Confidence and Supply
Canadians clearly do not understand how the parliamentary system works. They do consider it undemocratic and believe that parts of it escape voters’ control.
The domestic political story of the week in Canada is the confidence and supply agreement between the Liberal minority government and the opposition New Democratic Party. The agreement is meant to enable Justin Trudeau’s government to hold office securely until the next general election, scheduled for October 2025. (It may well permit Trudeau to retire from politics and for the Liberal Party to transition to new leadership before the election.) As political maneuvers in parliamentary systems go, a confidence and supply agreement is neither creative or novel. We have seen them in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, and in the Canadian provincial legislatures themselves. This type of agreement is not a “coalition” as many in Canada have called it, but rather an agreement that the New Democratic Party will support the government’s budgets (“supply”) and vote against non-confidence motions that might otherwise bring the government down before the end of its term and force an early general election. In exchange, the government will adopt several policy measures the New Democrats have been proposing, most notably the coverage of some dental services under the national single-payer medical system.
Political deals like this one, while part and parcel of government formation in parliamentary systems (the creation and maintenance of legislative majorities), causes political heartburn among many Canadians, seemingly to a degree unmatched in other parliamentary democracies. The core issue is that the agreement was negotiated behind closed doors, without advance public knowledge, even though both parties have speculated about entering into an arrangement since the federal election of last September. It is indeed uncommon for an arrangement to emerge only six months after an election, but it is in no way illegal. The Labor-Liberal arrangement (“Lib-Lab Pact”) in the United Kingdom in 1977 came three years into that parliament. The bottom line, however is that opponents of the deal, led by the opposition Conservative Party, argue that the confidence and supply agreement is illegitimate not due to the policies that emerge from the ensuing government, but because the parties had no public mandate to enter into an agreement since they did not declare an intent to work together before the election. Deciding to cooperate afterwards is undemocratic and unconstitutional. The electorate will decide for itself whether it is undemocratic. Many parties entering into arrangements like this one suffer harsh defeats at the next election. Scholars, however, agree that the conventions and norms of parliamentary systems clearly envisage negotiations among parties in minority legislatures in order to establish working majorities to sustain governments. Nevertheless, the nature of arguments opposing parliamentary cooperation among parties creates the appearance that many Canadians do not understand the parliamentary system and even dislike it altogether.
What should we make of the constant accusations in Canada that democracy is undermined when political parties cooperate in a minority parliament?
1. Canadians’ mental image of the parliamentary system presumes a single-party majority government. In Canada, the party with the most seats “wins the election” and forms a government that lasts, since 2006, for a four-year fixed term. This is a result of the first-past-the-post electoral system and Duverger’s Law, that this system ought to lead to a two-party system, one winner (government) and one loser (opposition) at each election. Hung parliaments, to use the British term, confuse this, even though minorities have been the norm since 2004 (five of the last seven elections). The Canadian system deals with minorities by having the largest party form a government alone and govern as a majority would, but that government is liable to lose a confidence vote, which necessarily causes an immediate dissolution of parliament, rather than formation of an alternative government. Coalitions or confidence and supply agreements violate the unwritten rules of this system. However, third parties and minority governments are a feature of the system, even under first past the post, and elections at 18-24 month intervals, which usually happen in Canadian hung parliaments, are not sustainable.
2. Canadians are used to elections having a clear winner. That is a feature of the American system, where individuals are generally elected to their offices and hold them under the same terms regardless of margin of victory. This is especially the case for the president, who has won a winner-take-all election via the electoral college. In a parliamentary system, election night itself does not necessarily determine the nature of the government. Canadians only vote for the single Member of Parliament representing their “riding.” Once the 338-member House is elected, other roles fall into place and effectively depend on party standings in the House. Government formation is one step removed from the 338 individual elections. This bothers a lot of Canadians, especially on the conservative side of the spectrum. The Conservative leadership race features one candidate, Pierre Poilievre, using the language of the presidential system by claiming that he is not running for the party leadership, but “for prime minister.”
3. The growth of populist movements in Canadian politics feeds into this belief system. The populist narrative already criticizes elite insiders for allegedly making private deals among themselves to benefit themselves, to the detriment of outsiders. In other words, public opinion. This is happening in the context of distrust in political institutions. Coalition negotiations, or milder forms of them, fit the populist narrative, especially in a situation when the negotiations lead to arrangements that put the populist parties themselves on the opposition benches.
4. Polarization figures into this. The catch-all parties are center-left and right. Alliances tend to run to the left, such as Liberals and NDP now, and at the extreme, Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc in 2008. The People’s Party, a potential negotiating partner for the Conservatives, has never won a seat in the House. Examples of right-leaning agreements are provincial, most recently between the Progressive Conservatives and People’s Alliance to sustain the Higgs government in New Brunswick from 2018 to 2020. Contributing to this dislike of cooperation among parties is what appears to be less fondness for the parliamentary system on the right of the Canadian spectrum. Preston Manning’s Reform Party, in its initial days, mused that the separation of powers within American political institutions, perhaps equating it to limited government, made them preferable to their Canadian counterparts.
So part of the disdain for the current confidence and supply deal is just a matter of some voters not liking cooperation among parties that they dislike. Part of it, however, is that the conventions and norms around Canadian parliamentarism do not deal with minority government well, and treat it as an aberration that can only be rectified with the election of a majority government. (Elections that produce minorities are in effect false starts fixed by a new election.) If minority parliaments are going to be the norm, the Canadian system will need to become more sophisticated in dealing with them, especially in providing for parliaments that run the full fixed term without a single-party majority. Getting over this mental barrier will be even more important if continuous minority government leads to a change in the electoral system to proportional representation.
References:
https://archive.org/details/politicalparties0000duve
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/duvergers-law-dead-parrot-dunleavy/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservatives-slam-liberal-power-grab-ndp-pact-1.6393205
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/minority-government-trudeau-scheer-singh-2019-election-1.5321140
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-singh-how-it-will-work-1.6393710
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1962968
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3229395
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010414099032007004
https://liberalhistory.org.uk/history/joint-statement-on-the-lib-lab-pact-steel-and-callaghan/
https://www.ndp.ca/news/delivering-canadians-now
http://www.revparl.ca/english/issue.asp?art=573¶m=108
