Commentary

The Stronach Defection and the Crisis of Canada’s Parliamentary System

On May 17, Belinda Stronach, the reputed architect of the merger of the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties to form the new Conservative Party, crossed the floor and became a Liberal cabinet minister. This move, plus the decision of two independent MPs, Carolyn Parrish and Chuck Cadman, to vote with the government, ensured a tie vote on second reading of the federal budget. The tie was broken in favour of the government by the Speaker of the House, thereby avoiding a June election. Although a summer election is still a remote possibility, the Conservatives are indicating that they may wait for Paul Martin to call an election after the release of the Gomery Report. An expected Liberal victory in next week’s Labrador by-election would make it even more difficult for the Conservatives to bring down the Martin government.

The Conservatives, the Bloc Quebecois and their supporters are crying foul about Stronach’s defection, suggesting that she possesses too much ambition and too little integrity. They do not explain how that differentiates her from a host of other politicians, including Stephen Harper and Peter Mackay. Various other commentators have also been speculating on Stronach’s motives and the full extent of the deal offered to her by Paul Martin. However, there is a virtual absence of any substantive analysis on the subject.

Stronach’s father Frank Stronach, president of Magna International, a major auto parts manufacturer, is a long-time Liberal. He ran as a candidate for the Liberal Party in 1988 and was a vocal critic of the Mulroney government’s free trade policies. When Belinda Stronach began her efforts to “unite the right” she openly stated that her objective was to save the Canadian parliamentary system. As every political system based on the British model, Canada’s parliamentary system relies on a governing party which holds power and an opposition party which is capable of taking over when the governing party becomes discredited. In order for such a system to function, both the governing and opposition parties must be national parties and, regardless of their rhetoric, both must support similar policies once in office. Thus, when the Mulroney Conservatives were discredited over their free trade policies, the Chretien Liberals replaced them with the promise to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, once elected the Liberals implemented identical policies to the Mulroney Conservatives.

The problem confronting the Canadian parliamentary system is that the traditional parliamentary opposition, the Progressive Conservative Party, was decimated in the 1993 federal election. The avowedly separatist Bloc Quebecois emerged as the party with the second greatest number of seats and, therefore, became the official opposition. However, it could not play the tradition role of an opposition party on two counts: first, it is opposed to Canadian Confederation, at least as it is presently constituted; and, second, it is a strictly regional party with no possibility of forming a national government.

The Reform Party, which had the next greatest number of seats, also could not play the role of a traditional opposition party. It too was a regional party, based on Alberta oil capital, with no support east of the Manitoba-Ontario border and its “social conservative” agenda ensured that it could never become anything more than that.

The 1993 federal election also reduced the governing Liberal Party to a regional party, with almost no seats west of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. However, it had a large enough majority that it was able to rule for over a decade as if it actually were a national party.

It was this problem which Belinda Stronach, according to her own words, set out to solve in 2003 when she organized a series of backroom meetings between leaders of the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties to discuss a merger. When the merger became a reality, she also campaigned to become the national leader of the new Conservative Party. If she had succeeded, the Conservatives may have been able to make some headway in Ontario because Stronach’s positions on almost everything were identical to the positions of the Liberal Party. However, she was unsuccessful precisely because her positions on social issues were too “liberal” for the majority of the members who came from the Alliance Party. Over the past year, the “social conservative” faction of the Conservatives, with the support of Stephen Harper, has emerged as the dominant force in the party, thereby making a breakthrough in Ontario highly unlikely. In other words, the Conservative Party is still incapable of playing the traditional role of an opposition party. Since it cannot elect a single MP in Quebec, the Conservative Party would need to take a large number of seats in Ontario in order to form a government. Apparently, Stronach realized that a breakthrough in Ontario could not be accomplished with Harper as leader of the Conservatives and that there was no role for her in that party other than as window dressing.

If there had been an election in June, the Liberals would have undoubtedly lost a number of seats, especially in Quebec, while the Conservatives would not have gained enough to form a majority government. They would have been forced to rely on support from the Bloc Quebecois to form a minority government, further exacerbating the political crisis. By crossing the floor and joining the Liberals, Stronach bought some time for the Canadian ruling elite to sort out its differences and find a way out of the political crisis gripping it. However, barring some totally unforeseen developments, in appears that a major crisis has been averted for only a matter of a few months, at best.

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