(From stratfor.com -- under fair use.)
Summary
Following a parliamentary vote Dec. 8, a minority coalition of leftist parties will likely displace Canada’s Conservative government, which does not feel particularly threatened by the development. Conservatives expect the coalition to dissolve within months and result in another round of elections in which the left will be thoroughly discredited.
Analysis
The leaders of Canada’s opposition parties, the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP), signed an agreement Dec. 2 to replace the country’s Conservative Party government with a minority coalition. The plan is actually feasible under Canadian law, so long as the two leftist parties are backed by the fourth party in parliament, Bloc Quebecois (BQ), to hold a majority of the parliament’s seats. Parliament is scheduled to vote on the Liberal-NDP plan Dec. 8.
Under the terms of the deal, the two-party coalition would govern until June 30, 2011, and enjoy the support of BQ on votes of confidence until June 30, 2010. The Liberals would hold 18 Cabinet posts plus the premiership, with the NDP holding the remaining six Cabinet posts.
While representatives of the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper do not want to get booted out of power, they also do not feel particularly threatened by the development. The Conservatives just emerged victorious from a re-election campaign seven weeks ago in which they ate away at the seats of both the Liberals and BQ, leaving the Liberals with their worst showing in history. The Conservatives see the leftist parties’ move as a desperate attempt to arrest Canada’s steady shift away from the left side of the ideological spectrum.
For their part, the Liberals hope to use the onset of recession to prove that they can still lead. The NDP, in contrast, is the perpetual third wheel that never quite makes it to the levers of power and is excited just to be in the limelight.
Even if the Dec. 8 vote goes as the Liberals and NDP expect, the Conservatives expect the coalition to dissolve within months at most and result in another round of elections in which the left will be thoroughly discredited. After all, the Liberal-NDP coalition would have to get all but eight of BQ’s 49 seats on every single parliamentary vote in order to rule.
While this confidence might have something to do with the Tories overdosing on party-line Kool-Aid, they do have some good points. Canada hasn’t been ruled by a coalition government in a century (its minority governments tend to rely on defectors from the other parties), and a Liberal-NDP coalition will actually have fewer seats (114) than the Conservatives it is ousting (143). Moreover, Liberal leader Stephane Dion has already resigned as party chief, yet his resignation does not take effect until May -- he plans on acting as prime minister until then. So the formative months of the coalition will witness a leadership struggle within the Liberals.
And the Liberal-NDP coalition will be relying on the firm and unwavering support of BQ -- a separatist political movement -- to hold the national government together, which is pretty close to irony distilled into physical form. BQ has supported the Conservatives at the national level before, but only in exchange for devolution of power to the provinces. Additionally, BQ and the Conservatives do not compete for votes; their core regions of support do not overlap. But the same cannot be said for BQ and the Liberals, which aggressively compete for influence in Quebec.
With the normal instabilities of coalition governments aside -- instabilities that no Canadian p`rty has experience mitigating -- the new government would also face internal party strife and depend on the support of a group that intends to dismantle not just the government, but also the country as a whole.
The timing also favors the Conservatives. The global recession is beginning to bite in Canada, a country that evaded the initial blows because of its strong internal market, balanced budget, American-style banking transparency and low exposure to subprime mortgages. But with the United States, Europe and Japan all going into recession simultaneously, and with Canada’s lucrative oil exports suffering from drastically lower prices, Canada cannot help but be slowed by the global economic headwinds. From the Conservative point of view, if the leftists want to take the reins forcibly at such a time, then they can go for it. The next item on the government’s agenda, no matter who is in charge, will be the budget. Taking over now could well force precisely the sort of bitter budget fight that tends to regularly scuttle coalition governments in Europe.
Copyright 2008 Stratfor.
---
I'm not allowed to get involved into politics while being openly affiliated with the CF, but I'll say that I'm a bit worried that a politician who resigned as leader of a party that obtained 26% of the popular vote will be PM and will tell the GG where to send our troops. (Or, rather, where to pull them back from.) Aren't those who support this travesty the same people who were whining about W. Bush being elected without the majority of the popular vote, even though he had twice as much as they do now?
