Constitutional Crisis

This was a long time in coming. From the perspective of its legal institutions - the different offices and bodies through which political power is dispersed, the set of rules and regulations governing the exercise of authority - Canada is a complete mess. The Constitution not only contains an opt out clause for provincial governments, it hasn't ever been ratified by Quebec. The power to prorogue Parliament, call elections and choose which party leaders will have a shot at forming a government is invested in the Governor General, an office which is a pure Imperial British legacy, with the sole concession to the Canadian people being that it is the Prime Minister and not Her Majesty who makes the appointment. There's a common truism that Canada is a country that works better in practice than in theory, and if anything that's an understatement - Canada, in theory, doesn't work at all.

And yet, in practice this is a remarkably country - prosperous, certainly, but much more than that. Canada was a successful multicultural society before it was trendy to be one. Despite the remarkable diversity of background, language and race of its inhabitants, it has maintained a sense of social solidarity and cooperation. This is reflected in lower social inequality, better race relations and less violent crime than in societies roughly comparable, like Britain and the US. It is this social quality - the tolerant and cooperative nature of Canadian society - that sets it apart from other Western democracies, and that makes it such a remarkable place in which to live. The reason why we can get by with such a disordered formal politics is also because of this sensibility - a tilt towards cooperation rather than conflict lets our politics muddle through to sensible outcomes.

Except for now. Now all the seams in our imperfect constitutional garment are visible, and every party is busy opportunistically pulling at threads, hoping that their rivals position will become untenable a minute before their own. Not content with keeping the ugliness in Ottawa, both parties, though the Conservative government especially and in the most toxic and despicable way, has sought to bring the Canadian public in to the middle of this dispute, and leverage anti-Bloc and anti-Quebec sentiment into accusations of treason and appeals to what must be called hate. A three-party coalition government bringing down the biggest party in Parliament may be a sly political trick, and may fly in the face of the recent election results, but it is not in itself "un-Canadian." What is indisputably un-Canadian is the irresponsibility of making these accusations, and turning what amounts to the failure of an in-house tactical struggle to deprive the opposition parties of their public funding into an ideological Götterdämmerung, an existential duel over purity and patriotism. This is politics gentlemen - just politics.

While the parties of the left - the NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc - have not been at their best in this debate, the blame for this sorry state of affairs must fall on the prime instigator, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He is the leader of this country, and the head of a major party. These are political positions, but they are also civic positions and ones which carry great responsibility along with their status and visibility. Harper clearly enjoys those positions - he loves to be in power, he mugs for the camera, he changes costume and strikes poses (though he can never quite shed his basic awkwardness) - but his character does not match his ambition. The last elections were called early, opportunistically, to try and capitalize on the weakness of the Liberal Party, and he took the unprecedented step of approaching the Governor General to dissolve Parliament without having lost a confidence vote. In doing so he not only broke precedent, but he also broke the law - a law he wrote himself - and all for tactical political gain. Canadian voters did not give him his majority (the gave him 38% of the popular vote, far from a majority) - he had no mandate for radical change, and Canadians expected from their Prime Minister a plan for dealing with the economic crisis. But instead of taking up the crucial, painful problems related to a world-historical global recession and the destruction of billions of dollars of Canadian wealth in securities and real estate, Harper tried to ram through changes to the public financing of political parties meant to cripple the democratically elected opposition parties in the next general election. He has behaved as though he believes his main duty is not to govern Canada, but to win elections for the Conservative Party. Perhaps the Conservatives are happy with a leader like that, but Canadians certainly deserve better.