Further from Peter Russell

This is just an incredible commentary on the state of our democracy by one of our truly great scholars:

Finally a Voice of Sanity

From constitutional expert Peter Russell. I cannot improve on or add to this:

When the House does meet and no party has a majority, there are basically three ways of forming a government. First, the Conservatives can simply carry on as a minority government hoping to win support, issue by issue, from opposition MPs. Second, either the Conservatives or the party that finishes second in seat numbers can form a legislative alliance with one or more other parties that would agree to support them on the basis of a shared legislative program. Such an agreement between David Peterson’s Liberals (who finished second to Frank Miller’s Conservatives) and Bob Rae’s NDP gave Ontario a stable minority after the 1985 provincial election. In this option, the parties supporting a Liberal or NDP government would not have cabinet positions. The third option is a coalition government in which two or more parties form a government and share cabinet posts.
All three options are constitutionally legitimate. Indeed, in the dozens of parliamentary democracies around the world, it’s highly unusual for any party to have a parliamentary majority. Governments in most of these countries are either coalitions or single-party minorities supported through alliances with opposition parties.
If the Conservatives don’t win a majority on Monday, Mr. Harper isn’t likely to try to form a coalition government or make a legislative alliance with any opposition party. So what would happen if his government fails to win the support of any opposition party when the House meets in late May or early June and is defeated on the Speech from the Throne?
At this point, constitutionally, Mr. Harper has two options. He could resign and advise the Governor-General to invite the leader of the party with the second-largest number of seats, either Michael Ignatieff or Jack Layton, to form a government. Or he could advise the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament and call another election.
It’s the second case that lands us in a “constitutional crisis” similar to the Byng-King affair of 1926. The principal that the Governor-General must be guided by in considering Mr. Harper’s request is that a prime minister’s advice (even if the prime minister has lost a confidence vote in the House) should be rejected only if doing so is necessary to protect the integrity of our parliamentary system. Calling an election, the fifth in seven years, just a few weeks after the last election when there’s a plausible alternative government that can command the confidence of the new Parliament may well be such a situation.
Of course, it all depends on whether Mr. Ignatieff or Mr. Layton can make a plausible case that a government one of them heads will be supported by a majority in the House. The Governor-General will need more than their good intentions to have the compelling case he needs to justify rejecting the Prime Minister’s advice.
If Monday’s election produces a House in which no party has a majority, let’s hope our political leaders have the good sense to work together to avoid a Byng-King constitutional crisis.

Into the Bunker

As the red hordes roll on toward Ottawa, bizarre speculation and a retreat to bunker mentality are beginning to become apparent. So this from our national paper of record:

Stephen Harper is refusing to say whether he would accept a decision by the Governor General to hand power to the opposition parties in wake of the May 2 election.

Mr. Harper is warning voters the next government will either be a Tory majority or a coalition government led by the New Democrats. He warns a Conservative minority would be short lived, defeated by a coalition.

But he declines to say whether he’d accept a decision by the Queen’s representative in Canada to give an opposition party the chance to govern - rather than, say, demanding the Governor General call another election instead.

With just days before a ballot, he says it’s a hypothetical question.
Mr. Harper however has spent the entire race since March 26 campaigning on a hypothesis: that his rivals would oust him from power should he fail to win a majority and instead form a coalition to take office.

The fall of the regime is never pretty.

There is neither inflation nor the risk of inflation

For two years now we have been bombarded with dire warnings about the risk of inflation. Never actual inflation, but the risk. The sky might fall. This is ideological rhetoric. The wealthy, having been bailed out by the state, now want to stick us with the bill. Sort of financial "dine and dash." This is particularly true of our neighbors, who are contemplating choking off the recovery in order to lavish more wealth on the rich. Here is a look at inflation in the U.S.:

This is much ado about nothing by people with an agenda.

From the Horse's Mouth

 This from one time Harper chief of staff and academic mentor Tom Flanagan on Harper's anti-democratic instincts:

The Conservative campaigning approach has been built around two realities: a low ceiling on the popularity of right-of-centre viewpoints in Canada, and a low-engagement political environment. That's governed pretty much everything this government does, in and out of campaigns.
Mr. Harper's proposed solution to this political conundrum was best seen in 2008. In that campaign, he parlayed to a near-majority by creating conditions where three quarters of a million Liberals stayed at home, rather than vote for the caricature that had been made of Mr. Dion. Mr. Harper made the Conservatives big by making the Liberal vote small. This year's campaign has sought a reprise of that success. But seeking to work around the low conservative-minded ceiling by working a low-engagement environment hasn't just pervaded the 2011 campaign. It's been the basic story of Mr. Harper's government, something I've argued in other posts (Ringside: March 29) and elsewhere.
The core strategy, using low engagement politics to equalize a low support ceiling, is mirrored not only in campaigns, but also in the government's public policy strategy. Lacking sufficient public support for a conservative shrinking of the federal government, Mr. Harper's administration has ducked debate on such matters, and instead has simply gone about quietly withdrawing Ottawa from several areas of national life. It has avoided a debate where the majority would prevail against it. Generally, the quiet deconstruction has worked. People, we've been told, just don't care. Well, sometimes. Other times, many of the government's most awkward moments have come when quiet burials -- prorogation, long-form census, Kairos funding -- suddenly drew unwelcome attention.
This brings me to the final pillar of the Harper Conservative strategy: populist centralism, which is my neologism for Mr. Harper's frequent nudges of our Westminster parliamentary system towards some de facto species of direct election of the prime minister. This populist centralism has not only accelerated the long-term, multi-party subordination of cabinet to the PMO; it has arguably resulted in the wholesale sidelining of the Legislature in favour of the Executive. That's something new.

The favoured tactics of Latin American autocrats. This government cannot go soon enough!

Canadian Complicity in Afghan Torture

From Truthdig, outlining Canada's complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. Key passage:

For the European members of NATO - especially the British and Dutch - the political driver was the need to distance themselves from a U.S. detainee policy already tainted by accounts of U.S. torture.
The U.S. and Canada supported such transfers, however, in the belief that NDS interrogators could get better intelligence from the detainees.
The transfers to the NDS were a direct violation of the United Nations Convention against Torture, which forbids the transfer of any person by a State Party to "another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

Perhaps Prime Minister Layton will have a Parliamentary committee look into this, as both Ignatieff and Harper have made their agreement with such policies quite clear.

Our Very Own Facebook/Twitter Revolution

The NDP is closing in on first. And the push is coming from the young. In an election that was timed to discourage university students who would be in the process of heading home at the end of the term, it would appear that they simply voted in advance polls.

With four days of campaigning left, support could soften. But it would seem plausible that there will soon be two members of Parliament living in Stornoway, and perhaps soon after, at 24 Sussex.

If a majority of Canadians are seen next Tuesday to have voted for a progressive alternative to the Harperites, there is no reason why such a government should not be formed after a proforma defeat of the Conservative budget.

The Fearmongering Begins

With the socialist hordes just days away from capturing Stornoway and perhaps even forming a minority government following a second defeat of the Harper budget, the horror stories are beginning.

This morning, we learn from Adam Radwonski in the Globe and Mail that Layton's (and the NDP's) pandering to soft Quebec nationalism will bring on the separatist apocalypse. Yesterday, we were told that market jitters were the result of fears of NDP advances. I wonder if anyone has saved the billboard that was on Bay Street during the Rae years showing Rae with donkey ears and talking about the dangers of a hard left government.

So transfer your life savings to the Caymans and stock the basement with canned foods.

The Church in the Service of Power is Not the Church

From my friends at Jesus Radicals, this reminder of what Easter is and what the Church, as the presence of Christ in the world and not as an institution in service of power, is:

Jesus’ life was one of resistance to the civilized, religious world. Jesus’ life demonstrated a completely alternate way of living called “the Kingdom of Heaven” in which the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten, the neglected, the widow, the orphan, the child, the prostitute, the sick, the lame, the blind, and the dead were treated as kings, and the kings were treated as outcasts. The poor fisherman is royalty in this Kingdom, yet the rich man cannot get there any more than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. This Kingdom mockingly tells us to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, simultaneously rejecting the imperial currency system and reminding us all that “the Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” – what is left for Caesar anyway? This Kingdom lays claim to those who have been possessed by demons, who have been blind from birth, who have been spat on and walked over by the most pious religious leaders, and restores them to abundant life. This Kingdom preaches repentance and the forgiveness of sins, not by works or by following rules, but by the grace of the King. Jesus embodied and inaugurated this Kingdom; He preached this Kingdom; He brought disciples in to further this Kingdom.

What do you think the existing kingdom (the Roman empire, including its subservient rulers and citizens in Judea) thought of this alternate Kingdom? They thought of it as a threat. They thought of it as an affront to their “King”, their “Savior”, the man they called “the Son of God”. And they were right! Jesus’ Kingdom stands proudly and boldly in direct opposition to the kingdoms of this world. 

When in Doubt Screw the Workers

While waiting for markets to open this morning I came across this news from the U.S. Fed. Janet Yellen, one of Obama's oh so progressive Fed appointments, is assuring markets that inflation isn't much of a threat. Though commodity prices are rising and corporate profits are at all time highs, declining wages (and of course this means the lowest paid workers) will keep inflation in check.

Those workers at Walmart and McDonalds sure are wonderful. Not only do they work for next to nothing. But by giving up healthcare and education for their children they will help pay for all the money given to Wall Street billionaires. And now they are going to keep the world safe for expensive oil and middle-east adventurism. Oh, and of course it is their children who do the fighting and dying.

I sure hope that in all their pain, they remember to just say no to drugs. Because we wouldn't want the expense of putting them in jail in these inflationary times.