Minority government – Canada and Australia

Jeffrey Simpson, national affairs columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, is the recipient of all three leading Canadian literary prizes. Author of six books, Jeffrey Simpson speaks at dozens of major conferences here and abroad on a variety of domestic and international issues and is a regular television contributor. On Thursday 18 November 2010, Jeffrey Simpson joined Professor Anne Twomey to address The Sydney Institute on minority government in Canada and Australia. This paper is an edited transcript of Jeffry Simpson’s address.

MINORITY GOVERNMENT – CANADA AND AUSTRALIA

JEFFREY SIMPSON

This is my fifth trip to Australia and this one as deep in my affection for and deep in my interest in the country. This morning The Australian’s Paul Kelly, who was at our Canada/ Australia business forum, used a word I thought was appropriate, which was “benchmark”. Every time I visit and every time I read about Australia, or I talk to Australians, I believe that for Canada this is the country against which we can most usefully benchmark ourselves. But that’s for you to say. So every time I come here I pick up all the newspapers. I don’t know all the players, of course, and the details are not known to me, but the essence of what you’re nattering about I understand pretty quickly, faster than I do in almost any other country, except the United States. But there, they do things in such a very different way that it’s interesting to watch them; but, for a Canadian, they’re not as relevant from a benchmarking point of view.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Mexico City at the Trilateral Commission. We had a number of presentations from Mexicans and it was in the few days after the Mid-Terms in the United States. Listening to the Mexicans and the Americans, and knowing that I was coming down here, the thought struck me that if you looked around the loosely-defined Western democratic world at the moment, most of the Western democracies are now run by divided or minority governments. Some of them are always that way because they have proportional representation systems which are designed to reflect votes and seats in such a way that nobody, except under the rarest circumstances, is ever going to have a majority. So it’s not surprising that Germany has a coalition. The Swedes just had an election and they have a Centre-Right coalition, our New Zealand friends have a coalition because that’s what the MMP system is always going to produce, except under the most extraordinary circumstance. So that category of countries is always going to be a minority government. But then you have the presidential systems which have structurally divided governments, executive and legislature being separate and, on top of that, party difference as well.

Divided government is now overlayed with divided party government. And, in parliamentary systems, which are supposed to most often produce majority governments, in Britain and in Canada and in Australia, you’ve all now got minority governments. So, you look around and you say, well, France has a President whose party still has a majority in the assembly,  the Assemblée nationale, which is probably the only reason they got the pension reforms through, despite the street demonstrations which are a part of French political life. But, for a variety of reasons which have only to do with individual countries, you’ve got a majority of them now run by divided governments. Whether there’s something more systemic going on, having to do with the frittering of national parties, that makes it more difficult for parties now to get majorities in certain democracies. I’ll leave to you. But I’ll just make the observation that what we’re discussing tonight is part of a wider pattern, if I can put it that way, at the moment.

In Canada, we have had since 1867, when Canada came together as you did in 1901, a number of minority governments. In 1925-6, 1962-68, 1972-74, 1979-80, 2004-2008. The goverment in 1925-26 lasted only a few months. In 1962-68 it was a one year government,  there was a two-and-a-half year government in 1972-74, a six months on in 1979-80 and now, since 2004, governments have averaged about two years. So, what are the lessons this Canadian situation might offer? Well, the first is that minority governments historically are the exception to the rule, however in the last fifty years, fifteen of those years have had minority government. So where as in the previous hundred years it was very rare, it’s now becoming more or less usual to have minority governments.

Secondly, the governments have lasted at a maximum two-and-a-half years and on the mean less than two. None of these governments, unlike the one you have now and unlike the one in the United Kingdom, ever was a coalition. They were always formed when a party of government didn’t have enough seats in the House of Commons, but survived, week by week, month by month either because none of the parties found it opportune to have an early election or because certain bill-by-bill arrangements were made between the government and one of the opposition parties to keep the Queen’s business going so that the government stayed in office. There were always political circumstances rather than a 76-page Germanic document. There was no written agreement that kept these governments going. And maybe that’s one the reasons why they proved to be governments that, on average, lasted less than two years. And maybe, therefore, in Australia where there is a kind of coalition although not between parties or among parties but between a party and certain Independents, there might be an opportunity for greater durability. You’ll see on that, I’m simply saying in our history these are the numbers. Two years, a little less, is the mean, two and a half has been the maximum, but no coalitions.

The third point is that in about half of these circumstances, the minority government fell because it wanted to fall, because it thought that the timing was opportune to have an election, that things had gotten better for them since they fell into a minority and that if they precipitated and election, they could win a majority. And in the other half of the cases they didn’t want to lose but the opposition parties though that it was in their interests to bring the government down. There’s no pattern as to whether governments fall because the government wants it or because the opposition. Each depends on particular circumstances.

Number four is, less clear I think. The more parties you have, or independents in your case, the greater the likelihood of minority government. For decades in Canada we had two main parties and one much smaller party on the left of the spectrum, a kind of socialist and then social-democratic party. The reason why we had majority governments was because we had two big parties and one very small one. When we fell into the minority governments back in the 1960s and 1979, was because a fourth party grew up, in the province of Quebec. And therefore it became difficult for one of the big parties to put a big majority of seats together because there were two opposition parties grabbing a certain number of seats.

When you take a large number of seats out of the parliamentary equation and put them into small parties the arithmetic is obvious, it’s much harder to for a majority in parliament. If you look at some of the proportional representation systems, and I realise this is an aside, they tend over time to produce a larger number of parties because if people are trying to match votes with seats, it’s in their interest to vote, as it were, narrowly. In Germany, part of the reason for minority government is unification and lefties from East Germany have become part of the left party. There are now six parties in Germany whereas when I started writing about German politics there were three.

Number five. This will be very interesting to see in Australia. We have not been able to change the political culture of parliament. Our parties still operate on a highly majoritarian parliamentary set of assumptions – there’s “them” over there and there’s “us” over here and we’re going to fight like cats and dogs every day, and we’re going to spin everything that happens to our tactical advantage, because a breakthrough is going to come through at some point that will allow us to get back into a majority. The notion that the electorate has sent a minority government to the capital and that therefore no party has the full confidence of the electorate, and therefore you should try to compromise, to work together, is totally foreign to our parliamentary system at the moment. Mainstream politicians all assume that any other situation is abnormal and that therefore they should conduct themselves as they always have. In a majority situation you dare the other side, you force the other side, you criticise the other side. You don’t try to cooperate. The habits of mind are apparently very difficult to shake for political parties that think that the next time they’re going to get the majority.

Years ago, when I was a young man, I enjoyed what was called a parliamentary internship that let me work on Parliament Hill when we had a minority government, 1972-74. I saw as then what it looked like from the inside. Since then I’ve observed it from the outside. There isn’t any doubt that minority governments shrink timetables. It may be different in Australia because you may have three years of relative peace with this coalition with the independents. But, generally speaking, I would say minority governments shrink timetables and horizons. There’s a great emphasis in minority governments on tactics because you’re not sure whether you are going to survive for very long, so you have to get whatever temporary advantage you think you can out of the events of today. The notion that you should do something extremely unpopular and go into the teeth of public opinion because you hope that four years from now, or five years because we can go five years in our system, you might be able to have persuaded the electorate that this was actually a good thing, is completely foreign to a minority government. You’re always trying to wrong-foot the other side in a minority government.

In 1979, Canada had a government that came into office and introduced a very brave budget It was given the slogan “short term pain for long term gain”. This was very foolish politically on the government’s part because the electorate saw the “short term pain” measure and said “you’re outta there”. And that party stayed out of there for the next four to five years. With minority government, it is very risky to do things that are difficult politically. Canada’s present situation is that the government inherited a big surplus from their predecessors. Having inherited a big surplus as a conservative government, they began to spend a lot of money. They haven’t really made any hard decisions yet. Certainly none flying in the face of public opinion.

So where are we now? Well, as I said, Canada has a minority government, the third in a row – one liberal, two conservative – but we don’t have a coalition, we don’t have independents as you do. A coalition would require, without independents, two of our parties getting together and either signing a document or coming to some kind of an understanding that would keep things going for a while. That hasn’t happened.

The biggest obstacle to that happening, is that for the last six elections a party called the Bloc Québécois has won the largest number of seats in the province of Quebec and their raison d’etre is to take Quebec out of Canada. They don’t really campaign on that during election campaigns. What they campaign on is “we are the defenders of Quebec’s interests”. They don’t say “vote for us an we’re going to have a referendum on sovereignty”, because that’s not within their power to grant, that’s a provincial government matter. And you can’t have one of the big federal parties having a coalition even in theory if you wanted to with a political party whose long term aim is to break up the country; that just won’t work. So that is one of the reasons why coalition is difficult.

About eighteen months ago there was a sort of parliamentary crisis, which is what can happen in minority governments. The government was in difficulty in the House of Commons and the principle opposition party, the Liberal Party and the left of centre party, the New Democratic Party, got together and decided that they were going to take over with a coalition, supported by the Bloc Québécois. The Prime Minister, under pressure, said his party had won the election with the most more seats; that the other parties had lost and were without credibility, or legitimacy. He shut parliament down with the Governor General’s permission because he’d already won a vote of confidence from electors. That was the last we heard about coalitions.

What we have at the moment, therefore, are four blocks. We’ve got the Bloc Québécois in Quebec, the New Democratic Party with 15-18 per cent of the vote, Conservative Party with about 33 per cent of the vote give or take three points, and the Liberal Party with around 28 per cent, give or take 3 points. And that situation has been remarkably stable over the last four years. Despite all the efforts, all the attack ad campaigns, all the announcements, all the spending, all the cross-country touring, nothing has moved. My military analogy, and it’s a hackneyed one, is that it’s like a First World War battle, the lines are fixed, immense energies are thrown into trying for a breakthrough and it never happens. We’re in a rut of tremendous stability.

With the next election, and another minority government, a lot of Canadians wil ask themselves if minority government is the new normal. One of two things has to happen. First, the mores and habits of the political parties in parliament have to change. We keep signalling to them that we don’t want to give one party full majority confidence, that we want them to compromise more, and they should change their behaviour. We don’t want the antics that go on. We want to see them trying to work together so that habits develop. If not this, then we’ll say that if de facto minority governments are the norm why don’t we change our electoral system. Because when you have a proportional representation system, everybody knows that some parties are going to have to cooperate after the election, or sometimes they come together before the election.

I’ll conclude by noting, however, that we have had three provinces in Canada that have tried to change the electoral system in their provinces, to forms of proportional representation. British Columbia tried. Little Prince Edward Island tried. And Ontario tried. In all three cases the voters, said no. My friends who support PR say this was because there was little tie to argue the case. But, I believe there’s a lot of inertia in political systems, and it’s really hard for people to change that which they know to something that they don’t.

I have studied your system. I can understand it and I like it. And if you asked me carte blanche what would be the best voting system for Canada, that’s the one I’d prefer. But for Canadians it’s a big leap. It’s hard to get people to change from the devil they know to the devil they don’t. It happened in New Zealand under a very special set of circumstances.

So we’re in this period of minority governments, which may stretch on for some time yet. But we still haven’t found the way to change the mores, the habits, the traditions, let alone the institutions to take account of what may now be the normal. The parties are still thinking about our system as if it was old-time majority, knock-em sock-em government.