The end of the Trudeau-Singh deal stuns many, but hopefully just first of many
By Tom Monto
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was quite clear last week that he had ripped up the Supply-and-Confidence Agreement between his party and Trudeau's Liberal government.
Many don't seem to know what to make of this.
But it seems clear to me. The Agreement and its ending are similar to the course of many voluntary arrangements. As long as it suited both partners, they stayed in the relationship. It lasted for a while, and then when it no longer suited one of the two partners, it ended.
Since the Agreement was signed in March 2022, many Canadians derived benefit from new public programs of pharmacare and dental care. But it was never intended to last forever.
The Liberals and the NDP always have been two separate parties and always intended to run against each other in the next election.
When the 2021 federal election produced a hung parliament - no party took a majority of the seats in the House of Commons - the Liberals had the most seats and were given a chance to form a working majority in the House of Commons. The NDP said they would support the Liberals in power as long as they met certain commitments.
Then last week Singh either felt the Liberals were not living up to those commitments or that the trouble of trying to make them live up to their commitments was not worth the trouble. It could have been even that Singh's hopes were raised and he saw that the Liberals were not going to meet his new, higher expectations.
We have seen that happen in many types of human relationships before. It is said that a woman marries a man, thinking she can change him, and a man marries a woman thinking she will never change. Often they are both wrong. The hope in such things is that the relationship has a strong base that will endure disappointments and that any changes that take place - and there will be changes - are ones that both can accept.
You can think of the Trudeau-Singh SCA as something like an engagement between two young people. The two parties merged their interests through a more or less happy compromise. The NDP promised to sustain the Liberals in power by helping them form a working majority in the House of Commons; the Liberals promised to expand social programs and pursue other policies geared to NDP priorities. In the short term, it served both parties' interests. But after a while Singh began to see it as no fun and Singh said it was not working.
One pundit has said that the end of the SCA both changes everything and changes nothing. It seems that it is like a divorce between two parents. They still share care of children so cannot make a clean break. But being divorced changes their outlooks if nothing else.
Perhaps much of the angst the media is feeling about the end of the SCA is because they have grown accustomed to the stability that the SCA gave us. When both parties abided by the Agreement, Canadians were freed from worry of the government collapsing and an election looming up suddenly. We enjoyed that kind of stability, and that was an unexpected relief at a time when no party had a majority in the House.
The Agreement and the co-operation between the two parties was good both for the sake of stability and for democracy. A joint government where the parties have support from a majority of voters is better in many ways than an unpopular government made up of one party and also better than a minority government stumbling uncertainly from crisis to crisis.
With the end of the SCA, Singh made the House of Commons go back to the way politics usually operates when no party has a majority of the seats - opposition parties will support the government on a case-by-case basis or the government will simply fall, triggering an election. Often in the past, minority governments fell long before the four or five years allowed between elections. Few countries have held elections as often as Canada has since 1990. The SCA between the Liberals and the NDP has spared us from that happening this time.
But even if we have grown accustomed to stability, I hope we do not seek stability at any price. I hope we don’t seek stability in the form of a one-party government with only minority support.
Democratic accountability in the House of Commons should be uppermost in our political scene.
What we want to do, in my opinion, is establish democratic control of the House of Commons by instituting an election system where the majority of votes elect the majority of MPs. And if no one party gets a majority of votes, then no party should have a majority of seats in the House.
But even with a hung parliament, we can still ensure that we don’t go to the polls every year or two by encouraging co-operation and working arrangements between like-minded parties. Supply-and-Confidence Agreements and other multi-party agreements are common in most countries of Europe. Canada has not had them at the federal level until now, despite the many hung parliaments that we have elected since 1867.
With the vote being splintered among five large parties and many smaller ones, reflecting our diverse society, no party gets support from more than half the voters. At least, no federal party has received a majority of the votes since 1984. But our election system often has allowed a party that receives less than half the votes to form a majority government and wield power.
As we approach the next election, predictions are being made as to how the votes will go. Some project the Conservatives to receive about 42 percent of the votes, and perhaps for the Liberal and NDP voters together to compose a majority of the votes cast. Because our election system wastes millions of votes, the Conservatives’ 42 percent share of the vote is thought to be enough to give them a majority in the House of Commons.
Just as some Conservatives complained of the way Trudeau’s Liberals received more than their due share of seats in the last election, we can expect widespread disgust if Conservatives form a majority government despite the majority of voters voting against them. Remember, majority rule is said to be the hallmark of any proper democratic system.
Even though Canada has experienced 16 hung parliaments since 1867, most of them happening since 1963, the last two years were the first time two parties in the House of Commons signed a Supply-and-Confidence Agreement. It was revolutionary when it was announced, but now it seems people feel lost seeing it go by the wayside.
The vision of a minority government reeling from crisis to crisis and at any time facing collapse does not appeal. I hope that the House of Commons will see many more Supply-and-Confidence Agreements and other forms of cross-party co-operation, especially if we can reform our elections so in the future no party can take a majority of seats without a majority of votes.
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