Prime Minister Mark Carney in the House of Commons in Ottawa.David Kawai/Reuters
It is no secret that, after coming just shy of winning one in last April’s election, Prime Minister Mark Carney is after a majority government. Now, as MPs return to a crisis-time Parliament, Mr. Carney finds himself on the brink of that majority for his Liberals.
It may be just a matter of a handful of seats in the House – with winnable by-elections looming and three Conservatives having crossed the floor – but those seats could have a huge effect on how the Liberals could govern.
In Canadian politics today, where party caucuses vote as monoliths, clear majorities afford governments the ability to legislate as they see fit without having to sweat such piddling details as maintaining the confidence of the House. The fact that political power has been centralized in first ministers’ offices only makes majority control all the more alluring.
The Prime Minister says he is not angling for a spring vote. And on Sunday, he announced byelections for three vacant seats on April 13, a step inconsistent with an imminent general election. Mr. Carney has reportedly discussed the merits of a snap election with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who himself called an election last year in pursuit of the “clear mandate” he said he needed to give Ontarians “a loud voice” amid the U.S. trade war.
Carney, Ford discussed idea of an early federal election to secure majority, sources say
Canadians must resist such thinking. A majority government is not a necessary counterweight to global instability, nor is it a carte-blanche endorsement of a government’s approach – and chasing one is a crassly self-serving reason for calling an election so soon after the last one. There are many benefits to minority governments that must not be lost in the facile narrative that only majority might makes right.
Minority governments can encourage collaboration, ease polarization, and show Canadians that their democracy is working – a feeling worth fostering, in the face of the U.S.’s existential threat.
Certainly, Canadians have had an opportunity to become comfortable with these purportedly unstable government formations. In the past seven decades, 13 of 23 federal elections have returned minority governments, including five of the last seven. Under both Liberals and Conservatives, minority governments have achieved big things in hard times: William Lyon Mackenzie King brought in old-age pensions before the Second World War; Stephen Harper stabilized the economy during the 2008 financial crisis; Justin Trudeau oversaw the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is true that minority governments cannot offer assurances about time horizons; they can fall at any given time over a confidence vote, so all parties are forced to remain on campaign footing. But that is both a feature and a bug.
Carney announces three federal byelections for April 13
The major achievements of past minority governments wouldn’t have been possible without the need to broker deals with opposition parties to retain that confidence. In so doing, Ottawa can produce policies and programs that are actually more representative of the Canadian will, since the first-past-the-post system gives a majority government 100 per cent of the power over the legislative agenda and committee work when a party only wins a plurality of the votes.
Of course, minority governments’ most durable achievements did not come from cordial consensus. For instance, historian Rick Archibold has described the debate over the Maple Leaf flag, adopted by Lester B. Pearson’s minority government during the Cold War, as being “among the ugliest in the House of Commons history.” But conflict and struggle is the very engine of a healthy parliamentary democracy, in which the opposition is empowered to hold the government in check, and better policy can be forged from the heat of disagreement.
Majorities do provide stability for a governing party; it is undeniably easier to govern with one. By this thinking, such “strong” governments act decisively on one mandate endorsed by the people. But true strength is achieved by competing interests working together to maintain a space where politics is possible. Minority governments force parties to understand that this space is worth carving out; iron-grip majorities can reward the arrogant idea that conformity is the same thing as unity.
Canadians should not malign minority governments as weak. That premise rests on the assumption that this country is not strong enough to endure heated debate and deliberation – democracy. It may be harder work, but that hard work is what Canadians elected their representatives to do.