A minority government is best suited to manage Canada in a crisis

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A Liberal majority looks all but inevitable. Three Conservative MPs and one New Democrat having crossed the floor, the Liberals now have 170 seats out of 343 in the House. A probable sweep of the three by-elections scheduled for April 13 would leave them with 173, enough to outvote the combined opposition even without the help of the Speaker.

That’s a tenuous achievement, to be sure. All it would take is the loss of a couple of MPs, whether to resignation, ill health or disaffection, to throw the government back into a minority. But in the offing lurks the prospect of a snap election, in which the Liberals, based on current polls, could safely be predicted to win more than 200 seats.

Naturally, a great many Liberals – though not all – find this idea highly attractive. But even many non-Liberals seem strangely drawn to the notion. For some Conservatives, it offers the chance to rid themselves of a leader they do not like or believe in. More common are those non-partisan types who yearn for a majority government of some stripe, “the firm smack of authority” we need in these turbulent times.

You hear a lot of this sort of thing. Canada, it is said, is in an unprecedented crisis, its very existence under attack. In such circumstances, it is argued, we can ill afford the divisions and uncertainty of minority government. We need a government that can speak for the nation, that can make decisions and get things done – as only majority governments can do.

The diagnosis is right. We are in a crisis. And we do need to come together as a nation in the face of it. But the very worst way of encouraging this is a majority government.

Editorial: The major plus of minority governments

In the first place, a majority government under our electoral system almost never represents an actual majority. Recent elections have seen “majority” governments formed with less than 40 per cent of the vote. Had a few thousand votes gone the other way, the Liberals might have managed it in 2019 or 2021 with as little as a third.

Worse, the typical majority tends to be drawn overwhelmingly from one part of the country or another – again, because of our electoral system. One hundred and fifty-two of the 184 seats the Liberals won in 2015 came from Ontario and points east. The Conservatives’ majority in 2011 was won with just 19 seats east of Ontario.

Yet these and previous governments interpreted these results as mandates to impose sweeping changes on the parts of the country that didn’t vote for them, often at their expense. This is not the sort of thing likely to engender feelings of national unity.

Contrary to their reputation, minority governments have been responsible for some of the most important developments in this country’s history. Mackenzie King introduced the first national pension program and negotiated Canada’s autonomy as a sovereign and equal member of the British Empire, all without a majority. Lester Pearson created much of the modern welfare state while similarly unadorned.

Opinion: Floor-crossings are part of a Canadian tradition – and fair play in our politics

What we call “minority” governments are, in fact, the real majorities: they just aren’t single-party majorities. The Pearson, Trudeau, Martin and Trudeau the Younger governments all depended on the NDP to pass legislation: combined, the two parties’ share of the vote in every case exceeded 50 per cent. Possibly because passage of these bills had to be negotiated, rather than imposed, they have proved enduring achievements, with lasting cross-party legitimacy.

Legitimacy is the key word here. Parliament has little enough power to hold governments to account in minority situations. Under majority governments, it disappears altogether. All of the worst, most abusive tendencies of governments – forcing Parliament to pass dozens of bills of vastly different purpose at one go, in the form of “omnibus bills” hundreds of pages long; cutting off debate, just when things are getting spicy, in the name of “time allocation”; ensuring committees do no real scrutiny of government business, and so on – are given free rein.

When this happens it isn’t just the legitimacy of government that suffers, but of Parliament itself. As Parliament fades in the public mind, so does the idea of a self-governing people to which it is answerable, the nation it is supposed to represent. That’s at least as much of a threat to national unity as anything else we face.

What we need at this time is not government by ramrod, but genuine consensus-building. We have some tough decisions to make, it is true. All the more reason to ensure that those on the losing side of these decisions feel they have been heard, their concerns understood, their losses compensated. That’s far more likely under a minority government than a majority.