May 20, 2008

Canadians hoped that this minority government would deliver
what a decade of Liberal majority governments could not - -
accountability.

Harper's Conservatives swept into power like a fresh wind
from the West. His government would blow the musty smell of
Liberal sponsorship scandal from the halls of power in
Ottawa.

We have great expectation of minority governments. They
achieved significant things in the past: Mackenzie King
brought us independence from Britain and old age security;
Prime Minister Pearson's government gave us our flag and
medicare; Trudeau's lone minority government started the
process of modern Aboriginal treaty-making.

But those hopes are rapidly fading as this government
exceeds its best-before date. Unlike past Liberal
governments who have cooperated with the NDP to bring about
progressive social legislation, the NDP have little in
common with the Conservatives and this minority government
is disappointing.

The tenor of this parliament has been unusually rancorous.
Tom Axworthy, professor of Political Studies at Queen's
University says that the mood is particularly ugly.
Question periods have always been showy displays of partisan
politics but away from the cameras, parliamentary committees
have accomplished a great deal.

Now, even the committees have become dysfunctional. The
Conservatives wrote a handbook on how to disrupt committees
so that opposition parties, who outnumber Conservatives,
can't advance their agendas. One Conservative committee
chairman, Art Hanger, walked out of numerous meetings in
order to ensure that motions don't get passed.

One of Hanger's stormy walkouts prevented an investigation
into the alleged Conservative payment to dying MP Chuck
Cadman to buy his vote and defeat the minority Liberal
government. Cadman's widow says he was offered $1 million
life insurance policy. Although RCMP investigations
recently found no evidence of that, sleazy insinuations
remain unsettled.

The Conservatives are still acting like strangers in a
hostile land. Suspicions of Ottawa run deep. The
Conservative Party is firmly rooted in Western alienation
and resentment of the Ottawa establishment. That distrust
animated the Conservative's predecessor, the Reform party.

Prime Minister Harper sees enemies everywhere in Canada's
civil service. He imagines that they are out to get him.
He thinks Elections Canada is trying to make his government
look corrupt by investigating the questionable "in and out"
transfer of election funds between local and federal
branches of the Conservative Party. He fired nuclear safety
watchdog Linda Keen just hours before she was to give
testimony to a parliamentary committee.

The Auditor General of Canada, Sheila Fraser, worries about
political interference in the civil service. She told CBC
radio that she is nervously looking over her shoulder since
Keen was fired. Fraser's exposure of Liberal misdoings was
seen as heroic but how will Conservatives view her damaging
reports of their government's misspending? Harper's
chilling message to civil servants is that it's my way or
the highway.

A neutral civil service serves as a traditional balance to
the power of government but Harper sees them as his
servants. It's not the kind of interference that he takes
kindly too. He prefers the way U.S. politics are done.

It's all very discouraging to Canadians who had hoped the
Conservative government would bring civility to government.

One of the few advantages of our current system of electing
government, called first-past-the-post, is that it's
supposed to deliver stable governments. But stability, as
we found out with the Liberals, is not always an advantage.
And four years of minority government have achieved nothing.
There must be a better way.

It's time for something completely different. Most nations
of the industrialized world have some form of proportional
representation based on consensus, which matches the
Canadian spirit of compromise. Contrary to objections of
those against PR, stable governments can form, especially
when combined with fixed election dates. MPs spend more
time running government than running each other down.

British Columbia has a chance to lead Canada into
proportional representation next May when the question of
appears on the ballot. The reasons keeping the old system
are rapidly fading.


David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

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