Don Newman on Parliament's return
- October 16, 2007 5:29 PM |
- By Your Voice
CBCNews.ca welcomed Senior Parliamentary Editor for CBC News and the host of CBC Newsworld's daily program Politics, Don Newman, on Friday, October 19.
- Download the audio of the interview (Runs 26:11)
What Stephen Harper really wants
By Don Newman
Stephen Harper wants one. He really wants one.
An election? Well yes, but only as a means to an end. What he really wants is a majority.
Then he can put through the House of Commons all the legislation he thinks the country needs without those three pesky opposition parties having any real say in the matter.
Harper's problem at the moment is that his Conservatives have only 126 seats in Parliament, about 20 short of a majority in the 308 seat House.
So he has devised a plan. He is going to increase the number of votes in the Commons that will trigger an election. How will he do that? Harper says he will make votes on every important piece of legislation a "matter of confidence." That means if the Liberals, Bloc Quebecois and New Democrats team up to defeat any of these bills, Harper will go to the Governor General and ask for the current Parliament to be dissolved and a date set for the next election.
In most cases, only votes on the throne speech, the budget, the bills implementing the tax changes in the budget and the spending estimates are automatic confidence votes and election triggers. But bills that go directly to a government's legislative agenda can sometimes fall into that category as well.
In this vein, Harper now says the vote on his new, revamped anti-crime bill will be a confidence measure, even though the revised bill pulls together five anti-crime bills from the last session, none of which required a confidence vote then.
And if the new anti-crime bill passes, well, there will be more confidence votes attached to other pieces of legislation that, until now, would not have automatically triggered an election if they had been defeated.
So the prime minister is calling the opposition parties’ bluff. If they all want to take him on, they can trigger an election and he can try for a majority that would finally let him put through the Commons any legislation he wants.
Or, they can back off and vote to put his legislation through anyway. As though the Conservatives did indeed have a majority.
Either way, it works for Stephen Harper.
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Comments (4)
If Harper gets his desired Non-Confidence vote, can the Governor General ask the Liberals to form a government?
I appreciate that it makes no sense to do so in a Majority situation, but this is a Minority scenario and a three party union can govern, since it would have the majority of seats.
Don Newman
In theory yes, but no. No.
Host Bob Sudeyko
As you say, they haven't ever done that.
Don Newman
Well what happened in 1926, this is a really brief history lesson, the Liberals had retained power after the 1924 election, but they weren't the largest group in the House, the Conservatives were but the Liberals had made a deal with a small party called the Progressives which gave them the working majority. Well then the Progressives left the Liberals and the Liberals were defeated, King asked for the election but the Governor General, who was a man named Lord Byng, said "well actually you're not even the biggest group in the House I have to constitutionally ask the largest group to form a government" and he did and then they were defeated because the Progressives wouldn't support them either. So the Liberals aren't the largest group in the House, the Conservatives are, it's been a year and a half since the last election, if Harper got defeated then there would be an election.
The Throne speach mentioned staying in Afghanistan for a longer period of time.
If this is the case, and it's already decided by the PM what should be done, what's the point of having the committee that he appointed only days ago?
Don Newman
Well it's interesting because a week before the throne speech this committee is appointed. And it's given a mandate to report back by the end of February next year. In the throne speech the government says it thinks that Canadians should be in Afghanistan until — what it says is — the Afghan police and the Afghan army won't be able to take over by themselves until 2011. The current mission is set to end in February 2009 and the Manley committee is meant to recommend what Canada does after that. So where the ambiguity in the throne speech is in the Harper policy for the moment, do we stay until 2011, but after 2009 we are just training the Afghan army and the Afghan police, or are we still in some kind of combat role as well? And I think that's where the ambiguity is and it's not entirely clear, and maybe the Manley committee will be able to add a little clarity to that, although a lot of people see it mainly as a political manoeuvre, a clever manoeuvre by Harper to get a Liberal he knows is pro-war to head a committee mainly of Conservatives and to give a recommendation back that is kind of embarrassing to the Liberals, who reluctantly, 25 of them supported extending the mission to 2009, the rest of them didn't. Which is about 72, or 73 of them and so the party is split on that anyway and so it looks like it was more a manoeuvre, a political maneuver by Harper than a real interest in what the committee thought about Afghanistan.
Hello Mr. Newman,
Even if the Liberals buckle in the commons, how will Mr. Harper get any legislation through the Liberal dominated Senate?
Don Newman
Well that's a very good question and it's a very interesting question right at the moment. This is another example of where Harper has to really be careful he's not too smart by half. His new confidence votes, or his new confidence vote, although there'll be three on this bill in the House of Commons, is on a new crime, sort of mega-crime, anti-crime bill. But it really contains four bills that went through or were introduced in to Parliament last session and three of them had gone through the House with ammendments and were in the Senate and the Liberals were taking their time with them in the Senate and the fourth one hadn't gone through the House. So what Harper's done, which is on the face of it rather unusual, he's taken all four bills and put them in to a new bill and he's reintroduced it as one bill.
Host Bob Sudeyko
Does that start the process all over again?
Don Newman
It does. And so he could've either not prorogued the House and kept the last session going so that three of those bills could be in the Senate and the other one could be dealt within the House or he could have tried to get the bills reinstated at the spot where they were in the Senate and in the House before prorogation, they ususally do that, they call it a reintroduction bill and they just lump them all in to one bill and he decided not to do that so he's now reintroducing three things that have already passed through the House back in to the House. And it's a good strategy to force some confidence votes but when you think about it as a practical matter, if you really want to get legislation through and govern then you wonder why you'd do it over on three of them. The other this is of course, when it goes through the House, as it probably will, it will get back in to the Senate and then I guess the Liberal senators will have to decide whether they want to blink or not. But I think it'll depend on, you know the polls change, in two months the polls could look quite a bit different than they do now. Or they may not, they may look almost the same or the Conservatives may be even higher. But remember the Liberals in the Senate said "oh we're gonna drag out the budget because we don't like the treatment of the Atlantic provinces, this is the budget sort of back in the spring, and they got the bill the last week of June, parliament was to rise for the summer, and "oh we're gonna be here until August," well the fact is they passed it pretty quickly and went home at the end of June just like everybody else. So my guess is they will take a, they'll test the political winds when they finally do get the bill and then they'll move it along fairly quickly if they think the polls still favour the Conservatives.
Do you think Mr. Harper's strategey will back fire on him if he forces and election with these "confidence" tactic?
Candaian's are notorious for voting people out of office as a means of punishment. As most Canadians do NOT want an election at this time won't he be takening the greater risk by forcing the issue.
Host Bob Sudeyko
If they haven't brought down the governement over the throne speech earlier in the week, what other issues are out there that you think that they might — cause we have a lot of confidence votes coming up now — might they bring the government down on?
Don Newman
Well this is interesting because this is like people think Harper wants an election and Harper's kind of boxed himself in. Traditionally, a Prime Minister can go almost anytime to the Governor General and ask for an election, and it has not been since 1926 that a Governor General has declined to grant an election and since that was such a constant crisis, an election came shortly after anyway and Mackenzie King who asked for the election wasn't granted one and the Conservatives formed a very short lived government and then were defeated and asked for an election. King won a huge majority so since then Governor Generals have basically given an election when asked. But the Conservatives as part of their program in the last election have fixed election dates the way they are now in a number of provinces including Ontario, so they have actually legislated that the next election will be on October the 19th, 2009. So once they've put that in to law it's very hard for Harper to suddenly go and say "well now I need an election" so instead he's tried to arrange for more confidence votes on pieces of legislation which traditionally would not be confidence votes and he's hoping at some point that he'll get himself defeated on one of those and that will trigger an election. The other thing that's going to happen, there's going to be what they call a fiscal update, there is every fall, it sort of sets the stage for the next budget which comes at the end of February and the budget fiscal update can be a mini-budget if they want to make it that and there's some suspicion the Conservatives will announce tax changes in the fiscal update and then put bills in, in the house to enact those changes. Those would then all become automatically confidence votes, all money bills are confidence votes. There are a number of ways Harper could try and engineer his demise. Whether or not, you know we were talking about that in our office today, how would the Liberals now go about engineering the defeat of the government if they suddenly want to do it, having allowed the throne speech to go through without opposing it. They might look a little silly, the way Harper would look a little silly if he just went after an election when he's already said it shouldn't be until October 19, 2009 so they've both boxed themselves in a bit is the short answer.