NOVA SCOTIA VOTES
Minority government Q&A
Last Updated: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 | 3:00 PM ET
CBC News
In Nova Scotia politics, 27 is a magic number. For a political party to have a majority government, it needs to win at least 27 of 52 seats in the legislature.
This hasn't been an easy thing to do in recent elections. In 2003, the Progressive Conservatives under John Hamm ended up with 25 seats. In the last provincial election in 2006, voters gave Rodney MacDonald's PCs only 23 seats.
So, Nova Scotia has had two PC minority governments in the last six years. With fewer seats in the legislature than the combined total of the other two parties, the PCs have had to rely on the support of opposition MLAs to pass a budget and stay in power.
We turned to David Johnson, a political scientist at Cape Breton University in Sydney, for a primer on minority government in Nova Scotia.
Has minority government been successful in Nova Scotia?
As with so much in politics, the answer to this is conditional upon one's ideological perspective and one's predisposition to minority governments in theory.
Conservatives will likely say that the current MacDonald minority government has been OK and has done the best it could under the circumstances, but that the government was limited as to the long-range economic plans it could develop due to its minority status. Likewise, New Democrats and Liberals will likely attack the MacDonald record for representing a failure of leadership in that the government should have moved closer to adopting more New Democratic or Liberal policy positions as the case may be.
The key factor about a minority government situation is that the governing party cannot pass legislation and sustain policy and programs solely on the support of its own members. A minority government is just that, a government where the governing party possesses only a minority (usually a leading plurality) of the seats in the legislature, meaning that for the government to pass legislation and sustain policies and programs, its measures must gain the support of one or more other parties, such that the combined votes of the parties involved amount to a majority of votes cast on any given measure.
For a minority government to survive, then, it must usually seek to promote policies and programs that can garner the political and legislative support of one or more other parties in the legislature. In the Nova Scotian experience where there are three parties represented in the house of assembly, the governing party has needed to gain the support of at least one of the opposition parties to sustain its legislation.
This means, in practice, that the governing party must seek reasonable compromises with one of the opposition parties, promoting policies and programs that one of the opposition parties can support so as to gain their backing in legislative votes and confidence measures in the house. By and large, this has been accomplished.
Can you give an example of how it has helped or hurt Nova Scotians?
This process of compromise-seeking and compromise-making can be hard on both governing parties and opposition parties willing to engage in such behaviour.
It is hard because each party has to compromise on principles and policies and seek arrangements with another party that neither party would accept were they in a majority government situation. Hence every party campaigning for a majority government, and hence party activists usually downplaying the effectiveness of minority governments. All party activists will always say that the best governance will come when their party forms a majority government, giving their side unfettered power to develop and implement policies and programs they most desire.
Having established this framework, I believe minority governments have been good for Nova Scotia, simply because they have compelled the governing party to work with one or the other opposition parties so as to gain reasonable compromises on policies and programs, and past budgets.
Since 2003, Nova Scotians, in their collective wisdom, have seen fit not to provide any party with majority power. So since 2003, the governing Progressive Conservatives have been compelled to seek reasonable accommodations with either the New Democrats or the Liberals. Resulting policies may not have been as visionary or as forthright as any one party would wish, but the compromises here have tended to reflect Nova Scotia's centrist and moderate political traditions.
How long do you think we can continue to have minority governments in this province?
For as long as Nova Scotians continue to return minority legislatures. Again, while no party leader, MLA, or party activist actually wants to see a minority government, I think most Nova Scotians have come to see that minority governments can work well for this province and that minority governments can be quite responsive to the needs and interests of Nova Scotians.
But minority governments do result in compromised governance. If and when a strong plurality of Nova Scotians find a party and a leader that they are enamoured with, possessing and advocating a policy platform that attracts them and speaks to them, then watch to see Nova Scotians vote for that party and leader, giving them a strong majority government so that their desired policies and programs can be efficiently implemented.
The task of the current parties and leaders, then, is to establish and articulate such a policy platform that a leading plurality of Nova Scotians would find intelligent, reasonable, doable, just, compelling and visionary. No simple feat, but the party and leader that can do this will earn their majority government status.
We have a minority government at the federal level. How does it compare?
While all minority government situations share the basic dynamics of the governing party requiring the support of one or more opposition parties to sustain its legislation, budgets and policies, the current federal Conservative minority government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been somewhat unique in that the Conservatives have pretty much been able to govern as if they had a majority due to the historic weakness of the federal Liberal party following the fall of Paul Martin, and the inept leadership of Stéphane Dion.
For the better part of three years the federal Liberals had been fearful of precipitating a federal election for fear of falling even further in public support. This enabled Harper to force the Liberals to either support his proposed legislation, or to abstain "en masse" so as not to trigger a fall of government and a new election.
Now, with Michael Ignatieff at the helm of the federal Liberal party, and with the party showing greater support in recent public opinion polling, this Liberal fear of an election is dissipating and we are beginning to see the return of more "traditional" minority government behaviour in Ottawa, i.e. the return to compromise-making between the government and one or more opposition parties. The recent federal stimulus budget is a case in point.
