Yuan Yi Zhu is a research fellow at the University of Oxford.
The basic rules of a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy are deceptively simple. The person who can command the confidence of the house becomes prime minister; an incumbent prime minister has the first shot at forming a government after an election, regardless of his seat count.
In Canada, Justin Trudeau is now on his second consecutive minority government, to apparent no ill-effect for his ability to govern.
This is thanks to a confidence and supply deal with the New Democratic Party. In both of the last elections, he won a plurality of seats, though he came up second in the national popular vote, the result of the Liberal Party’s bottoming popularity combined with its frustratingly efficient regional vote distribution.
But what will happen and the polls suggest that it might – if, after the next election, the Liberals came up second in the vote count, but still form a government once again, thanks to some coalition politics?
According to the orthodox view, business will carry on as usual. There is nothing to stop the second- and third-largest parties, say, from getting together and stopping out the plurality party from governing as long as they have the necessary number of votes in the House of Commons.
But Andrew Coyne, an erratic, though sometimes insightful Canadian columnist, has recently raised the possibility that such an outcome will lead to a political crisis.
His argument is essentially that Conservatives have been committed, at least in recent elections, to the view that the biggest party in the House of Commons ought to be the one forming the government. If the Conservatives have the most seats, but are cut out of government by a left-wing coalition, things could get ugly.
Coyne raised this scenario in order to push for one of his pet projects, namely electoral reform. But it is nevertheless worth pondering about how his scenario will play out for the Tories.
The most recent precedent, and the origins of the Tories’ view that the biggest party ought to govern, dates from 2008, when the Conservatives were in a minority government under Stephen Harper. The second, third, and fourth largest parties in the House of Commons signed an agreement to oust the Conservatives through a vote of non-confidence, and to form a coalition government in its stead.
Harper immediately branded the motley bunch as a “coalition of losers”, and had the governor general prorogue Parliament. By the time it returned after Christmas the coalition was no more, having collapsed in the meantime. There were protests across the country, but most voters shrugged, and gave a majority to the Conservatives two years later.
But 2008-2009 is not a perfect precedent. The coalition government would have been a minority one (the Quebec separatist Bloc Québécois was willing to non-confidence the Conservatives, but not to take part in the ensuing coalition government). Far more importantly, Harper was the incumbent and could simply prorogue Parliament and wait for the opposition to fall out among themselves.
This time, the Liberals will be the incumbents. They will have control over the timing of the calling of the new Parliament, which can happen weeks, if not months after the polls close. In the meantime, they can negotiate a coalition agreement at their leisure, whereas there is no party that could plausibly enter into a coalition with the Conservatives.
What can Pierre Poilievre, the Tory leader, do in these circumstances? He can, and most likely will, attack the Liberals for forming another coalition of losers; but beyond this he has little leverage. Canada’s media is overwhelmingly hostile to him, and the weight of constitutional precedents, if not necessarily of political morality, will be against him.
From there, it is but a short walk to being branded an election denier (Canadians love to copy America’s pathological political language), which will scare off the Ontario suburbanites whose support Tories need to have a political future.
The better solution would be for Poilievre to win the next election outright. But frustratingly, despite leading in several dozens of polls, Conservatives are not polling nearly well enough in the seat-rich Greater Toronto Area to win an overall majority, and banking millions of votes in solidly blue western seats will do nothing for their prospects of forming a government.
Worse still, Coyne raises an even bleaker possibility for the Tories: that of the Liberal-New Democrats confidence and supply arrangement lasting indefinitely.
A decade ago, the two parties were still sufficiently dissimilar to prevent this; the Liberals more business centrist, the NDP still retaining some of its radical labour movement heritage. But Trudeau has turned the Liberals into an unapologetically progressive party, so that there are few obstacles to an open-ended alliance between the two.
Harper was able to win a rare Conservative majority in 2012 partly because the progressive vote split in a way highly convenient for him. If the two main parties of the left manage to form a durable alliance, the Tories could be kept out of power federally for a generation or more, despite being the biggest parliamentary party, while Trudeau turns Canada into an even more unrecognisable country. To many Canadians, this is a prospect that does not bear thinking about.