coalition that rose suddenly and collapsed just as quickly in Dec 08.

Topp is a partisan, as he makes very clear in his caveat in Part VI, but that does not make his recollections any less valuable.

There will be a book, he suggests, but I choose to reproduce the series here, in full, for discussion and comment by Army.ca members, because blogs can be transient things.

A few preliminary comments:

+ Dion was right. Coalitions are not foreign to our system of government; in fact in many Westminster style (responsible)  legislatures they are the norm.

+ Harper was right. Canadians would not stomach a coalition that explicitly allowed the BQ a seat at the table and the Liberals and NDP lacked the wherewithal to di it without the Bloc.

+ Michaëlle Jean’s decision to prorogue parliament was constitutionally and politically correct and should never be explained. One of the principles of our constitutional monarchy is that the sovereign’s (or the GG’s) discussions (consultations) with her prime minister are absolutely private. Explaining herself – as so many in the commentariat demand she do – would  breach the essential confidentiality that permits her to seek the best available legal, political and constitutional advice and to impose the crown’s will on her government.

This is a pre-season gift for political science fans: Enjoy!
 
Here, collected under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from recent editions of the Globe and Mail web site, is a series of memoirs of the formation and abortion of the coalition from NDP insider Brian Topp:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/brian-topp/coalition-redux-the-prime-minister-makes-a-big-mistake/article1382092/

Sunday, November 29, 2009 11:27 PM
Coalition redux: The Prime Minister
makes a big mistake


Brian Topp

It was, amazingly, only a year ago. It feels like a decade ago, but it was only this time last year that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government returned to a new Parliament and made the first major moves of its new term.
The world's finance services industry was melting down. Canada's economy was sliding into a deep recession. But instead of addressing these issues in their November economic statement, the Conservatives focused on three issues closer to their hearts: bankrupting the three opposition parties in Parliament; gutting federal pay equity; and stripping federal public services of their right to bargain collectively.

An example, to say the least, of misplaced priorities. And as it turned out, a near-fatal political mistake. In response, the opposition agreed to combine their forces. They would vote to kick Mr. Harper out of office, and to replace him with a Liberal-NDP coalition government. Mr. Harper bought himself some time. And then the Liberals cracked.

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion was removed in a caucus coup. Michael Ignatieff took his place. Mr. Ignatieff then tore up the opposition accords, reversed the Liberal Party's policy toward the Harper government, and voted to keep the Harper government in office in return for nothing. To be fair to Mr. Ignatieff, he was pursuing a coherent objective in doing this. He wanted to set up a traditional electoral contest at a time more convenient to himself.

I had a ring-side seat during all of this, as part of Jack Layton's negotiating team during discussions between opposition parties over what to do about Mr. Harper, his policies and his government. Today and over the coming week, the folks at globeandmail.com are going to post some extracts from a longer piece I've written on these events, to give you a sense of what it was like to be on that roller-coaster.

And what a roller-coaster it was.


- - - - -​

Wednesday, November 26, 2008: Just before 6:00 p.m., my BlackBerry buzzed. An email from Jack Layton.

“CTV is reporting that the per voter public financing scheme is to be cancelled in tomorrow’s update,” he wrote. “I believe that the Liberals could be tempted by our earlier proposition, faced with such a catastrophic proposal. Self-preservation could provoke out-of-the-box thinking. I would like to discuss having you re-open your line of communication with your contact.”

This was a more than interesting email.

In the fall of 2008, CTV news tended to be quite accurate in their news breaks about what the Harper government was planning to do. So when they reported that the Conservatives were planning to bankrupt the opposition parties, we needed to take the news seriously.

I took a bit of time before replying to our federal leader’s email, to get my mind around the idea we were going to try to reactivate our coalition proposal (we had floated the idea of replacing the Conservatives through a coalition during the 2008 election and then again earlier that fall, and had been rebuffed by the Liberals, who were now focused on a new leadership convention).

On the one hand, the federal Liberals were in worse financial shape than we were, and would have to look at their options again in light of Harper‘s attempt to bankrupt them. Indeed all three opposition parties now had a compelling, concurrent reason to cooperate to rid the country of Mr. Harper.

On the other hand, I just didn’t believe we had an interested partner. I had never heard any Liberal in any forum ever say that they supported “our earlier proposition.” I didn’t believe they were interested or would ever be interested.

However, when your federal leader asks you to do something, it’s generally fit and proper to do it. So in mid-evening I gave "my contact", Liberal Senator David Smith, a call and left a message on his voice mail, which was not returned (Smith had co-chaired the 2008 Liberal campaign. I had done the same for the New Democrats).

“Can’t raise my friend. You might be able to get this talk going faster tomorrow via House leader channel, or c-o-s [chief-of-staff],” I wrote at 11:46 p.m.. “I’ll try him again later this morning just for fun, though.”

I was sceptical that Senator Smith was a useful channel to talk to the Liberals – and indeed he was not. It seemed to me that talking to Ralph Goodale (Stéphane Dion‘s House leader) or to Johanne Sénécal (his chief of staff) would attract the inevitable Liberal brush-off more quickly.

Thursday, November 27, 2008: Jack Layton wasted no time pursuing this issue.

“What is the state of the ‘letter’ that we had been considering sending to the political leaders?” Layton asked me at 7:24 a.m. via his BlackBerry. “Was there a list of legislative initiatives that would form the basis of a relationship? (such a list would have to be revised in light of emergency in any event).”

Layton was referring here to a draft letter, never sent, which we had planned to present to Stéphane Dion on election night had the numbers justified it, proposing a coalition government.

“Clearly it [our draft letter] needs a substantial revision,” I replied (7:31 a.m.). “Its focus was our 08 platform with biggest move being child benefit. What we need here is an economic focus. Toughest deal point remains the corporate tax cuts, which both Dion and Rae said they still support. Our draft proposes to indefinitely postpone these.”

“If the Senator is in Ottawa, I or others could meet him if needed,” Layton wrote back that morning (7:36 a.m.).

Layton’s run for Mayor of Toronto earlier in his career had been blocked in part by some manoeuvring by Senator Smith (“sharp practice” is how Allan Blakeney might have called what Layton believes Smith did to him in that campaign). Layton didn’t want to let go of Smith as a channel for poetic as well as practical reasons, I think.

“Also, what do you think of a public call for a coalition if the economic update does not include dramatic action on an economic stimulus? The media will say we’re doing it because of the cut to party financial, of course. But if we stay the course, we can weather that storm because of the economic news and how the coalition handles it will dominate the news over time.”

This was good political analysis by our leader, and one I found persuasive then and now. The prime minister had called an election that fall in direct violation of his own fixed elections law. Nobody cared on election day. Canada was now facing a dangerous economic crisis. If the Conservatives focused on playing political games instead of addressing that crisis, we might be able to dump and replace them, and then drown out the inevitable backlash from the Conservative party’s anger machine by controlling the government agenda and – hopefully – doing a better job.

“Key in all of this is who is the PM?” I replied (7:44 a.m.). I was warming up. “That requires a prior conversation with the Libs. If they agree it can be Goodale or McCallum, then this has some legs. If they insist it must be Dion, then you are probably holding a busted flush given Bloc won’t play.”

I was pointing out here that we did not have the numbers between the Liberals and NDP to unseat Harper, and that the Bloc seemed unlikely to me to be interested in installing the author of the Clarity Act as prime minister in place of the decentralizing Harper Conservatives.

“I don’t believe the Bloc will be in as strong a position as they were a few weeks ago in opposing Dion as PM,” he wrote (8:14 a.m.). “They will be very concerned about losing the public funding and they will be seized with the importance of strong action on EI and stimulus. Standing in the way of a new government because of their attitude towards Dion could be very damaging to them. I will meet with Dion and propose that he consider the scenario, based upon a lack of economic stimulus and the anti-democratic nature of the proposal to cancel, essentially retroactively, the funding of the democratic process – bringing in the era of big-money politics again.”

I was pleased Layton was going to deal directly with Dion. Straight to the Liberal leader without any further dancing, so that we could get our “no thanks” and get back to work.

My phone and email buzzed all day with speculation and rumour. I collected it, sceptically.

The Liberal caucus met that afternoon. I kept an eye on CBC Newsworld to see what the Liberals might say.

In due course, Stéphane Dion stepped in front of the cameras to announce that his caucus would end their support for Stephen Harper in the House of Commons, and would vote against the Conservative government’s economic statement.

“He said the Liberals are voting against. It would seem this might be real!” I wrote to Layton and McGrath (4:52 p.m.). “Indeed,” Layton replied (4:56 p.m.). “I intend to meet him tonight to start the process. He’s saying no because he knows our option can work and that Duceppe will support it. Good job we were prepared.”

Layton's chief of staff, Anne McGrath, also commented (4:55 p.m.): “Gadzooks!”

Gadzooks indeed.

Some of the day’s random rumour mongering now seemed worth reporting. So I sent a further little report, with a process kicker.

“Backchannels: Rae and his people don’t want bitter Liberal memories of the Peterson accord and its consequences to stick to him, so he’s keeping his head down so far internally,” I wrote to Layton and McGrath (5:02 p.m.). “Iggy folks also reserving, awaiting developments. If this gets real I think you’ll want to assemble whatever you have in mind as your working group in Ottawa tomorrow.”

What Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff thought about all of this was, of course, critically important. Stéphane Dion had resigned as Liberal leader. Rae and Ignatieff were the leading candidates to succeed him. If they supported a coalition proposal, it had some sort of a chance. If not, it didn’t.

I was also suggesting Mr. Layton think about his working group. I hoped that the members of our “scenarios committee” (a study group that included chief of staff Anne McGrath, former federal leader Ed Broadbent, former Saskatchewan Premier Allan Blakeney, and myself) would be part of our bargaining team, since we had spent many hours thinking about these issues over the past four years. In the alternate I wanted to be cleanly severed from the process so that I could stop thinking about it.

“Start booking the flights,” Layton replied at 5:08 p.m.

It was time to get to work.

Over the past three federal elections, I had gotten to know some of the strategists on Stephen Harper’s team. That afternoon I decided to throw a few pebbles into the blue team to see how serious they were about their widely reported program, and to give them fair notice that something big was coming.

I picked a friend I had good reason to believe was close to the prime minister’s thinking and sent him a brief note (5:43 p.m.):

“My folks just pushed the red button. I’m on a 7:00 a.m. flight to Ottawa.”

He bit (5:56 p.m.): “Do some polling first... what do your voters (not activists or insiders) think about government giving $26 million to political parties during a recession?”

I replied (5:57 p.m.): “There isn’t going to be an election.”

He knew what that meant (5:59 p.m.): “You’re gonna run the government with separatists?”

In hindsight, I should have thought more carefully about the implications of that question. From the first moments when Mr. Harper‘s team turned their minds to the prospect of a combined opposition coalition, they knew that its key vulnerability was the role of the Bloc Québécois. They zeroed in on this in their nimble campaign against the coalition the following week, and handily won the battle for public opinion in English Canada at the price of their immediate hopes in Quebec.

My assumption was that Harper was committed to finding his majority in Quebec, and saw his constituency there in the nationalist-bleu vote currently parked with the Bloc. Further, I knew that Harper himself had proposed a variant on a coalition arrangement to both the NDP and to the Bloc during Paul Martin‘s minority – a proposal Jack Layton pulled the plug on.

I didn’t fully appreciate that the prime minister was perfectly capable of tossing away his immediate prospects in Quebec if that was expedient. And that he and his team were capable of (to call things what they are) bald-faced lying, denying his own discussions with the Bloc and making the Quebec separatist party the flash point in the debate. Had I understood this, I would have pushed very hard indeed to keep the Bloc much farther away from the coalition negotiations and away from the coalition public announcement, looking instead for a separate, unilateral statement of support Mr. Duceppe could have made a day or two after the coalition was announced.

This was probably our fundamental strategic mistake. And there it was in my Tory friend’s email on the first day.

Tabarnacle!

News kept coming from Ottawa.

At 6:46 p.m., NDP press secretary Karl Belanger reported: “Just bumped into Pierre-Paul, senior Bloc official. Duceppe just off the phone with Dion. He’s going for it.”

I reported to Layton and McGrath at 7:05 p.m.: “Senator Smith just called me. No real news – he just wanted to report his team is thinking about our proposal.”

At 9:02 p.m., Anne McGrath emailed a report about Ed Broadbent, who Jack Layton was trying to touch base with: “No need for you [Layton] to call him. We just spoke. There is a caucus revolt brewing in the Libs to replace Dion with Iggy... Said that he was told that you were opposed to either Rae or Iggy in your conversations with Dion. I confirmed this was not true. You have said nothing about the leadership of their party. That’s up to them. Sounds like Dion’s trying to hang on now. The basis of our agreement should be an economic stimulus package.”

Much of what would happen in the next four days was prefigured in this report. As was later widely reported in the media, Ed Broadbent and Jean Chrétien engaged in a number of discussions leading up to and during the coalition negotiations. They found common cause on the coalition’s central elements very quickly.

The incubus in the Liberal Party was also immediately visible – Michael Ignatieff‘s revolt against his leader.

Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan was holding a fundraiser at the Royal York Hotel that night. Several of my colleagues from film and television were attending to show the flag for our industry tribe. They called me from the event to report that a number of federal Liberals were present. Notably, a number of people from Michael Ignatieff‘s leadership campaign. Given all the news about Mr. Ignatieff, it seemed helpful to see what they might have on their minds.

So a bit later that evening I walked over the Royal York Hotel and slipped into the fundraiser. At the event, my good friend and long-time film industry colleague the late Hon. Doug Frith introduced me to some of Mr. Ignatieff’s key campaign aides. On the floor of the event and then at the Royal York’s Library Bar, we settled down to what turned into an almost two-hour discussion, punctuated by calls and emails to Jack Layton on my part and (from what I could tell) to Mr. Ignatieff on their part.

We had a conversation in three acts.

In the first part of the conversation, my new acquaintances asked me to explain to them why they should be supportive of a coalition with the NDP at all. In their view they had a crushing majority of the Liberal caucus behind them, and they were confident that Michael Ignatieff would win at the planned May 2009 Liberal leadership campaign on the first ballot. They could then expect a nice bump in the polls during Ignatieff’s honeymoon; they could defeat Harper in the House in the spring or fall of 2009; defeat him again in the subsequent election; and then they’d be in office nice and clean, the old and traditional way. As it later turned out, they never really deviated from this strategy.

I replied by pointing out that as long as the Bloc Québécois was viable, they were not going to win a majority government in any conceivable scenario – a view they agreed with. This being so, why go through a year’s political work with all of its uncertainty, hoping to end up at the head of a minority government, when you could have exactly that outcome next week?

They took a little pause to make a series of phone calls to their mothership.

In the second part of the conversation, they asked me very directly about who would be the prime minister of such a government. Specifically, was it true that Jack Layton had told Stéphane Dion that only Dion would be acceptable to us?

As noted above, Ed Broadbent had also heard that one.

I called Layton to ask him what I should say in reply. He told me to tell Mr. Ignatieff‘s people that the NDP took no position on who the Liberal leader and prime minister should be – that was up to the Liberals to decide.

This answer seemed to please Ignatieff‘s people a great deal, and they took a time out to make some more calls.

In the third part of the conversation, on their return, their tone changed markedly. They were suddenly a good deal less friendly. Their message was that we would see what would happen in coming days. They provided some contact numbers, and then they left to go join the rest of their team.

I had a couple of glasses of wine with my film industry friends and then called it a night.

It was a long walk through empty downtown Toronto streets, surrounded by brightly lit skyscrapers, from the Royal York to my car back at my office. The walk sobered me up.

I wondered how good this was all going to look in the morning.

Copyright © 2009 Brian Topp

Next The Shape of Deal
 
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail web site is the next instalment:

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Monday, November 30, 2009 11:58 PM

Coalition redux: The shape of the deal

Brian Topp

Yesterday I began a series of posts I'm going to be putting up here, giving you a bit of the flavour of last year's efforts by federal opposition parties to replace the Conservative minority government with something better.

By the end of the first week, the scene had switched to Ottawa. We had assembled a team and talked through our objectives. Then we sat down with the Liberals for the first time.


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Friday, November 28, 2008: Our first exploratory meeting with the Liberals began in mid-afternoon that day at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Ottawa. We met in an airless boardroom on the second floor.

Liberal House Leader Ralph Goodale and Ottawa policy consultant Herb Metcalfe led the Liberal team. Dawn Black, a wise veteran NDP Member of Parliament, and I represented the NDP.

I had never met Metcalfe before and knew nothing about him. I soon found him to be a smart, friendly, thoughtful political adviser working with remarkable commitment to try to get his luckless leader back on a winning track.

Mr. Goodale, on the other hand, I knew quite a bit about. We had put some thought earlier in the game into proposing that Mr. Goodale be named prime minister of the coalition government.

Further, Allan Blakeney was going to be a key part of our team that weekend. Goodale and Blakeney had known each other in the Saskatchewan legislature – Blakeney as opposition leader, Goodale as leader and sole MLA for the Saskatchewan provincial Liberals. In the 1986 provincial election, Goodale had waged a lonely campaign on a platform of strict fiscal discipline, while the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP duelled over how much more could be done by government for the economy and public services. Goodale had been clobbered in that election. But he turned out to be right about the fiscal state of the province. When Premier Romanow was elected in 1991 and found himself confronted with the disastrous fiscal mess left by the Conservatives, our government tackled the issues Goodale was trying to warn about in 1986. In that sense there was some hope for finding a common fiscal language with Goodale.

We got down to business.

After some conversational throat-clearing about the weather and a round of introductions, Herb Metcalfe opened the discussion by saying that the Liberals were committed to trying to negotiate a coalition, and wanted to commit that coalition’s key principles to paper as quickly as possible. “We need to have a letter signed by Monday,” Metcalfe said. “A letter from Jack, Duceppe and Dion to the Governor General.”

I agreed to this proposal – we would sign a joint letter from the entire opposition to the Governor General, telling her that a majority of Parliament supported a new government.

I then suggested we talk in more detail about the “shape of the deal.” Metcalfe agreed.

I outlined our view, reading from notes I had taken of Jack Layton’s direction a few hours before.

We proposed that we work up two documents: a government accord between the Liberals and the NDP; and a policy accord that would also have the support of the Bloc.

The government accord between the Liberals and the NDP would provide for a coalition; a proportionate cabinet; and a term going to June 2011 to permit two budgets.

The policy accord would commit the new government to a focus on the economic crisis. There would be a stimulus package including infrastructure investment; income support and security; and co-operation with the Obama administration on priorities like a continental environmental cap-and-trade system.

If this was roughly the shape of the deal we were both interested in, Dawn Black and I suggested we discuss the government accord on Saturday with a view to negotiating it in final form, and then that we discuss the policy accord Sunday. We proposed this work plan because we had a fairly clear idea about what we wanted in the government accord. But we needed more time to do our homework on the policy issues. The agenda we outlined therefore created a workday on Saturday that our mothership could use to carefully consider the policy issues.

Metcalfe and Goodale agreed to this work plan.

Goodale discussed some of the parliamentary issues around defeating the Conservatives. The Liberals would table several draft opposition day motions immediately. There were several motions we could choose from, he said.. One would be a straight non-confidence motion. This might then set up two separate votes Monday that the government could be defeated on – the ways-and-means motion, and the Liberal confidence motion.

Metcalfe talked about the press. He proposed that we adopt a joint communications approach, and say as little as possible to journalists while we were working. “It’s best for all of us if much is left to idle speculation,” he said.

Things seemed to be going well. The discussion was also drifting into operating issues of secondary importance. So it was time to test how solid this house was, by delving into some of the tougher questions.

“Let’s talk about who is going to be prime minister,” I said. “Who you have as your leader is entirely up to you. We’ll work with whomever the Liberal party chooses. But since Mr. Dion has resigned, and in the spirit of ‘idle speculation,’ who do you think will be your designate for prime minister?”

There were some interesting expressions on the Liberal team members’ faces when I asked this question.

Metcalfe answered.

“You’d have to be stupid to not use the current leader,” he said. “How could we possibly pass up this opportunity? But some people might take a contrary view. The leader is calling some of the caucus members who are supporters of his. We need to arrive at a deal. If we get there, then we can get our internal matters cleared up.”

There was a longish silence in the room while Dawn Black and I digested this answer. What Metcalfe was telling us was that Mr. Dion intended to use a coalition accord to “unresign” – to step back into the Liberal leadership as prime minister of a new government, much as Pierre Trudeau did in 1979 after the fall of the Clark government. This explained the determination of Dion’s negotiators to have the accord wrapped up by Monday, when their leader would have to face his caucus.

What were our interests?

In the very short term, the Liberals had just handed us some serious leverage in these negotiations. The coalition was a do-or-die proposition for their leader. That meant they probably weren’t going to walk away, provided the accord was in a form they could get through their caucus.

But in the bigger picture, we were indelibly weaving the coalition into the fate of Mr. Dion, unless we moved immediately to change the game. If Mr. Dion was going to use the coalition to keep his job, that meant Mr. Ignatieff might end up opposing the coalition for the same reason – and Ignatieff’s people believed he had over 50 MPs in his corner.

A bolder, perhaps more effective approach might have been to stop the talks at that moment, and to tell the Liberals that we could not proceed until we knew who the Liberal leader was. This might have handed us Ignatieff to deal with that Monday. Who, perhaps, would have proceeded with this project in his new circumstances. But none of the signals from his camp were encouraging. Which is why we stuck with the Liberal we knew. Dion was the leader. He was who we had to deal with. Liberal leadership politics were too dark and murky for us to try to navigate in. We would have to take our chances, and see what happened.

It was time to break the silence and ask more interesting questions.. “What are your plans with regard to senior appointments and ABCs [agencies, boards and commissions]?” I asked.

Metcalfe answered that in their view there didn’t need to be wholesale changes to the senior public service. But there were definitely five or six deputy ministers – he cited the deputy minister of finance – that were not going to be comfortable with the new agenda and would need to be moved. They didn’t have any particular thoughts on ABCs. I offered that some of the federal government’s boards (I cited the trade tribunal and the CRTC) were of particular interest to us, and that we would be proposing some language on Saturday that respected the prime minister’s prerogatives but contemplated consultation on the composition of boards.

Metcalfe raised the size of the cabinet. Mr. Dion was interested in a much smaller cabinet than Harper had, he said. They would be looking at 24 ministers. The savings from reducing the cabinet would save the government much of the $16-million or so that Harper was trying to claw back from public financing of political parties. I said that sounded quite acceptable. This point offered an opportunity for us to get into the relative share of cabinet between the two parties. I told Metcalfe we would be looking for the cabinet to be proportional to the relative weight of our caucuses. This didn’t seem to surprise either Metcalfe or Goodale and they noted it down without demur.

Metcalfe moved on to what seemed to be a favourite topic of his, the need for a minister whose sole job would be to oversee cabinet committees and to ensure they all really worked. We received this proposal without comment.

At this point I proposed that we review our notes and make sure we had clearly heard each other on the “shape of the deal.” I went through the deal points again: an NDP/Liberal governing coalition; a policy accord also supported by the Bloc; a proportional cabinet; a two-and-a-half-year mandate to June 2011; a focus on the economy. They agreed that this was the shape of the deal.

Goodale outlined his proposal for a 30-day consultation process about the economy and the next budget. He said what needed to be done was fairly clear, but that there should be a wide consultation process to ensure stakeholders were heard and the government’s actions were seen to be legitimate and based on wide agreement.

I pointed out that the stimulus package we were contemplating the corporate tax cuts that the Liberals favoured were going to add up to a very substantial deficit. I asked Goodale if he was comfortable with that. Goodale replied that our goal had to be to get back on track to debt reduction as quickly as possible after the economic crisis was over, aimed for a goal of having the debt down to 20 per cent of GDP by 2020. The recovery plan would have to include a plan to get the federal government back to fiscal health..

We thought that was fine, betting it could not be achieved without backing off on the corporate tax cuts Harper introduced and the Liberals supported.

“Do you expect the agenda to include your carbon tax proposal?” I asked next. Everyone laughed. No, they didn’t. A continental cap and trade system was the way to go. The two programs were basically equivalent if carefully costed out and would get us to the same end. There was no talk of a “tax shift” any more. Agreed.

Goodale went directly to the corporate tax issue. Did we understand that some of those measures were needed? I said we would see, as the government’s fiscal strategy played itself out.

Metcalfe raised the final issue that day – dispute resolution. If we are going to persuade the Governor-General that we had a viable government, we needed some sort of machinery to resolve disputes between the coalition partners, short of having the government come apart. The Liberals were thinking of some sort of party elders committee, that we could refer disputes to for mediation. Since Ed Broadbent and Jean Chrétien seemed to be working well together behind the scenes, this sounded like a good idea to us. We agreed, suggesting that Chrétien and similar figures from the Liberal party could be their picks, and that people like Ed Broadbent, Allan Blakeney, and Roy Romanow would figure among ours.

Both sides thought we had enough to report back to our principals. Metcalfe said the Liberals had reserved the penthouse boardroom on the 17th floor of the same hotel for the following day. We agreed we would consult the people we worked for, and that if they were satisfied with progress we’d resume the following day.

Dawn Black and I stumped back to Layton’s caucus services office a few blocks from the hotel, doing a debrief en route. We marvelled at the role of Liberal leadership politics in this affair. This was about Mr. Dion retracting his resignation and grabbing the prime ministership. The audacity of what he was trying to do kind of impressed us. And worried us.

We reported progress to Layton. He felt things were on track and that the negotiations should continue. At Layton’s direction I emailed Metcalfe (5:54 p.m.): “Confirming for 10:00 a.m. tomorrow.” The Liberal negotiator was succinct in reply (6:05 p.m.): “See you at 10:00 a.m.”

Copyright © 2009 Brian Topp

Next: The agreement comes together
 
Another segment, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail web site:

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Wednesday, December 2, 2009 12:37 AM
Coalition redux: The shape of the new government

Brian Topp

On Monday I posted a piece here titled "The Prime Minister makes a big mistake," narrating the Conservative government's foolish attempt a year ago to bankrupt the opposition, its failure to address the economic crisis and the resulting decision by the Liberals and the New Democrats to hold talks about replacing Stephen Harper's government with a new and better one.

On Tuesday I posted "The shape of the deal," which described the initial exchange of views between the red and orange teams.

Here, I describe some of the detailed discussions that occurred between the parties about the form that proposed new government was to take — which, it turned out, was a trickier conversation than we had first thought.


- - - - -​

Saturday, November 29, 2008: At 10:00 a.m., Allan Blakeney, Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton settled down in an windowless boardroom in the NDP caucus office with a staff team to review, discuss and debate the policy proposals we would put to the Liberals the following day, to be followed later that day by a caucus meeting to consult our MPs.

Dawn Black and I headed up to the penthouse boardroom at the Sheraton Hotel.

Herb Metcalfe continued to lead for the Liberals, but he showed up with a new team – Marlene Jennings, a Liberal MP from an anglophone riding in Montreal and Liberal deputy House leader (standing in for Goodale, absent that day); Stéphane Dion’s chief of staff, Johanne Sénécal; and Dion’s deputy chief of staff, Katie Telford.

Since we were now outnumbered two to one, we briefly considered calling for two more New Democrats to round out our team. But we decided not to, reasoning that having a smaller team might turn out to be an advantage as indeed it did.

We began by talking about Metcalfe’s proposal that the three parties send a letter to the Governor-General. We offered our draft, which was reviewed and quickly agreed with little substantive amendment. A little too quickly, I thought.

In other negotiations, I’ve seen periods when it seemed that the union could make no proposal that the employer wouldn’t accept. At ACTRA we’ve called this the “collecting the flowers” phase. Almost without fail, what was going on was that the employer had a bomb they were planning to drop, and they were trying to accumulate some positive capital, create some goodwill and generate some momentum in the talks before getting to the tough stuff. In my view this tactic doesn’t work, but from the union’s perspective it is a pleasant period in a negotiation because much of what you might like to get, you get. Before the anvil drops.

Sénécal left the meeting.

We turned to the main piece of business before us – the government accord. I told Metcalfe that we had been thinking about this and had an outline to suggest. He invited us to set it out, and so I outlined what we had in mind, closely tracking the issues I had discussed with Romanow the previous night. In all its essentials I described a coalition agreement between the Liberals and the NDP modeled on the 1999 Saskatchewan NDP-Liberal coalition. The Liberals agreed to discuss this, point-by-point.

It still seemed to me things were going a little too well.

After some fumbling around we arranged to have a laptop and projector, so that the text we were working on could be put up on the wall and drafted collectively.

We began with the role of caucuses. We set out our view: the NDP and Liberal caucuses would sit side-by-side on the government bench. Both would be “government caucuses” with standing to take part in the business of government, but would keep their identities. In other words, we were not proposing to merge our caucuses. Agreed.

Next up: cabinet. We opened by offering a sentence to the effect that nothing in the accord “is intended to diminish or alter the power and prerogatives of the prime minister.” We wanted the Liberals to see that we understood modern cabinet government, including the critical role of central agencies led by the prime minister, and were committed to a coherent and effective government. Agreed.

We offered that the prime minister would be the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada – the individual unspecified. This was intended to put on paper that it was up to the Liberal caucus to decide who the PM was. Agreed.

We proposed, given the panic on CBC that we might have the effrontery to have our party’s long-standing commitment to fiscal responsibility enshrined through an “NDP finance minister,” to send a reassuring message to the contrary. So we proposed the agreement detail that the finance minister would also be chosen from the Liberal caucus. Agreed (with relief).

We picked up on Metcalfe’s idea from the previous day and proposed the accord say that the cabinet would number 24 ministers. We liked this idea for a number of reasons, the key one being that such a cabinet was small enough to actually meet and discuss issues. That meant cabinet might creep towards becoming a real forum for decision-making after its long sleep, to our benefit as junior partners who did not control the central agencies. Agreed.

We proposed that the cabinet be in the same proportions as our caucuses. The Liberals would be contributing 77 MPs to the government. We would be contributing 37. So we proposed that 8 of the 24 ministers be named from our caucus.

Metcalfe seemed to steel himself. I wrote down what he said next in my notes:

“Some players are questioning the number of cabinet seats,” he said. “Some are proposing an accord instead of NDP seats in the cabinet – or an election, instead of doing this agreement.”

Katie Telford, Dion’s deputy chief of staff, weighed in. She said that the idea of NDP cabinet ministers was just not selling in the Liberal caucus and that it would be more productive for us to work on a different model. The Liberals, she informed us, were now prepared to consider negotiating an accord with us.

So the anvil had dropped. Mr. Dion’s team was reneging on the key element of the agreement we had the previous day, the core concept that we were forming a coalition government with a joint cabinet.

Dawn Black and I pondered this in silence for some time, while Metcalfe outlined a complex idea that perhaps Jack Layton could sit in on a Liberal cabinet as some sort of observer without portfolio, perhaps with some role in cabinet committees.

I began by letting a wave of wonderfully intense anger and outrage course through me.

Anger was followed by a moment of despair. We had been baited and switched. The Liberals had cranked up a national media drama. Our leader had committed a significant share of his political capital into a coalition proposal that they had agreed to the previous day, but had now taken off the table – offering instead a Rae-Peterson-style accord that we had told them very clearly we were not interested in.

My despair passed quickly. This wasn’t a plan. Dion’s team didn’t look like people who played that way. They were trying this on us because Dion was getting worried about his caucus, and wanted to see if we would agree to an easier sell.

I turned to thinking about how to crack this Liberal position. At the end of the day, I reasoned, Mr. Dion needed an agreement with us more than we needed one with him. If the accord failed it might damage the NDP to some extent but our base would see it for what it was, a good try to rid the country of the Conservative government and to replace it with a more progressive one. Mr. Dion on the other hand would not be prime minister and would not be leader of the Liberal Party. It was all-or-nothing for him. So there was no reason to play this game with Mr. Dion’s team. It seemed to me what we needed to do was try to get Mr. Dion’s negotiators to set out whatever their real bottom line was in this discussion, and then report out so that Jack Layton could take the matter up directly with Mr. Dion.

Dawn Black and I consulted in whispers for a moment. She saw things the same way.

I addressed myself to Metcalfe.

“We don’t have a mandate to negotiate an accord with you,” I told him. “Would you like us to leave?”

“No,” he said.

At which point Marlene Jennings exploded. “I want to say a few things,” she said.

She informed us, emphatically, that the coalition proposal was not selling well with her Liberal colleagues because it implied that NDP Members of Parliament might gain access to cabinet jobs. Liberal MPs had been waiting for many years for those positions, she explained, and they did not accept that people from some other party might take their places in line.

Dawn Black responded for our side. Over the next half hour or so, Ms. Black ripped Ms. Jennings’s argument apart in a fine display of forensic, parliamentarian debate. Two parties would be coming together to form this government, Ms. Black explained. All of the members involved had worked very hard during their careers. The new government would only be possible because both parties were involved. Shouldn’t simple fairness, and a desire to ensure both parties were equally committed to the success of the government, suggest that both should be represented fairly in the cabinet?

Ms. Jennings defended the entitlements of her caucus colleagues. Only Liberal MPs, she tried to get us to understand, were qualified for and entitled to cabinet positions.

Ms. Black explained, several times, that this meant there would not be a new government and therefore none of them would be reaching their career goals.

Ms. Jennings then began a rearguard action. She proposed that the NDP could perhaps be accorded a single seat at the cabinet, without a department, in order to monitor what was going on and to make suggestions.

Ms. Black was unmoved by this proposal.

Ms. Jennings offered two seats.

No better luck.

How about three?

Herb Metcalfe, a soft-spoken man, now raised his voice loudly enough that even his own MP heard him. “Maybe we should take a break,” he suggested.

While the Liberals regrouped out of the room, Black and I reported back. I BlackBerried to Layton and McGrath (1:50 p.m.): “They are getting cold feet on any NDP ministers and are floating an accord... Don’t do anything – but be ready that we will jointly ask you to speak directly to Dion to resolve.”

McGrath did some checking. She wrote back (1:52 p.m.): “Bloc negotiator says that the Libs have only spoken Lib/NDP coalition and they believe we have to be in.” That was a useful lever. The Liberals would find themselves isolated among the opposition parties unless they returned to the coalition model.

McGrath added (1:59 p.m.): “Ed says Chrétien in favour of cabinet posts too.” I replied (2:19 p.m.): “Chrétien should call Dion.”

The Liberals returned. Metcalfe noted that the Liberals had just made a significant move but that the NDP hadn’t budged from our opening position. It was our turn to show some flexibility. The Liberals then outlined a proposal they hoped we would consider as an alternative to a significant role in a joint cabinet. Perhaps, in lieu of a proportionate share of seats at the cabinet table, we might accept a third of the parliamentary secretary positions. These would not just be assistants in the House of Commons; they would be sworn in as privy councilors with the right to review cabinet documents and to attend meetings when appropriate.

Metcalfe and Jennings went on at some length about how critically important these positions were; how much access they provided; and about why this might be a great way to get New Democrats involved in government without (to translate what they were saying into how we were hearing it) sullying the cabinet table with our presence.

Black and I consulted briefly. Clearly we were going to have to make some sort of a move to get this agreement.

We tried the following: I proposed to Metcalfe that the NDP receive seven cabinet positions in a 24-member cabinet. One “major” portfolio (for example, foreign affairs or a major economic or social portfolio other than finance - perhaps health care); three “mid” positions (for example environment or immigration); and three “small” portfolios (something in the style of the many secretary of state positions that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many of his predecessors have larded cabinet with).

This wasn’t much of a move on its face, but to an alert bargainer it was a big signal. We had moved off our principle that the cabinet should be proportionate to the caucuses. We had dropped our “ask” by 12.5 per cent. And we hadn’t said any closing words – “final and best offer” – i.e. there was still room in our minds to negotiate some more.

It didn’t seem to us that these signals were picked up by the Liberal team, who appeared to still be having a hard time with the idea of socialists around the big table in any kind of role. Dawn Black and I didn’t think we had a mandate to go much farther, especially when it seemed clear the Liberal team didn’t have instructions that got them close enough to us to permit an agreement. It was therefore time to move this discussion to a better venue, preferably between Layton and Dion directly, followed by a clean-up session with fewer people involved. Punting the issue out of the room for a while would also have the virtue of creating a window for the Bloc to speak to the Liberals about their unwillingness to support a Liberal-only cabinet.

Black and I therefore suggested a three-step way forward: that we finish the rest of the coalition accord at this session; that we then go back to our principals for further instructions on the issue of the proportions within the cabinet, and perhaps have them speak directly to each other; and that Metcalfe and I then meet one-on-one early the following morning to finalize the government accord.

Agreed.

We went back to the laptop and projector and worked amicably on the rest of the coalition accord.

We agreed on a “no surprises” clause, cribbed from the New Zealand governing accord.

The Liberals proposed and we agreed to a “standing committee of the accord,” chaired by the prime minister. They had drawn this idea from some of their own reading of other coalition accords. It created a formal mechanism for coalition principals to meet regularly to make sure the coalition was on track. We stapled into this the idea of a committee of respected party leaders who would assist in dealing with disputes. Agreed. A few other points were dealt with, and we were done.

We adjourned to report to our principals. We had a completed coalition accord, with one issue outstanding. We wanted seven cabinet seats out of 24. The last Liberal offer was three.

Later that night, I tried to see how Metcalfe was coming along on our remaining issue. I called him for the first time at 7:00 p.m. and left a message on his cellphone. I echoed this with a BlackBerry note telling him I’d left him a message, my phone number attached. At 7:27 p.m. he replied: “Do you have anything from your side?” I replied: “I have a bit of room to manoeuvre.” Metcalfe (7:37 p.m.): “I think I can get some movement but would help if I had an idea of what room you have.”

Jack Layton and Anne McGrath left Centre Block to attend the annual press gallery dinner.

I called Metcalfe and this time he picked up my call. We spoke briefly, dancing around each other. Metcalfe told me he had been authorized to canvass the leadership candidates about the issue.

I reported my conversation with Metcalfe to Layton on his BlackBerry (9:05 p.m.): “Heard from Libs. They are canvassing three leadership candidates on Dion proposal to offer four seats. I told them not to make that a bottom line but they’re close. They agreed to leave themselves some flex.” Via Layton’s BB, Anne McGrath replied (9:32 p.m.): “Anne here. Showed this message to Jack. He nodded.”

Around 1 a.m., Layton and McGrath returned from the press gallery dinner. They reported seeing Ignatieff and Kory Teneycke, the Prime Minister’s communications director, huddled together in an intense conversation that went on for some time.

That didn’t sound encouraging.

It was time to call it a day.

Copyright © 2009 Brian Topp

Next: Things come together
 
Yet another chapter, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail web site:

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Wednesday, December 2, 2009 11:13 PM
Coalition redux: Things come together

Brian Topp

On Monday I posted a piece here titled “The Prime Minister makes a big mistake,” narrating the Conservative government’s foolish attempt a year ago to bankrupt the opposition, its failure to address the economic crisis and the resulting decision by the Liberals and the New Democrats to hold talks about replacing Stephen Harper’s government with a new and better one.

On Tuesday I posted “The shape of the deal,” which described the initial exchange of views between the red and orange teams.

Wednesday it was “The shape of the new government,” where we discussed what the new government was going to look like – how it would be structured and governed.

Here, I describe some of the discussion that occurred around the policy priorities of the new government. We were pinching ourselves by the end of this day. It had all come together. This might just work. We were tantalizingly close to removing the Harper government and replacing it.

- - - - -​

Sunday, November 30, 2008: The Blackberry flood started early for a Sunday.

Kathleen Monk (8:18 a.m.): “Iggy will be on Newsworld at 9 a.m. Baird will follow. Apparently Iggy and Kory T. were seen having lengthy tête-à-tête last night at the gallery dinner.” In the morning light that still didn’t sound good.

Dawn Black (8:26 a.m.): “Ujjal. We just spoke. He said we must be hard line – not give an inch to the Conservatives no matter what they bring forward. His view was that Peter J[ulian] and Paul Dewar left an impression on TV we would consider a new package if one is brought forward from the Conservatives.”

This, of course, is exactly what Dosanjh and his Liberal colleagues themselves would agree to do only a few days later.

Herb Metcalfe and I met for breakfast in the restaurant in the Delta Hotel in downtown Ottawa. We loaded up on comfort food for what was going to be a long day, and got down to business.

By 9:09 a.m. the cards were on the table. I BlackBerried a report to Dawn Black, so that she could brief Jack Layton and the rest of the team meeting at NDP caucus office: “[The Liberals] offered eight parliamentary secretaryships. Agreed that if PM feels he must have more than 24 ministries, our proportion would be maintained. They offered five seats. I countered with five + deputy PM, or six seats. Liberal negotiator is choking on deputy PM because if Liberal PM is run over by a bus, we’re PM. I offered to write a line that this won’t happen. No take-up. We’ve recessed. He’s off to talk to Dion. Will get back at 9:30 or so. I think he’ll recommend six seats in a 25+1 cabinet (i.e. another Lib added too). He believes scenario is Dion will be PM until May, and then be replaced by a new leader, likely Ignatieff. We gossiped. Rae easy. Ignatieff extremely reluctant. Dion listening to Chrétien, who was very tough with them last night.”

Metcalfe was gone somewhat longer than expected. Eventually he returned looking a little flustered – police had pulled him over and he had received an ill-timed traffic ticket. This BlackBerry exchange with Jack Layton tells the tale of what happened next:

Me to Jack Layton (10:13 a.m.): “Final offer: They are offering 5 ministers + 8 parliamentary secretaryships/privy councillors. No to DPM. No to 6. 24 ministers + PM. If a larger cabinet is selected then our proportions are maintained. Instructions please.”

We marked time while our principals talked directly to each other. Ed Broadbent and Jean Chrétien discussed the issues. They spoke to their principals. Eventually, Metcalfe looked at his buzzing BlackBerry and then looked at me.

“Okay, it’s six,” he said.

We shook hands and the government accord was complete.

Me to Layton (10:58 a.m.): “Excellent work well done. Everything signed and sealed.”

Whew! Back in the boardroom of NDP caucus office, Layton, Broadbent and Blakeney were meeting with a fairly large group of NDP research and communications staffers. Our staff quickly finalized our policy pitch document; we grabbed a quick bite to eat; and then we gathered ourselves together and set off two blocks away to the hotel for the next round of talks with our new friends and allies on the red team.

We settled back into the tight, non-descript meeting room at the Sheraton. The Liberal delegation was again led by Metcalfe, joined by Ralph Goodale and Marlene Jennings and a rotating cast of Liberal staff members including, most of the time, Dion chief of staff Joanne Sénécal and deputy chief of staff Katie Telford. The tone was friendly and businesslike. With the governing accord under our belts we knew we were in sight of an agreement, provided we could come to terms on our basic agenda.

We discussed how to proceed. We agreed the NDP would start off by setting out our proposals. We would then adjourn, the Liberals would consider their counter-proposal, and then we’d see if we had enough overlap to find an agreement.

Volunteers and staff on both sides of the table now stepped back. It was time for our party’s statesmen and stateswomen to carry the negotiations.

Blakeney and Broadbent began by reiterating the basic understanding we had arrived at on Friday. The new government’s job was to address the present economic crisis, and all of its focus would be on economic issues. Speaking for the Liberals, Goodale agreed.

Our team then presented our proposals verbally and in writing. We wanted four things: First, we wanted the policy accord to spell out the New Democratic Party’s commitment to fiscal responsibility, a commitment we knew Goodale was also passionate about. Blakeney had been one of Roy Romanow’s closest counsellors when Romanow struggled to save Saskatchewan from bankruptcy in the early 1990s, courtesy of another reckless tax-cutting Conservative government. Some of Blakeney’s proudest achievements as premier, including what remained of the province’s dental and drug plans, had been lost while our government dealt with $15-billion of public debt sitting on fewer than 300,000 taxpayers.

Ralph Goodale also knew what conservative fiscal recklessness had done to his home province, and shared our views on this matter. We wanted it hardwired into the governing accord. That meant a commitment that the budget would be rebalanced once the economic crisis was mastered.

Second, we wanted the new government to commit to a strong economic stimulus package, focused on infrastructure investments. Jack Layton paid particularly close attention to this part of our package during our discussions. As a former Toronto city councillor and president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Layton had a detailed understanding of the gaping infrastructure deficits blighting our economy in every part of the country. He also knew how quickly municipal authorities could get to work on new projects if funded, and he knew what a big difference investment in this area could make to people’s lives. We wanted to see a strong commitment to new infrastructure, to housing and housing retrofit, and to renewing Canada’s manufacturing and resource industries.

Third, we wanted families hurt in the recession to get some help, immediately. In three previous federal campaigns, we had told the people of Canada we would fight in Parliament for working families. Journalists made gagging sounds when we said this. But we meant it. The top of mind issue for many policy-makers in the Western world as they work through the consequences of small “c” conservative misrule is what to do to repair the balance sheets of banks and major corporations. Our top of mind issue was what to do for the working families who are paying and will continue to pay a double price for the incompetence of their betters – losing their livelihoods, while bailing out their bosses with their taxes. We wanted measures to help the rising tide of unemployed meet their mortgages, pay their bills, and be given some hope for future employment. We had three measures in mind: enhanced training; restoring Employment Insurance; and expanding the child benefit, an excellent vehicle for redistributing wealth to low-income working families, hardest hit in the recession.

Finally, the policy accord needed an “and another thing” section to deal with some specific issues. The Tories had lost their majority in Quebec in part because of foolish insensitivity about issues affecting cultural industries. We wanted that spoken to. Allan Blakeney did one for the home team by putting the Canadian Wheat Board and supply management on the agenda. And we wanted to see our environmental agenda woven into the accord – nicely packaged into a continentalist vision so that our Liberal coalition partners could accept it.

This was all presented. Goodale asked some clarification questions and offered some preliminary comments. And then we adjourned, heading down the hall to wait in another bleak boardroom while the Liberal team settled down to consider their response.

I caught up on emails. Dawn Black had an interesting report from a Liberal contact (12:56 p.m.): “I just heard from a friend of Michael. He was only able to speak to his press liaison at this point. He said our read on it is correct. The Libs need to iron out how long Dion stays, what he stays to do. What is less defined – in time as it is in milestones – i.e. budget. They don’t seem to know where the line will be drawn between Dion and his successor.”

That was interesting – a potential compromise between Dion and Ignatieff, in which Dion could serve as prime minister for a time but then agree to cede his place to either Ignatieff or Rae after their spring convention.

It was now time for the skillful folks in the Prime Minister’s Office to try to drop a bomb in the middle of our negotiations.

The raw material they had to work with was a transcript of an NDP caucus meeting teleconference held the previous day, apparently taped by Vancouver Conservative MP John Duncan, an inadvertent invitee due to a name mix-up by a junior NDP staff member.

The Prime Minister’s Office leaked this transcript to CTV News, who promptly aired it. A key focus of the network’s reporting was a snippet from Layton’s leader’s report to caucus in which he reviewed the discussions he had had with the Bloc through the FTQ earlier that fall, exploring the possibility of replacing the Conservatives.

This was not news to the NDP caucus, but it caused some impressive hyperventilating on air. The NDP had been PLOTTING with the SEPARATISTS.

Anne McGrath reported the effect of this news on our negotiations in an admirably understated email to Layton (2:51 p.m.): “Brian and Dawn have been in sidebar discussions to calm down the Liberal team,” she reported to Layton. “This is definitely not helpful. I think we should not have any more conference calls.”

Indeed.

However, once the shouting had stopped and it came down to brass tacks with Herb Metcalfe, the Liberals shrugged the leak off and we got back to work.

At about 3:00 p.m., we returned to the main boardroom to hear the Liberal counter-proposal. They had been drafting with a laptop and projector, and walked us through their counter-proposal line-by-line. Blakeney, Broadbent and Black asked detailed questions, paragraph by paragraph. Essentially all of our proposals were reflected in their version, in much less detail and with no spending commitments attached. There was one key omission – they did not want to include any reference to an enhanced child benefit or to childcare.

It was time for another Dawn Black moment.

Black picked up the cudgel, demanding to know what the Liberals had against families and children, especially given all the complaining they had done about the fate of their last-days-of-Martin press releases about childcare.

The Liberal front-line seemed extremely embarrassed to defend the position they were taking, and as the discussion proceeded more and more of the Liberal talking was being done by their leader’s office research staffer.

He argued, relentlessly and repetitively, that no spending commitments must be made that would be “structural spending.” Helping families and children, to his mind, was “structural spending,” and so nothing could be done about child poverty or the real-world consequences of unemployment to average Canadian families.

It was fascinating to look at the Liberal team during this exchange. They looked ashamed of themselves. They also looked defeated and powerless. How many times during their recent decade in office, I wondered, had elected Liberals had expressions like that on their faces, while staff and bureaucrats chanted neo-con blather? Permanent tax cuts for wealthy individuals and business were “investments.” Help for poor families was “structural spending.”

Black was on a bottom line. She spelled it out for the arrogant young Liberal staffer. If there was nothing about child poverty and childcare in the agreement, Black said, then there would be no agreement and no coalition government.

Ed Broadbent, author of a landmark motion in the House of Commons calling for concrete steps to end child poverty in Canada, unanimously adopted, backed her up strongly.

Blakeney caught Goodale’s eye. What if we put in a very clear commitment on this issue, with the note that we will move forward “as finances permit?” Goodale jumped at this solution, and into the accord it went: “As finances permit, we are committed to move forward with improved child benefits and an early learning and childcare program in partnership with each province, and respectful of their role and jurisdiction, including the possibility of opt out with full compensation.”

Agreed.

It was time to check with headquarters, and to decide if we had what we needed.

In essence, the Liberals were doing to us what they do to the Canadian public every election. They had picked up on our themes and priorities, stripped out the operating detail, and had fed the resulting comforting words back to us to persuade us that a progressive agenda would be pursued, while avoiding any detailed or concrete commitments.

Should we play along with this?

Each member of our negotiating team had to make up their own mind about that. I was inclined to work with what was before us, for several reasons.

First, I was mindful that no plan survives contact with the enemy, especially in the context of a major economic crisis. Our team had worked hard on our proposals. But could we really be sure we had anticipated every contingency that might occur to Canada’s national government over the next two years? Likely not.

Second, I knew that an overly detailed policy agenda can be a trap.

In provincial politics, policy specifics are sometimes helpful. You commit to pave 50 kilometres of that road. At some point during your four-year term, you do it. Next election you point to the road, and promise with credibility to do the next stretch.

On the other hand, policy specifics that seemed smart at the time do not always turn out to be so. A few years ago I attended a retirement party for a colleague in the government of Saskatchewan. I was seated next to our then newly appointed justice minister, whose first words in his life to me were: “so you’re the stupid ass who promised to hire 300 more police officers.” There had indeed been such a commitment in our 1999 election platform that I might have had something to do with. We were trying to communicate our commitment to safe communities. Perhaps it was good politics at the time (it had worked for Bill Clinton), but it would seem that specific proposal had proved challenging to implement given the many other pressures in the justice and corrections system.

Third, there was the rhythm of the negotiation to consider. Our counterparty had invested heavily in an internal debate late into the previous night to meet us on a position we would not budge from – we intended to be in the ministry if we were to support a new government. Insisting on the letter and form of our policy draft might force them into a similar process again. Would they come around to our point of view a second time? Or would they conclude they were dealing with an overly greedy partner and refuse to close? Likely the latter. When you are a cat and you already have a pretty good canary in your mouth, it is time to think about how the other side gets one too, so that you get to keep your canary. This being so, it was better in my view to let the Liberals author a key coalition document, and therefore have cause to hope they would be able to shape and lead a government in which they would have 66 per cent of the caucus and 75 per cent of the ministry.

Finally, the Liberal policy draft was at least putting most of the right issues on the agenda. Unlike Liberal ministers and backbenchers, we wouldn’t be powerless in the face of obdurate and regressive positions from neo-con staffers in the proposed government’s leader’s office. Our team would retain their identity and leverage as a separate party, and would be in a position to insist on progress on those files whether or not the price tags and operating details were included in the coalition policy accord.

Our bargaining team discussed all of this. Then I wrote to Layton (3:37 p.m.): “They are proposing we be silent on price tags on commitments... in return for basically accepting our entire list. Is that ok?” Layton took some time to think about it and then replied with admirable brevity (4:05 p.m.): “Yes.”

We caucused. The rest of our bargaining team were of like mind in the circumstances. We would work with the Liberal draft, as amended.

So, we told the Liberals we had a deal. And – for a brief moment, and a fine one – we did.

Copyright © 2009 Brian Topp


Next: Things Fall Apart
 
The fifth and penultimate instalment, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail web site:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/brian-topp/coalition-redux-things-fall-apart/article1387799/
Thursday, December 3, 2009 11:11 PM
Coalition redux: Things fall apart

Brian Topp

Yesterday, in “Things come together,” I described some of the discussion that occurred around the policy priorities of the new government. We reached agreement on all points. We were tantalizingly close to removing the Harper government and replacing it.

Today, I offer some of the highlights of what happened over the following few days, from my perspective. The coalition – signed and sealed, approved by all three opposition caucuses and individually endorsed by 162 opposition MPs in writing to the Governor-General, quickly disintegrated. It fell apart thanks to some deft manoeuvring by the Prime Minister, and because of the very different values and political priorities Michael Ignatieff brought to these discussions.

If it had to collapse, at least its passing was mercifully quick.

Tomorrow I’ll offer a few comments on implications and lessons learned.

- - - - -​

Tuesday, December 2, 2008: Things went very badly.

The Prime Minister and the Conservative anger machine zeroed in on the key weakness of the coalition project, the high-profile role of the Bloc Québécois. In a high-decibel Question Period, Mr. Harper staked out the blue team’s counter-attack. This exchange, which led the session that day, set the tone:
Hon. Stéphane Dion: Mr. Speaker, I will read the following statement: “The whole principle of our democracy is the government is supposed to be able to face the House of Commons any day on a vote. This government now has a deliberate policy of avoiding a vote...” The statement goes on to say that it is a violation of the fundamental constitutional principles of our democracy. Could the Prime Minister inform the House who said those words?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper: Mr. Speaker, the highest principle of Canadian democracy is that if one wants to be prime minister one gets one’s mandate from the Canadian people and not from Quebec separatists. The deal that the leader of the Liberal Party has made with the separatists is a betrayal of the voters of this country, a betrayal of the best interests of our economy and a betrayal of the best interests of our country, and we will fight it with every means that we have.


Mr. Dion reads a good deal better on paper than he sounded on television that day, a fact that was about to destroy him.

In his exchanges with the Prime Minister, he cogently pointed out that the Mr. Harper was flouting the fundamental principles of responsible government, and was behaving in the manner of a hypocrite, having argued the opposite case on all the issues only months before.

The Prime Minister’s very first line captured the whole Conservative case: “Mr. Speaker, the highest principle of Canadian democracy is that if one wants to be prime minister one gets one’s mandate from the Canadian people and not from Quebec separatists.”

That, of course, is not true. The highest principle of Canadian democracy is that Parliament gets its mandate from the Canadian people, and then selects a ministry from among its ranks to do its bidding. But truth had nothing to do with what happened next.

If the shoe had been on the other foot, and it had been Stephen Harper’s Conservatives at the head of a parliamentary majority moving in the first days of a new Parliament to unseat an isolated minority government (as Mr. Harper had been planning to do when he was an opposition leader), English-speaking Canadians on December 2 and 3, 2008, would have heard a very different song from their television networks, open-mouth radio, newspapers and magazines. They would have been listening to lectures about parliamentary history, parliamentary democracy, responsible government, the need for the executive to be democratically accountable – and the need for the executive to find its legitimacy from a majority of the House of Commons each and every day of its existence, failing which the House had both the power and the duty to install a new ministry that could command that support.

But in this case, it was an isolated minority Conservative government that had lost its parliamentary support. And so it was the Tory Prime Minister’s themes that English Canadians heard.

As became immediately clear, Stéphane Dion had no hope of making his own case over the combined efforts of the Prime Minister, the Conservative Party’s anger machine, and ubiquitous Tory pundits. Dion was in a fixed poker game, just as he had been when arguing for Canada against the establishment “consensus” in his home province. This time he had his home province on his side – his problem was the rest of the country. He needed to kick over the table. He needed to do something audacious and game changing, in the style of his Clarity Act initiatives. He needed to find a way to go over the heads of the anglo-conservative monoculture, speak directly to the people of Canada, and compellingly persuade them that notwithstanding most of what they were allowed to hear about what was happening in Ottawa, Parliament was in fact moving to give them the better, smarter, progressive government that 62 per cent of them had voted for.

As Pierre Trudeau would have put it, Dion needed to go over the heads of the elites and take his case directly to the people. An opportunity emerged to do this the following day. An opportunity that, as things developed, was only going to come once.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008: There was a bit of the flavour of a phony war on Parliament Hill.

From the perspective of the New Democrat team, it was an oddly quiet day. Our Liberal partners were pre-occupied talking to themselves, and dripped out information with a dropper. By noon we knew two things: the three coalition partners were going to try to co-ordinate their work in Question Period to avoid the dangerously-effective pounding inflicted on us by the Prime Minister the previous day. And the Liberals disclosed, in fragments over the course of the day, that agreement had been reached with the television networks to broadcast statements by the Prime Minister and Mr. Dion to the Canadian people that night.

Neither Mr. Layton nor Mr. Duceppe would be included in these broadcasts, although the cable news outlets eventually agreed to carry them after Harper and Dion. We learned that both Harper and Dion would be preparing pre-recorded broadcasts. The Liberals let us know they didn’t need any help to do theirs, and encouraged us to simply be supportive of Mr. Dion after he had spoken. They then hunkered down in their offices to prepare Question Period and their statement.

Our communications team talked about what to do. We didn’t like being locked out of the main broadcast, but there was nothing we could do about it. We would just have to hope that Layton’s statement would get clipped into the evening news that night (as it was – although by then it didn’t matter). We agreed we weren’t interested in pre-recording a statement since we wanted to know what Harper and Dion were going to say before responding.

Further, our team, fresh off an excellently staged election campaign, liked the idea of putting Layton in front of the doors of the House of Commons to emphasize that the prime minister was probably about to padlock them (those of us who dote on Saskatchewan political history recalled that Liberal leader Ross Thatcher did precisely the same thing to excellent effect during a dispute with the CCF government in the early 1960s. Famously, in Saskatchewan, Thatcher kicked the door to the legislative chamber to symbolize that the government had locked it). Finally, by making a statement in the lobby of the House of Commons, we could rely on the parliamentary press gallery to worry about the lights and the camera work, broadcasting seamlessly using the facilities available to them on Parliament Hill.

Had they asked us, we would have advised the Liberal team to do the same thing.

Question Period was noisy but irrelevant. Everyone was waiting to see what Harper and Dion would say to the public in their unmediated moments on national television that night.

With our own arrangements made and not really much else to do, the NDP caucus and many of its staff assembled in the NDP caucus room with some snacks, and settled down in front of a set of big-screen televisions to watch the statements by Harper and Dion. Shortly after 7:00 p.m., the networks cut to a video of Prime Minister Harper. His waxy smile and rigid posture clearly conveyed his nervousness. But he delivered the points set out in the PMO memo as predicted, clearly warming up to his topic as he expressed his outrage – outrage! – that anyone would conspire with the Bloc Québécois to replace a sitting government – as he had done himself.

Our caucus booed the Prime Minister gamely, heckled his television image in fine House of Commons style, and waited for our guy, our nominee to replace Mr. Harper in the prime minister’s chair, to destroy Harper and finally politically launch the new government. For a very brief moment, the NDP caucus was rooting for a Liberal leader.

No Canadian, with the possible exception of Pierre Trudeau, was less deserving of being accused of consorting with separatists than Stéphane Dion.

He had an opportunity here to make a devastating rebuttal to the Prime Minister, dedicated as Mr. Harper was to systematically dismantling Canada’s national government with the parliamentary support of the Bloc at every step, co-author as Mr. Harper was of a “firewall” memorandum urging Alberta to partially withdraw from the federation, architect as Mr. Harper was of a similar coalition proposal he had been shopping only a few years before.

Dion had the opportunity to point to the exciting new Obama administration just elected south of the border; to say that 62 per cent of Canadians had voted for identical change in Canada; and to say that the economy demanded that change.

Dion had the opportunity to point to the long winter of increasingly centralized and out-of-touch government in Ottawa, and to say that this was the start of a new era of responsive, accountable government wherein the government, the cabinet and the prime minister would actually enjoy the voting support of a clear majority of the Canadian people, and not simply be the lucky recipients of the undemocratic quirks of Canada’s antiquated electoral system.

Dion said some of this, more or less.

But nobody watching heard any of it.

As Dion’s chief of staff, Johanne Sénécal, wrote to me in a BlackBerry exchange a few minutes after Dion’s broadcast: “It was a flop as to quality – I have no idea what happened. They tell me it had to do with compatibility of technologies. I have no idea but it did not look good.”

I thumbed my own first reaction to my ACTRA colleague Ray Guardia after Dion’s video was finally, mercifully over: “Ouch!”

Guardia replied: “Brutal!”

My BlackBerry buzzed non-stop for more than 20 minutes as my various pen-pals let me know what they thought about what they had just seen.

A senior member of Ignatieff‘s leadership campaign offered the most ominous comment, a few minutes after Dion spoke (7:53 p..m.): “It’s all over, Dude.” I wrote back (7:58 p.m..): “How so?” He replied (8:03 p.m.): “The chief spokesman can’t speak.”

A few moments later, one of my friends from the Conservatives wrote to commiserate (8:00 p.m.): “Dion. You must really wish that Jack could speak instead of Dion.”

I was looking morosely at the note from the Ignatieff campaign when this came across. In need of some levity just then, I decided to reply with a joke, alluding to some of our lines from the 2008 campaign, and then I added a little bait to see if he would tell me anything about the PM’s plans for the Governor-General the following morning (8:03 p.m.): “Hey, as [Layton’s] been saying for a while, every time your guy quits, he’s going to apply for the job. GG ruling is going to be quite something, one way or another.” To be provocative, I added (8:09 p.m.): “A little more seriously, that’s a big decision there about the Quebec wing.”

He mused about this for a few minutes and then replied (8:29 p.m.): “As you have been trying to tell your folks, you can’t do good unless you’re in power. So far you have played the Grits like a song. You know though, with every day, it’s getting more difficult. Nonetheless, I give you credit. This was a big idea. I just don’t think it will work.” An elegantly written message that Dion had just blown his brains out.

We watched Layton offer a compelling, eloquently delivered, well-lit and well-recorded statement in front of the doors of Parliament to a microscopic audience of cable news viewers. Possibly a few more saw a few seconds of it on network news that night. But it didn’t matter.

The atmosphere in the NDP caucus room was funereal.

For the most ridiculous of reasons – basic tradecraft issues of staging, lighting and videography – our candidate for prime minister had thrown away his chance to reframe the debate and to counter Mr. Harper and his force-amplifiers. We were not going to get to first base in the debate. And so Mr. Harper was going to be free to play hardball with parliamentary democracy the following morning.


Thursday, December 4, 2008: The Liberal leader’s office had taken responsibility for all the logistics of delivering letters signed by the majority in the House of Commons telling the Governor General they wanted a change of government. It was therefore strangely quiet once again in the NDP leader’s office. We watched pictures of the door of Rideau Hall on CBC Newsworld. The Prime Minister entered.

We allowed our hopes to grow a little as his meeting with Her Excellency seemed to take a long time.

It started to snow.

And then the Prime Minister walked out, looked up at the sky to take in the Lord’s judgment on his evil works, and announced that the Governor-General had done what she was told, and that Mr. Harper had been authorized to avoid a confidence vote by padlocking Parliament.

Speaking directly to Michael Ignatieff, Mr. Harper announced there would be a new budget at the end of January and invited opposition parties to help draft it.

The Governor-General’s office later told us that the petitions signed by the parliamentary majority didn’t arrive at Rideau Hall before the meeting with Mr. Harper. A Conservative friend told me that in their view, one way or another, the Governor-General is not authorized to “see” any correspondence from anyone but the prime minister, and in Canadian practice was barred from taking the views of the majority in the House into account in deciding whether or not to lock the doors of the people’s house.

I wrote to Johanne Sénécal and asked her what she believed would happen now. “We continue the coalition and will put onus on government,” she replied (12:21 p.m.). “So far we have not seen anything.”

I didn’t believe it. Given the response to Mr. Dion’s video, it seemed likely to me that his party would quickly rid itself of him, and that the Liberals would take a much more skeptical approach to replacing the government.

We watched the statements by Dion, Layton and Duceppe.

I wrote to the key players in the NDP election planning committee (2:48 p.m.): “Seems more likely than not the Libs will now find a way to dismount. Hopefully in the process they’ll give us the gift of an ugly dismount and votes to prop up Harper. We’ll see what the Libs want to do to keep talking about coalition. Maybe a lot, maybe not much. So I guess our election prep discussion needs to resume.”

Parliament collapsed like a balloon.

A few days later Stéphane Dion was ousted in a Liberal caucus coup.

Bob Rae was brushed aside in a murky secondary coup played out at the national Liberal executive.

And then the newly-appointed Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, announced that there might be a coalition “if necessary,” but that if the Conservative government tweaked its budget his support was available.

In late January Mr. Ignatieff in effect led his caucus into the Conservative lobby, voting confidence in Stephen Harper’s government, support for its fiscal measures, and an end to the new and better government his party had agreed with ours.

In return, Mr. Ignatieff negotiated an arrangement under which the Harper government could and would use public funds to publicize its measures every quarter.

That was a commitment Mr. Harper was happy to give Mr. Ignatieff, and to keep.

Copyright © 2009 Brian Topp


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