Coalition, or a civics lesson, or a rant

I am amused by the antics of Erin O'Toole to try to deflect questions about his COVIDIOT caucus by focussing on a (possible) NDP-Liberal coalition government. It's like the CPC think a coalition is a scary anti-democratic form of government.

Let's review, shall we. There are 338 seats in the House of Commons (170 seats for a majority government), distributed as follows after the 2021 election:

(I'd do a fancy chart, but blogger hates those things.)

Party            Seat Count      %seats        %pop vote        Rep pop seat (totals 317, rounding)

Liberal         159                    47%            32.6%            110

CPC             119                    35%            33.7%            114

BQ                32                    9%                7.6%               25

NDP              25                    7%                17.8%            60

GP*                2                    <1%                2.33                8

Independent    1                    <1%

As we can see, the seat distribution between parties does not match their percentage of the popular vote. This is because of how those votes are distributed. The CPC party tends to win their ridings in Western Canada with huge surplus votes. The Liberals tends to win votes more efficiently, by winning more seats with smaller margins. Given our current first past the post system, that's the way it works out. 

Cries from the CPC supporters about the Liberal government not being legitimate are from people who do not understand how our system of government works. Ignore them. If they don't understand this, the certainly don't understand equalization. The tribe of monkeys pounding on typewriters will produce not just the works of Shakespeare, but the entire Western literary canon, and then sheep bleating in the pasture will get Wagner's Ring cycle perfect note for note, before those people understand equalization.

Under our current system, the Liberals will hold power till Justin Trudeau decides to call an election, or the Liberals lose the confidence of the house by being outvoted on a confidence issue. Technically speaking, that could happen after the Throne Speech in late November, by the CPC, BQ, and NDP all voting together. I think that extremely unlikely. Under these circumstances the Governor General would almost certainly hand government to the CPC and invite them to form a government. Which I can't see them doing, given they have to get the support of two other parties, both of which hold policies quite different than the CPC. 

So the Liberals need to find 11 other votes to maintain the confidence of the house and pass their legislation. There are 55 seats in the two minor parties to work with, both of them with policies that are broadly similar to the Liberals. A bit of political judo and hey presto and tada! 

Typically in a minority government, those required votes come from the other parties on an ad hoc basis. Technically there is an informal agreement between two or more parties to vote together on certain issues, sometimes even holding their nose and voting against their own policies. Why might they do that? Money. They can't afford to fight another election, and they don't want to look like the ones that triggered the election. That party tends to be punished in the following election. Yes, there is a bit of an element  of a huge game of chicken happening, but I think that just makes the players pay a bit more attention to the game, which is a good thing. As long as everyone is competent and can count votes, it works out pretty well. The case study is the fall of the Joe Clark government in 1979.

Minority governments in Canada have tended to be fairly productive, all things considered. The concept of having to get the support of other parties eventually trickles into the minds of the governing party, and they tend to make practical concessions to make the legislation more palatable. That is, of course, until one of the smaller parties thinks the time is ripe to get ahead by forcing an election.

The more formal arrangement is an actual coalition government. This doesn't happen much at the federal level, being associated with political events of 100 years ago. Quebecers still remember the conscription issue, and it's hangover drives politics today. 

None the less, it's a legitimate form of government. The Liberals and NDP could negotiate the terms, typically some number of cabinet and committee seats. Add in some role within government, and they would govern as a majority until the next election, which could be up to 5 years later, but would typically be around 4 years. A minority government usually lasts about 2 years, it taking that long to rebuild the bank accounts.

This is hardly subverting democracy. Either by seat count or popular vote, the Liberal and NDP together hold a majority. How they work together day to day is up to the party leadership. They would have 184 seats, which would be called a comfortable majority. They could allow several votes to stray on matters of conscience to help maintain governmental unity. There's been lots of majority governments with a bigger seat count. 

The CPC party in opposition with 119 seats is hardly a hobbled opposition. They have the resources to research the issues and hold the government to account, as the opposition likes to say. That their caucus is divided on several fronts, and estranged from popular Canadian opinion on a major topic is their problem. They ought to be thankful it's going to be years before the next election. 

The astute of my readers will have noticed a 4th column of data, showing the number of seats each party would hold if distributed according to the popular vote. This is an imperfect science, given the number of votes for entities other than the major parties. How rounding is dealt with is the bane of all proportional representation vote schemes. 

However, let's imagine what would have happened if Trudeau had instituted some form of proportional representation like he promised, and seats were broken out as given, with the 21 seats not accounted for being distributed to the other parties on the same basis, so the CPC and Liberals each get another 7 or 8 seats, and the BQ and NDP split the rest, and maybe the Greens get one. 

If you look at the numbers, we are in exactly the same place, albeit with tighter margins. The Liberals and NDP together just squeak over the 170 majority government threshold. The CPC seat count doesn't change much, but the smaller parties have a bigger seat count. (Yes, I know that the BQ only running candidates in one province complicates things like a national percent of votes calculation.)

This is why it's going to be difficult to do away with our Westminster system (or first past the post, as it's commonly called). It rewards parties that can build a broad coalition across the country, relying on getting a few more votes than the next biggest vote getter in each riding. A broadly acceptable platform and a bit of vote splitting, plus a soupcon of voter apathy, and a pinch of wedge political messaging, can and does win a majority government with about 36% of the vote. If we added the NDP vote to the Liberal vote, they would have had an overwhelming majority.

The smaller parties tend to do better out of a prop rep system. Above, note the Green Party would have had 8 to 10 seats instead of 2. They might have squeaked into official party status, and qualified for more funding. As it is, it is entirely possible for a party to be somewhat popular across the country, perhaps consistently being in 4th place behind the major parties and ahead of the whackadoodle fringies, but end up with zero seats. Even the NDP is under represented, getting almost 18% of the vote in the last election, but only getting 7% of the seats. Rather than 25 seats, they would have got about 60.

There are several proportional representation systems, and all are somewhat more complicated than our first past the post system. None are 100% fair in allocating votes, (no voting system is) but all are more fair than Westminster. What's likely to happen is that several such systems could be put forward for the voters to choose from. I predict that the current system would get more votes than any individual prop rep system, but that prop rep overall will get more votes. I'd like to see a non-partisan commission with public input determine which system is best for Canada. There is no shortage of other countries to look at for examples. Do a public education campaign, and have a one to one referendum. (Not that I'm particularly a fan of referendums.) I'd like to think the prop rep would win, and then we'd be into a new era, where coalition governments or various forms of informal working arrangements would be routine.

Another photo from the night shoot last week. This essentially takes all 285 photos and lays them over top of each other. The shows the motion of the stars, as well as all most of the airplanes and satellites. Some of the fainter lines get lost in the star trails. There's also a movie of the same chunk of sky which makes it easier to see the airplanes and satellites. You can see it here. 

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