Liberals find a third way on Conservative budget

Most people assumed that the Liberals had two options for the federal budget that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative presented yesterday. The Liberals could have announced their support, showing them to be as weak and capitulating as they were under former leader Stéphane Dion. Or they could have voted it down, which could have risked plunging the country into its fourth federal election in five years, something that certainly would not have been good for Canada’s economic stability.

But Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff found a better way, a third way. In his announcement earlier today, he and his Liberal caucus put the Conservatives and their budget “on probation” – neither voting it down, nor giving it whole-hearted support, either.

This is wise for a budget that no one saw as 100 percent bad nor 100 percent good. The reviews have rightly stated that the budget is a long way from the Conservatives’ poison-pill “financial update” of last fall, which is ideologically driven and lacking in any measures to help stimulate the economy.

This current budget may not go far enough – there is nothing addressing the nation’s Employment Insurance problem, for example – but there is a minimum amount of stimulus to keep the economy moving.

One of the biggest complaints from all of the opposition parties is that Stephen Harper is not to be trusted. Sure, the budget numbers are OK, they argue, but you can’t trust the Conservatives to show them the money when the time comes. Therein lies Ignatieff’s politically creative genius.

The Liberals will introduce amendments to the budget calling on the Conservatives to produce three accountability reports, detailing how the Conservatives are doing in terms of producing the economic stimulus they now promise. These reports will also be confidence motions, so if the Conservatives do not reach the economic targets they set in their own budget, they can and likely will be voted out of office.

This is the ultimate in accountability for a Conservative party that loves to talk about accountability, but rarely likes to apply such principles to itself.

All this is also better politics – and policy – than the knee-jerk reaction coming from NDP leader Jack Layton and Bloc Québécois head Gilles Duceppe. They decided before they even saw the budget that they were going to vote it down.

And I feel their pain. Like Layton and Duceppe, I would much rather see a left-wing coalition government than sit through any more time with Harper’s Conservatives in power. The government should have been voted down after the financial update was issued last fall, and Harper should never have been allowed to prorogue Parliament in order to avoid a non-confidence motion. That was a corruption of democratic principles, and both Harper and Governor General Michaelle Jean are to blame for that.

But the current budget should not be judged based upon Harper’s past behaviour, but on what the current budget offers and the ability of Harper to keep his promises. And the Conservatives are not likely to vote against the Liberal amendments for fear of being seen as anti-accountability.

Harper, whether he feels it in his heart or is just doing it to save his political skin, seemingly learned something from his near-death scare before the prorogation. Now it is up to Ignatieff and the Liberals to make sure those lessons stuck.

If they didn’t, then it will finally be time to throw the bums out.

It’s about time for Liberal/NDP coalition

While Conservatives are spinning out of control, trying to convince the public that a coalition government is undemocratic, I have just one thing to say: What took the Liberals and NDP so long?

We saw shades of such a coalition back in 2006, when Paul Martin and his Liberal minority worked with Jack Layton’s NDP to come up with the budget. The government fell – taking that ad hoc coalition with it – only after Layton decided he didn’t want to play ball anymore.

But now with the spectre of another couple of years of an emboldened Stephen Harper, Layton decided it made more sense to cooperate with – rather than bash – the Liberals.

Although some hard-core partisans are balking, the Liberals and the NDP are natural coalition partners. Frankly, except for the separatist issue, so is the Bloc Québécois.

All three are left-of-centre parties with more commonalities than differences. All three parties agree, more or less, on issues ranging from the economy and infrastructure to arts funding and gender equality. And certainly, these three parties have more in common with each other than any of them have with the Conservatives.

Even on an issue like climate change, the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc may have different ideas on how to handle the issue, but at least they all agree that it is a crisis that needs to be addressed. That’s in contrast to the Conservatives who still want to stick their heads in the ice as it melts around them.

Although the seeds of this agreement were planted some time ago, the Liberal/NDP coalition did not crystallize just because it could. It happened because Harper pushed them into it. He overplayed his political hand, expecting Stéphane Dion’s Liberals to continue to sit on their hands while Harper’s minority ruled as if it had a majority.

Right after the Oct. 14 election, Harper – who won another minority government – vowed to work with the opposition parties to make this parliament work. Well, so much for cooperation. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty issued a “Financial Update,” complete with the unfortunate if appropriate acronym “FU,” that was void of any plan to handle the current economic meltdown.

Instead, it included ideologically driven proposals – such as limiting the public sector’s right to strike and decimating the public financing system for elections – that Harper knew would not be acceptable to the opposition. Again, Harper was expecting the Liberals to just roll over and play wait-for-the-next-leader dead.

Even more disingenuous is the Conservative argument that a Liberal/NDP coalition is undemocratic and/or unconstitutional. Under the parliamentary system, what the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc have proposed is completely acceptable. The Conservatives won neither a majority of the vote (just 38 per cent in this fall’s election) nor a majority of the Commons seats (143 out of 308). So collectively, the left-of-centre parties won a majority of the vote and a majority of the seats.

Under the Constitution, if the Harper government falls because it no longer has the confidence of a majority of the House of Commons, it is Governor General Michaelle Jean’s duty to ask the opposition if they can form a government. All the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc have done is worked out that they would be able to step in and take the reins.

Harper, as usual, has been acting as if he were an American-style president, rather than a Canadian prime minister. But as Bush has been his role model, he should have been looking at Barack Obama’s transition to power, and how Obama is putting competence ahead of partisanship in picking his new cabinet. It is Obama who is working with his rivals – from both parties – to form a new government.

But instead, Harper was still reading from the Bush “you’re either with us or against us” playbook, a manual that has yellowed quickly and is fraying at the seams.

Harper and his minions are now trying scare the public out of supporting the Liberal/NDP coalition, arguing that in this fall’s election, people didn’t elect Dion.

Well, Mr. Harper, a majority of Canadians didn’t pick you, either. You had your chance to play nice, but you refused. It’s time to leave the sandbox.