Selected and edited from the Inroads listserv by Bob Chodos

From: Henry Milner | October 30

In his column in the Globe and Mail on October 18 Jeffrey Simpson is angry at Quebecers, but I am not sure why. It is not clear whether it’s because Quebecers who vote Bloc are committing a sin by supporting a party that effectively defends their interests, or because the Bloc remains committed to Quebec sovereignty. It seems to be the first, since Simpson’s wrath is also directed at Premier Jean Charest (who was pushed into Quebec politics in the 1990s by Ontario leaders – including Simpson – to save Quebec from the separatists), for whom, as for the Bloc, “nothing is ever enough.”

Jeffrey Simpson appears to have expected that because Parliament recognized Quebec as a nation (within a united Canada) and partially resolved the fiscal imbalance, Quebec francophones would have, out of gratitude, kicked out the party which identifies with their community – a community that constitutes a declining fifth of Canadians. “Now that we have recognized you as a nation,” he seems to be saying, “stop acting like one.”

The truth is that more than half of Quebec francophones voted for federalist candidates. Are they to be castigated because they split those votes among four parties? Had the federalist parties been as concerned as Mr. Simpson, they could have united against the Bloc.

In reality, Mr. Harper called this election because a Tory majority was in the offing, since the polls had his party running almost even with the Bloc in Quebec. But then he blew it; Gilles Duceppe ran a better campaign. Stephen Harper was unacceptable because he wasn’t a francophone, claims Simpson. But Stéphane Dion is every bit as much a francophone as Duceppe.

If the Bloc is really such a threat, an easy solution is at hand. The Tories and Liberals could agree to change the electoral system that gives the Bloc almost twice the proportion of seats as its share of votes. But they won’t because it is not in their interest to do so!

Ultimately, what it comes down to is Mr. Simpson blaming Quebecers for doing what everyone does: acting rationally in the given circumstances.

Henry Milner is co-publisher of Inroads.

From: Reg Whitaker | October 30

Henry makes some excellent points against Jeff Simpson, and I sympathize with his defence of Quebecers’ right to make their own decisions in their own interests. And yet ...

Happy as I was on election night to see Harper stymied from gaining a majority by the resurgence of the Bloc, Simpson does have a point. The BQ is not like the other parties in terms of the impact of BQ voting on the national system. All the other parties run as national parties, and even where they concentrate their support in some regions much more strongly than in others (the Conservatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan; the Liberals in urban Ontario), they make every effort to broaden their appeal beyond their regional core. These efforts are more successful in some cases than in others – in the Liberals’ case it was not very successful this time. But whether successful or not, they do try as it is in their electoral interests to do so.

The BQ does not try, and in fact appeals to its supporters precisely as a party that can speak only for them, because by definition it does not give a damn about anyone other than Quebecers. It seems to me that for many years now the BQ has had a dual face in terms of program: (1) sovereignty, but (2) parochialism. It’s as if they are saying to voters: if the sovereignty thing does not work out, well, hey, we will still be here to put Quebec not only first, but Quebec only, and no federalist party can do that because they purport to represent the rest of Canada as well.

It is obviously the right of Quebecers to choose a party that will play a parochial role in Parliament. And to be fair, BQ MPs in practice often act constructively on national issues. But ultimately, their presence as a force that will not and cannot cooperate with other parties in national office – in coalitions either formal or tacit – means that national politics remains fragmented and volatile. The frantic efforts of the other parties to counteract the grip of the BQ does mean as well that Quebec holds a leverage in bargaining that is held by no other province (Simpson’s point). This is a problem if Quebec is not seriously intending to embark on a sovereigntist path, and it is one that will be increasingly resented by Canadians outside Quebec.

Political scientist Reg Whitaker lives in Victoria, B.C., and is a member of the Inroads editorial board.

From: Gareth Morley | October 31

I propose a compromise. The Québécois get to vote tribally, and Anglos get to (tribally) bitch about it.

It’s worked so far.

Gareth Morley is a litigator with the British Columbia Ministry of Attorney General. All opinions expressed are his alone, and do not reflect the views of the Ministry of Attorney General.

The Schmittian moment

The listserv was at its most intense during the week of high drama between the Conservatives’ Economic and Fiscal Statement on November 27 and the prorogation of Parliament on December 4. In a post evoking Stephen Harper’s ruthless and vindictive “dark side,” Reg Whitaker noted that the Prime Minister’s “intellectual alter ego, Tom Flanagan, has made it abundantly clear that the steady, unswerving goal of the Conservatives is not just to defeat, but to destroy and eradicate the Liberal Party.” This elicited the following response.

From: Philip Resnick | November 30

The best-known book of the political philosopher John Pocock is entitled The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition. I evoke this study because I think Canadian politics finds itself at a juncture that can be characterized by a similar metaphor, something I would call the Schmittian moment. Carl Schmitt may not be a household name to most readers on this list, nor ought he to be. He was a 20th-century German political theorist and legal scholar of a hard-line Hobbesian disposition who supported Hitler at the time of his rise to power and who accordingly has left a rather tainted reputation in his wake. Yet he was a very important political thinker, and among other things someone who had a significant influence on Leo Strauss, the hero of contemporary neoconservative thinkers.

Schmitt’s most important and lasting work is a short essay published in 1932 entitled The Concept of the Political. In it he addresses the question: what is the essence of politics? He answers it with the sober response: being able to distinguish your enemy from your friend. The statesmen he most admires are those who knew who their enemies were – e.g., Cromwell denouncing the Spaniards in 1656 – and the political movements he most admires are not weak, wobbly liberal democratic ones but those that are similarly able to define their enemies.

Reg Whitaker was absolutely right to cite Tom Flanagan’s inflammatory article in the Globe and Mail suggesting that the Liberal Party was to be destroyed just as Rome had once set its sight on destroying Carthage. For a hard-line neoconservative like Flanagan, the Schmittian imperative suggests that you need to know your enemy and seek to destroy him. There is little room for nonideological mushiness or the niceties of political compromise. Stephen Harper, who seems to be a politician of an equally Schmittian temper, has shown his true colours in the events of the past week. He has behaved as though he has a parliamentary majority, when he does not. He has claimed to have legitimacy with the backing of 37 per cent of the electorate, and denied any similar legitimacy to the three opposition parties with the backing of 55 per cent of the electorate (62 per cent when you factor in the Greens). And, like the proverbial schoolyard bully, he has sought to rub the opposition’s noses in the dirt – both by refusing to treat the economic meltdown Canada is experiencing in a nonpartisan manner and by mischievously threatening to undo the current system of party financing.

Bob Rae was quoted the other day as saying that something had snapped on Thursday [November 27]. What snapped was the sudden realization by all three opposition parties that what they had to face was not a Progressive Conservative government of the kind that Canada has known in the past, but a neoconservative one, with Schmittian impulses. And the result has been to forge a movement to coalition between the Liberals and the NDP that a number of us on this list were advocating and debating before the last election with a sense of never-to-be.

The next eight days will tell us whether such a coalition will see the light of day, with an added bit of hot pepper in the form of a Bloc agreement to provide its support over the coming months. If that is indeed the way things turn out – and I, for one, devoutly hope that it is – it will be because Harper was so smitten by his neoconservative zeal that he forgot that a Schmittian moment can also lead one’s opponents, whom he treated as bitter enemies, to reciprocate in kind.

Philip Resnick is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a member of the Inroads editorial board.

The coalition’s questionable legitimacy

While many listserv contributors supported the proposed Liberal-NDP coalition, others were more hesitant to jump on the bandwagon, as the following two posts indicate.

From: Henry Milner | December 2

A year ago Ontario voters rejected electoral reform and set back any hope of such needed change for a generation. The process set up for consulting the population was (deliberately?) flawed and allowed opponents to portray it as a power grab by party hacks away from the voters. This is what I fear will happen if the proposed Liberal-NDP government takes power. So far there has been one positive development, namely that Harper threw the Grits and NDP into each other’s arms. This could move us toward the kind of institutionally based centre-left cooperation that pretty much everyone agrees would be good for this country.

Given the basic party support patterns in this country, such cooperation can be expected to take the form of a Liberal-NDP coalition propped up by the Bloc as proposed by the three leaders Monday. The question is whether now is the time. I fear that if this alternative government takes power now, it will in fact set back the prospects of real change, prospects heightened by the fact that the opposition parties have actually proven able to cooperate.

Instead of making what will be denounced as a power grab, the deal should have been on how to act as a concerted, principled opposition, and how to take that experience to the electorate when the time comes, to seek a mandate based on a program for governing together – and, ideally, including a plan to change the electoral system to one that does not have built in disincentives to such cooperation.

Why will this new government be seen as a power grab? Fundamentally, its legitimacy rests on its representing Canadian voters. Had the Liberals and NDP combined won more seats than the Tories, then a coalition between them would have justified denying confidence to the Harper government after the election. When a legitimate government wins a lot more seats in an election than it had before the election, the fact that its opposition chooses to work together is not sufficient for removing it. The election produced a Parliament with the Liberals and NDP combined having far fewer seats than the Tories. The fact that the Bloc promises not to topple this government for 18 months doesn’t change this. Were the Bloc part of the coalition, that would be different, but that is inconceivable; indeed, Duceppe goes out of his way to insist that his only commitment is to vote for the budget and speech from the throne for 18 months.

So the legitimacy of the coalition, as Dion and Layton claimed, rests on some kind of emergency: that they should govern based on their commitment to save Canadians from the economic crisis. I suspect that public opinion will see this as transparently false, since the Conservatives have in effect promised to do much of the same thing in a budget before the end of January.

My hope is that the unfavourable reaction and the knowledge that this will be exploited by the well-resourced Tories will result in cooler heads prevailing in the opposition parties and that they will climb down – just as Harper has.

But it may be too late to stop the train. If we do end up with a coalition government based on the announced deal, it should have no illusions about governing for 30 months. Given its illegitimacy, it would probably need to, and should, seek a mandate from the people at the first reasonable opportunity – say after the Liberals choose their leader. But I can easily envisage it all backfiring, handing the Tories a majority they could never win under normal circumstances.

From: Garth Stevenson | December 2

I agree with most of Henry Milner’s comment on the parliamentary crisis. Talleyrand’s remark when Napoleon Bonaparte kidnapped and shot a political opponent is perhaps apropos: “It is worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.” But putting Talleyrand’s cynicism to one side, this is a crime as well as a mistake.

Our country, and the entire world, is facing the worst economic crisis since 1929. The automobile industry, the basis of Ontario’s economy, is on life support. The TSX fell by almost 10 per cent on the news that this farcical coalition agreement had been arrived at. And Mario Dumont is right to wonder why the Bloc, if it has any principles, would agree to support a government headed by the author of the Clarity Act.

Do we really need or want, in these circumstances, a descent into Italian-style politics? Do we really need or want a lame-duck prime minister who drove his party down to the lowest level of support in the 160 years of its existence? Do we really need or want any kind of coalition, when the last one we had was 90 years ago, and was itself a total disaster? Do we really need or want to risk the resurgence of western alienation that will inevitably occur if a party that won every seat except one in Alberta and Saskatchewan is removed from office within weeks of the election, on an utterly trivial and self-serving pretext which is no longer even relevant, since Harper has agreed not to abolish the subsidies to political parties? Do we really want to leave the interpretation of the subtleties of Westminster-style government in the hands of an attractive woman with no political experience, who was appointed to her job so that the Liberal Party could demonstrate its concern for so-called visible minorities?

Face it, guys. The Conservatives won the election, fair and square. I didn’t vote for them, but that’s the way it is. And the Canadian people certainly don’t want another election at this point in time. And to suggest that, because 26 per cent of the voters voted Liberal and 18 per cent voted NDP, therefore 44 per cent want a coalition between those two dissimilar parties is utter nonsense. (I could use a less polite expression, but I won’t.) No one discussed such a coalition during the campaign, and no voter had any reason to expect it.

Having started with Talleyrand I will end with a more respectable source, Thomas Jefferson: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

Garth Stevenson is Professor of Political Science at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Iggy’s choice

At the end of January Parliament returned, the Conservative government introduced a budget and the new Liberal leader decided to support it. The question for the listserv was whether Ignatieff had made the right decision.

From: John Richards | February 1

This week, Michael Ignatieff undertook his first strategic decision as Liberal leader: to support the Tory budget and simultaneously jettison the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition. He made the right choice.

I start with an argument shared by most of us living west of Toronto. We want to reorient federal politics away from Quebec. From Trudeau to Chrétien, excepting the hiccups of Joe Clark, John Turner and Kim Campbell, Canadian PMs have founded their careers on the dilemmas of Quebec-ROC relations. Trudeau, Mulroney and Chrétien are all products of Montreal political culture. Fair enough: responding to Quebec nationalism matters. But so do other things. There are now more Canadians living in Canada’s two westernmost provinces than in Quebec. Whatever else divides those west of Toronto, one thing unites us: we want Ottawa’s priorities to shift away from Quebec concerns. The coalition guaranteed that would not happen.

There are other arguments:

1. The budget is tolerable

A serious world recession is upon us, and partisanship on budgetary matters should be used only as necessary. It was undeniably necessary to counter Harper’s ideologically inspired November Economic and Fiscal Statement, a document that played down potential economic contraction, minimized the limits of monetary policy and failed to consider the case for fiscal stimulus. Thanks to a near-death experience in December, the Tories have jettisoned the Economic and Fiscal Statement and, in their January budget, applied fiscal stimulus of a magnitude (relative to size of GDP) similar to that in other major OECD countries. Many of the budget proposals are mildly progressive – for example, the personal income tax cuts. Which is a good thing: low-income taxpayers will spend a higher share of their cut than will the wealthy, and hence the “bang per buck” of deficit spending is higher the more progressive the tax cut.

In an attempt to please everyone, the budget doles out money to a long list of interest groups – a list far longer than I could come up with on my own. The tradeoff in distributing money and tax cuts so widely is an absence of credible strategies to address overarching goals that could benefit from public monies. Some argue this is all to the good: government cannot pick winners, and in the context of recession, stimulus should be delivered in as neutral a manner as possible. I disagree – see point 3 below.

2. The coalition parties are so intellectually incoherent they are not to be trusted with running the country

A feature of the Bloc and NDP is that they have abdicated any real claim to represent all Canadians. They have defined strategies that turn on advocacy for their respective core electoral bases: francophone Quebecers and unionized workers. The proof is that they never advocate policies that, in the short run, imply costs to their electoral base. Would the Bloc ever oppose a piece of pork doled out to Quebec? Would the NDP ever defend a policy that envisioned reduced subsidies to the unionized auto industry?

Ironically, the Liberals under Dion did just that: they proposed a policy, carbon taxes, that inflicted short-term pain on core Liberal voters in the name of an overarching goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Dion was not the ideal salesman. But the NDP and Bloc behaved abysmally. They made common cause with the Tories and found disingenuous rhetoric whereby they denounced carbon taxes and simultaneously claimed to be as green as a spring meadow.

Ignatieff’s tactical goal is time: time to rebuild his party’s finances and time to define strategies that appeal beyond the remaining rump supporters: urban elites in Toronto and Vancouver, immigrant urban enclaves, Anglo-Quebecers and clients in Atlantic Canada.

Here I speculate. Ignatieff probably aspires to be a centrist reformer in domestic policy, and is clearly not at ease with strategies built on traditional labour demands or nationalism. He doubtless associates the NDP with “old Labour.” While no supporter of Margaret Thatcher, he recoiled from the “old Labour” defence of subsidies to state-owned coal mines and support for entrenched union power. And while the Bloc leaders are far removed from the xenophobia of the Balkan nationalists whose atrocities galvanized Ignatieff’s interventionist thinking in foreign affairs, he no doubt sees in the Bloc the same willingness to oversimplify and interpret events in terms of past sins of outsiders.

3. What “overarching goals” should Ottawa address via the budget?

In an excellent article entitled “The Big Fix” in today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt discusses Obama’s analogous dilemma: how to spend money quickly yet realize some overarching goals.

Leonhardt leads off with a quote from Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste ... it’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.” The benefit of the recession-induced crisis is to weaken narrow interest groups that have hitherto blocked reform. Obama can choose a few “big” goals with a reasonable chance of success. The three that Leonhardt identifies in the Democrats’ stimulus package are:

• credible greenhouse gas policies, as the crisis has weakened corporate and union resistance to pricing greenhouse gas emissions (there will be a cap-and-trade emissions scheme, which will probably be equivalent to a carbon tax, and to which Canada will be obliged to adhere);
• dramatic increases in spending on K–12 public education in an attempt to raise mediocre U.S. education performance relative to that of other industrialized countries; and
• universal health insurance.

Canadians enjoy universal health insurance and there is little Ottawa can do to improve the health system. This is primarily a provincial matter.

The Tories suffer ideological blinkers on climate change policy, and the Liberals are smarting from the “green shift” fiasco. These are short-term political realities. Nonetheless, the budget should support a wide range of green initiatives: subsidies to green technologies, subsidies to construction but only if it incorporates dramatically better energy conservation design; spending on urban public transit systems provided municipalities curb auto use (by tolling bridges, by transferring arterial road lanes to buses, by implementing congestion tariffs). To say the least, much of this is controversial.

Overall, K–12 school performance is better in Canada than in the United States, but that is to damn with faint praise. Dropout rates are unacceptably high in some provinces (among francophones in Quebec and in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Atlantic Canada) and among marginalized groups, Aboriginals in particular. Like health, K–12 education is primarily a provincial matter, but Ottawa’s spending power can go a long way in prodding the provinces to better education performance.

John Richards is co-publisher of Inroads.

From: Reg Whitaker | February 2

There is much to agree with in John Richards’s measured defence of the Ignatieff strategy, but I must beg to differ on the essential point: that supporting the non-Conservative Conservative budget and jettisoning the coalition was the right choice.

Smart it may have been, from a partisan Liberal perspective – in the short run. Media commentators have been falling over themselves to bestow the Mackenzie King Award on Iggy for his Machiavellian manoeuvring out of the coalition clutches and into the stance of a credible alternative (down the road) to the much diminished Mr. Harper. The budget if necessary, but not necessarily the budget. Never do today what can be put off to tomorrow. These and other King-like maxims of ambiguity and deception have transformed the office of the Leader of the Opposition from an opéra bouffe into a passable imitation of a functional war room. Ian Davey, son of the legendary Keith who successfully marketed Pearson and Trudeau, now sits as Iggy’s chief honcho and declares that his model for relations between his office and the media is – Stephen Harper, who knows a thing or two about how to keep the media in their place. Now that’s encouraging!

Toronto Liberals like Davey clearly believe that they are on the cusp of recreating the old Government Party, free of the annoying entanglement of the allegedly leftist NDP. It is possible, barely, that the Iggy-led Liberals could displace the Harperites in the next election, but likely only as yet another minority government. Liberal majorities were enabled in the past only on the foundation of (1) a “solid” Quebec base until 1984, and (2) a “solid” Ontario base from 1993 to 2000 (I put solid in quotation marks because solidity was only in seats, not in votes, an artifact of the electoral system).

Foundation 1 is highly unlikely to be restored with the Bloc in place, even if as polls now indicate the Liberals are a close second behind the Bloc in Quebec – second or even a close first in competitive races will not yield a solid bloc of Liberal seats as in the past. Foundation 2 died the moment that Harper united the Right and will not return in the foreseeable future. The result is that the Liberals are very unlikely to win a majority because the NDP takes enough out of the Liberal vote in English Canada to keep them in a minority. Hence they will have to deal with the NDP if they wish to maintain a reasonably stable minority government (dealing directly with the Bloc is out of the question, as witness the hostile reaction to the coalition with Duceppe attached). But this is precisely the bridge that Iggy just burned.

Mackenzie King was not always a brilliant strategist. Luck was often on his side, along with an often inept Conservative opposition. The problem with clever tactics as an end in themselves is that they may turn out cumulatively to be bad strategy (viz., Harper). I wonder if today’s Liberal tactics may not turn out to be dubious Liberal strategy tomorrow. It is not just the burnt bridge to the NDP. It is also the perception of yet another pusillanimous Liberal backdown after the usual partisan bluster against Harper.

Iggy critiqued the budget well enough, and then refrained from proffering any substantive amendment that would reflect that critique. The so-called “accountability” amendment is a bit of a joke: surely the Tories can plaster together a report card that will offer yet another opportunity for the Liberals to head collectively for the bathroom when there is a chance to show Harper the red card (there is always another day to fight when there are “winning conditions”). The voters ultimately will have a choice between a Conservative government with an inauthentic policy in which they do not believe but are willing to toss out to the boobs to stay in office, and a Liberal opposition too gutless to shoot down a policy they claim to find wanting.

The Obama administration is attempting to use the crisis as an opportunity to transform Reaganite-Bushite America into something different and better, and to enhance the role of the federal government as the instrument of democratic reform when the market has been failing. There is of course no guarantee that they will succeed, but the effort is exciting and hopeful for progressives. Our Bushite government no more believes in this kind of opportunity than R.B. Bennett really believed in his 1935 “New Deal.” And where are the centre-left progressives in this country with exciting ideas for restoring the role of the public sector and achieving great things together in the face of capitalist crisis? Well, playing Mackenzie King, biding their time, waiting for the electoral tide to come in, and then do what exactly? Government by a kinder, gentler Harper in a red jacket instead of a blue sweater? Where are the alternative policies? Where is the alternative vision?

The coalition is dead and buried, but while it lasted it did at least offer the Liberals a direction away from the muddled middle of their past and present, as did Dion’s abortive fling with the Greens. And in the event that Iggy becomes a minority PM, they will have to dig up the corpse and resuscitate it. What seems clever today may not appear so clever tomorrow.

PS: John, the Quebec thing is not the best argument against the coalition. Duceppe had no hold over the two partners for his Quebec pork barrel; he promised to support them for two years whatever they did.

Political scientist Reg Whitaker lives in Victoria, B.C., and is a member of the Inroads editorial board.

From: Henry Milner | February 2

I agree with John that supporting the non-Conservative Conservative budget and jettisoning the coalition was the right choice for Iggy. But not for the same reasons.

1. John’s first argument is regional, i.e. the idea that blocking the coalition would reorient federal politics away from Quebec. It may be believed by westerners, but that doesn’t make it true. The fact is that both the Tories and Grits want to win majorities and will have to cultivate Quebec if they are to have any chance at all. In reality their chances are slim. And without single-party or coalition-based majority government, under the current electoral system the Bloc will be overrepresented and will have to be given its due.

2. The other reasons he gives are related to policy. But these really don’t matter much. The reason the Liberals won’t talk about changing the electoral system is the same reason that they don’t believe in a coalition (the exception, I think, is Bob Rae, but he grew up politically outside the Liberal family). Liberals believe deep down that they, alone, are Canada’s natural governing party. It was useful for Iggy to have the coalition as a cudgel to get Harper to make appropriate noises, but it is a cudgel he was loath to swing.

3. And that leads to the real reason the coalition was a bad idea. It lacks legitimacy. If there was any real basis for the coalition, the Liberals and NDP would have been meeting, would have together crafted a response to the budget (saying it was not bad enough to bring down a recently elected government), and would have put together a team to begin to draft a document setting out the principles for a common program to take to the people in an election after they together (on an agreed set of guidelines) did ultimately bring down the government. Only in such a context could the Canadian people see the coalition as a real – and thus legitimate – alternative.

Henry Milner is co-publisher of Inroads.

From: Reg Whitaker | February 2

Henry’s point that “the real reason the coalition was a bad idea [was that] it lacks legitimacy” is quite right. Which leads me back once again to the argument that only uniting the centre-left (a Liberal-NDP and perhaps Green merger) will actually lead to a realignment that can break the hold of the minority neocons over Canadian politics. Of course a proportional representation system might facilitate postelection coalition building. However, with persistent minority parliaments under first-past-the-post, coalition building was tried in December and worked only to force the Conservatives into a halfhearted backdown from their ideological nostalgia – not to forge a working partnership that could endure past a change in Liberal leadership. Moreover, the Liberals will have to face working with some other party if Iggy wins a minority in 2009 or 2010, and that leaves the NDP as the only viable partner. Some time down the road these guys are going to have to swallow their egos (quite a menu in Iggy’s case, I grant) and do what Harper and MacKay did for the Right in 2004. But the past two months have only made that harder, not easier.

From: Arthur Milner | February 2

The problem with what Ignatieff has done is that it returns us to politics as usual. For a moment, there was excitement in the air – excitement on the centre-left, outrage on the right, but it still added up to excitement, and a rapid political education.

Now we can go back to sleep. When was the last time we had a Liberal leader so devoid of an actual point of view – so restrained that, with everything in his court, he is nonetheless unwilling to use the power of Parliament to exact a few interesting changes to the everything-for-everyone-except-environmentalists budget? How fitting that he now finds himself where Dion found himself – talking tough while caving in to Conservative legislation. What an opportunity wasted!

And our political class applauds his maturity.

Sure, as Henry says, the coalition would have lacked legitimacy. But is this pas-de-deux by dancers who have abandoned all belief legitimate to anyone besides our political class? Well, I guess so, since it’s our political class that bestows legitimacy. But it’s an impoverished political class and an impoverished legitimacy.

So now we have a lame-duck Conservative leader who has shown us his new, more attractive, servile side; and a lame-duck Liberal leader who can’t do anything risky since he blew his credibility and capacity for risk forever by supporting the big lie in Iraq.

Perhaps the biggest story is the coup in the Liberal Party, now restored to the apolitical centre where its establishment is most comfortable.

The U.S. gets Obama. We had the possibility of a shakeup and a centre-left coalition government. Now we get one opportunist propped up by the other opportunist in the hope of a majority government some day. Is that as good as it gets?

One last rant. Is there another democratic country in the world where the electorate hasn’t got a clue what will happen if the government is defeated? Will we have an election? Will the opposition be asked to form a government? Yes, if the government falls before a certain date? What date? Or an election whenever the defeat happens? No one knows. No one asks. No one seems to think the electorate has a right to know. No one talks about it. Let’s get rid of the Governor General and ask the Pope to make the decision. Then we just have to watch for smoke from the chimney of the Vatican.

This is Canada. It is so dull as to be beyond belief.

No we can’t.

Arthur Milner is a playwright and theatre director and a member of the Inroads editorial board.

From: Ian Malcolm | February 2

There’s something 1913ish about the sentiment in Arthur’s post; it’s reminiscent of the lament, “We need a good clean war to rid us of this tepid bourgeois complacency and revive our spirit of greatness.”

As for Obamaenvy, should Ignatieff immediately back Obama’s support for extraordinary rendition? Should we pray for the Bank of Montreal to collapse so that people can suffer while Ignatieff can, Obama-style, scold the bankers and do nothing else? Obama is a breath of fresh air, but he’s not exactly Gandhi – or Hugo Chávez.

Ian Malcolm is Senior Publishing Editor (humanities) at the European office of Princeton University Press in Woodstock, England.

From: Arthur Milner | February 3

Let’s see: A desire for a more responsive politics – and even for an unprecedented coalition government that represents a large majority of voters – is “reminiscent” of a desire for a war that killed tens of millions. Gosh, that’s a good comparison.

Is there another democratic country in the world where the electorate doesn’t know whether a government defeat will be followed by an election or an effort by the opposition to form a government?

From: Anthony Westell | February 3

I don’t quarrel with the argument that Iggy made the right decision, but I’m not so sure that ideological differences with the NDP make a coalition impossible. It’s true of course that Canadian voters reacted strongly against the recent proposal for a coalition, but how much of that was based on the fact that the Conservatives had just been elected, and how much on the idea the BQ would share in the government? What unbridgeable policy differences divided the parties in the last election? It appears to me that unless the centre-left can cooperate it will always lose to a united centre-right.

Anthony Westell is a retired political reporter and columnist.

From: Ian Malcolm | February 3

It’s the lament that Canada is dull and the mourning of lost excitement that’s reminiscent of 1913. Yes, I exaggerated the comparison to make the point.

Personally, I like dullness.

Anyway, if there isn’t any other country with such electoral uncertainty, that makes Canada kind of exciting doesn’t it?

From: Richard Nimijean | February 3

Anthony writes, “What unbridgeable policy differences divided the parties in the last election? It appears to me that unless the centre-left can cooperate it will always lose to a united centre-right.”

Funny how time flies. A decade ago we were saying the same thing about the Liberal ability to benefit from a divided centre-right (the Tories and the Reform/Canadian Alliance)...

I would be careful about making such predictions, given the propensity of the centre-right to divide itself. The first cracks are already starting to appear, repeating events from 20 years ago.

Richard Nimijean teaches in the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.

From: Anthony Westell | February 3

Richard Nimijean makes my point exactly when he writes, “A decade ago we were saying the same thing about the Liberal ability to benefit from a divided centre-right (the Tories and the Reform/Canadian Alliance).” As we know, the centre-right united and has won the last two elections against the divided centre-left – and will go on winning until the centre-left unites.