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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 7, 2008
Battered
Good news: for at least till the time of filing this column, the rest of the world was still not following our constitutional crisis. As a once-proud Canadian who hopes to be proud again, eventually, I don't want them to notice. We are family; this is a family affair. Fortunately for us, the rest of the world has enough crises of its own -- and ours is rather complicated, and does not involve bloodshed (touch wood).But here in Canada, the attempt to overthrow the government by means that are constitutionally possible -- by using the letter of the constitution to defeat its spirit -- has successfully held popular attention. That we are now campaigning on whether the government we elected is legitimate bespeaks a constitutional order sliding into the mire. For at the root of all our constitutional instruments -- those written in law, and those written into the heart by precedent -- is the notion that election results confer legitimacy. The specific proposal of the three opposition parties, which includes an undertaking by the Bloc Québécois to support a Liberal-NDP coalition for at least 18 months, flies in the face of our constitutional traditions. An unelected prime minister must, by precedent, go to the polls within six months of obtaining the job. Louis St. Laurent took a little more than seven months, but was at least in command of a party that had actually won the previous election. This principle is crucial. In previous decades, newly appointed ministers of the Crown, including the prime minister, had to resign their seats in the House of Commons and recover them in byelections to establish their democratic legitimacy. This proved over time an impractical arrangement, itself open to finagling and abuse, so it was dropped. But the memory testifies to the commitment of the Fathers of our Confederation to democratic legitimacy: no change of ministry without going to the people. The issue today is not whether you like Stephen Harper. I don't like him, I might even think his measure to cut off public subsidies to political parties, which triggered the opposition insurrection, was tactically foolish. For as George Jonas wrote in the National Post, you do not take a bone away from three rottweilers without expecting them to bite. But the argument over whether we like Mr. Harper is irrelevant. If the opposition parties want to force an election on any issue at all, they are in a position to do so. If they wanted to run as a coalition in that election, they could do so. But they are not prepared for another election, they fear the possible result, and so they are demanding power without an election. We might argue till the cows come home about whether the majority of Canadians actually voted against Mr. Harper in the last election, and whether he might have lost had a hypothetical coalition of soft socialists, hard socialists, separatist socialists and eco-socialists been running as a united bloc. They weren't, so that discussion is also irrelevant. Canada's voters did not choose to put an alternative ministry in power. We in fact voted to give the Liberal party under Stéphane Dion its worst whipping in Canadian history. And that is the party and the man now trying to form a new ministry, with the support of parties to the farther and separatist Left, on the assumption that a Liberal-appointed Governor General will be complaisant. This is an absolute outrage against the Canadian constitutional order. But it is also an outrage against the current electorate, who needed a government to deal with an economic crisis, and chose Mr. Harper as the most reliable leader from the available alternatives. We have an opposition that has, even before succeeding in its putsch, created a constitutional crisis that can only distract from the economic crisis. But whereas an economic crisis will solve itself over time (even as the politicians act to perpetuate it, with bailouts to all the failed business operators, and the debt that entails), a constitutional crisis can only snowball. Already we have republicans -- on both Left and Right -- citing the mess to advance their old cause of getting rid of the monarchy, the office of governor-general, the Senate, and anything else that looks antiquated to them. As if our impending constitutional crisis weren't big enough, getting rid of the monarchy would require another Meech Lake. And it could be stopped dead, in exactly the same way, by any provincial legislature, at any time, over three years. We may all thank the late Pierre Trudeau for creating the amendment formula in question, by which the monarchy remains secure until we are prepared to contemplate the complete destruction of the country. Meanwhile we are now in thrall to people who propose to solve a manageable problem by creating an insoluble one, which does not solve the first problem, and can only lead to more insoluble problems. In other words, to people like Messieurs Dion, Layton, and Duceppe, who act without considering the destructive consequences of their acts, and will use any means to the end of personal power. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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