O Canada, when did you get so macho? The federal election campaign is already registering red on the testostero-meter. Stephen Harper says he's willing to go mano a mano in a television debate, and Michael Ignatieff tweets back: "A one-on-one debate? Any time, any place." Tweets at dawn, gentlemen: Please take 140 characters, turn around, and hit send.
I had to fan myself, and I can't remember the last time that happened during a Canadian campaign. It's thrilling to watch, like a pair of elk locking antlers in rutting season, or two WWE wrestlers, freshly greased, threatening to pull each other's hair until one of them screams.
Which is why it's so odd that the C-word has crept into this bloodthirsty atmosphere like a mouse into a classroom full of kindergarteners - and I don't mean a truly scary C-word, like cancer or crabs or constitutional reform (or contempt, for that matter). It's "coalition," of course.
Kicking off his campaign, Mr. Harper warned: "On May 2, we will choose between stable national government and a reckless coalition; between a low-tax plan for jobs and growth, and a high-tax agenda that will stall our recovery, kill jobs and set families back."
Quite apart from the fact that it's impossible to actually vote for a coalition, and that he wasn't quite so dismissive toward the idea not so long ago, the scare-bomb seems to have worked. Mr. Ignatieff unequivocally ruled out the idea of a coalition should his party not win a majority of seats in the House of Commons, though judging by the heated comments on message boards, there's a significant percentage of people who aren't buying his line.
Taken at face value, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are on the same side of this issue. Perhaps Mr. Harper is trying to raise the spectre of all those coalition governments in Europe, where politicians in shiny shoes are constantly bickering, gridlocked over matters of policy, where stalemate leads to four elections in seven years. … Oh, wait. Never mind.
What seems odd, watching from across the ocean, is that this bogeyman has dominated the campaign so far: Who's afraid of the big, bad coalition? What are people afraid of, anyway? In Britain, the year-old coalition government of David Cameron's Conservatives and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats - the first since the Second World War - is suffering not from too much friction, but too little. Far from dithering, in one year the British government has embarked on a hugely ambitious program of spending cuts and health-care, tax and education reform. You might not like their ideological program - and many don't - but you can't fault them for inaction.
Like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier handcuffed together in The Defiant Ones, they've taken a potentially messy situation and learned how to move together (if not necessarily forward). In the run-up to last May's election, Mr. Clegg was as coy as a wedding-night virgin, refusing to say whose bed he might find more appealing, although he indicated he didn't want to wake up with Labour if Gordon Brown was still its leader. He ended by cozying up to Mr. Cameron, largely because he won the right to a referendum on the Lib Dems' pet cause, a system of alternative voting. (That referendum, largely lost in the noise of the royal wedding, will be held May 5.)
The two leaders are now so politically indistinguishable that Mr. Clegg was lambasted for a remark he made this week after appearing at a question-and-answer session with Mr. Cameron. Not realizing his that microphone was still on, he said: "If we keep doing this, we won't find anything to bloody disagree on in the bloody TV debates." Needless to say, the leftists in Mr. Clegg's party would like to give him a bloody pounding.
Coalition governments are a continental phenomenon, as European as passing laws to regulate the size of bananas. Sometimes - don't look now, Canada - separatists are even involved, as with Spain's nationalist Catalan parties, who have used their power in Madrid to prop up governments and further their own political ends. Sweden is governed by a coalition of centre-right parties. Of course, the potential for chaos is high, as when Holland's coalition government fell to pieces last year. Angela Merkel seems to spend most of her time plugging leaks in her sinking coalition and barking, "Get over it," in German.
This week, Belgium set a record for commitment phobia when it entered its 42nd week without a government, though you may have failed to notice. The impasse has caused financial turmoil, but it's not like the country stopped working, or frites stopped frying. Belgian political parties, divided along cultural and linguistic lines, have united to govern in the past, but at the moment refuse to play ball. That's macho, but it's hardly something to aspire to.