An Extraordinary Turn of Events

The economic crisis and a failure to learn from the mistakes of others have resulted in an extraordinary turn of events up here since Thursday. As you may recall from an earlier post, elections were held in Canada on Oct 14th which resulted in a strengthened minority Conservative government, headed by Prime Minister Steven Harper. It appeared that the other parties such as the Liberal Party, New Democractic Party and Bloc Quebecois were too fractured to ever come together and form a majority coalition government. As long as they were divided, it appeared that Harper's Conservative party would control the agenda and hence his status as a Prime Minister appeared safe.....until last Thursday.

Let's backtrack for a second. One of President George W. Bush's mistakes (among many) was to govern as if he had a mandate, despite two extremely close elections in 2000 and 2004. That governing style led to significant losses in the Congressional elections of 2006 and a thumping at the polls this year.

It appears that Prime Minister Harper may not have learned from the mistakes of Bush. Last Thursday, he released an economic plan that essentially ruled out deficit spending into address the ongoing recession. In addition, he proposed to take away public financing of political parties. This was seen as an attempt by others to strangle other political parties financially and produced a backlash that now threatens to produce a different Prime Minister. In addition, the economic plan is deemed to be insufficient to address the current economic climate. Harper and his finance minister have backtracked over the weekend both on the issues of deficit spending and the public financing of political parties.

As a result of this, the various parties on the left end of the spectrum are trying to work out a deal to form a coalition government. There are doubts as to whether they can do that. For one thing, they will have to decide who will be the new Prime Minister. Will be Stephane Dion, who was lambasted for his electoral strategies in October ? Will it be somebody else ? That remains to be seen.

In any case, a no confidence vote in Parliament is scheduled for Monday December 8th. We will get a better idea of what will happen then.

What does this mean ? For one thing, Harper and his aides got involved in the Ohio Democratic primary when a memo was released in an attempt to embarrass Barack Obama on the issue of NAFTA. Hillary Clinton went on to win that primary on the NAFTA issue. It was believed that this was a clumsy attempt by Harper to influence the Democratic race in an attempt to derail Obama. The conventional wisdom is that a relationship between Obama and Harper might only be cool and cordial, due in part to the leaked NAFTA memo. A different Prime Minister might lead to warmer relations between the US and Canada. Who knows ?

The link below is an editorial from today's Toronto Star:

Harper