The Dominion is Saved!

Nothing like politics, eh?  The ultimate blood sport.  A day is a long time,even on a placid day, this weekend an hour is an eternity.  Can anyone remember August?  Harper getting ready to steamroll Stephane Dion into retirement?  The financial crisis threw the Conservatives onto life-support, the polls started to show the Grits leading and then, everyone at once, realized that would mean Dion as PM.  A strengthened Tory minority was the result.  The Dion factor should not be dismissed, the prospect of a man widely seen as inept at the wheel at a time like this can only hurt any chances of a coalition ever surviving an electoral test. 

Has Harper lost the touch?  The bungled arts funding was hubris.  The attempt to cripple his opponents for years, by cutting off public subsidies, was a calculated risk that has backfired spectacularly.  For nearly three years Stephen Harper has treated the opposition parties, as especially the Liberals, like a cheap Marseilles whore.  This is their revenge.  It's a grand bluff they intend to take right onto the floor of the Commons.  They want to scare Harper straight, now that they've been given an opportunity.  A Liberal-NDP coalition/alliance/agreement or whatever is certainly plausible, it's happened before in 1963-1968 and 1972-1974.  Bob Rae himself kept David Peterson in power at Queen's Park for two years (1985-1987) after having toppled Frank Miller's minority government, almost exactly the same scenario we see again today.  The difference between then and now is arithmetic.  There were three parties in the Ontario provincial legislature then, there are four parties in the federal Parliament today.  The Bloc is more than keen on kicking the Conservative cat, but they have no interest in governing, they are a true protest party in every sense of the word.  A confidence vote will come, the Bloc will abstain or support the government, Harper will have learned his lesson and in a month's time Jim Baird - the pitbull of modern electoral Conservatism - will be attacking the Liberals for getting in bed with the NDP.  We'll have a laugh and go back to worrying about getting pink slips and refinancing our mortgages. 

Norman Angell, a Labour member of parliament, on the eve of World War One wrote a book called the Great Illusion, in which he argued that a general European would be utterly futile from an economic standpoint.  So it was.  My rather smug assertions that there will be no coalition and no election seem, to some, to be drawn from the same panglossian well.  Paul Tuns has effectively called me out:

In theory he is right. But the theory takes into account only ideology, personalities, history and possible consequences of a deal, but not the (admittedly short-term) incentives. The unholy alliance of Dion's Liberals and Layton's NDP makes sense because this maneuvering is about preserving privilege: taxpayer-funded party financing. To a lesser degree, having boxed themselves in, it is also about preventing an election, handing a majority to the Conservatives and thus preserving their jobs. There might also be an element of lame duck Dion wanting to avoid the tag of being the first Liberal leader since Edward Blake not to be prime minister.

Publius will be correct if the political science professors are right, but I will be correct if the economists are right.

So Publius, should we bet a beer?

A beer and sushi lunch.  Ok, just lunch.  Or maybe just decent permalinks.  Dion may be interested in a death ride, to avert a fate worse than Edward Blake - who by the way was one of the leading lights of Canadian classical liberalism - but Bob and Iggy aren't so keen.  The Perrier ice-water in Lord Iggy's veins notwithstanding, he and his old university roommate know that a Coalition, and the almost inevitable election to follow, will be a disaster for everyone.  World War One happened because Wilhelmine Germany believed it could, and needed, to win.  A general superpower conflict never happened because it would have been Mutually Assured Destruction, no one could win.  The fall of the Conservative government is a situation in which no one could win in the short run and only the Conservatives could win in the long run.  Another election would bankrupt the Liberal Party.  Even with a highly energized base, the Grits simply do not have the fund-raising apparatus, nor the time to set one up, to compete effectively with the cash rich Tories, whose own base will be enraged by a parliamentary coup. 

Yet Harper has no interest in blundering into war, which is what an election now would mean.  He has withdrawnthe proposed subsidy cuts and Jim Flaherty, the Minister of Finance, is making noises about a stimulus package, wisely setting a date of January 27th for an early budget - a week after the American inauguration.  What leg does the Grand Coalition have to stand on?  Why overthrow a well regarded - if not wildly popular - government?  Why risk an election?  Why flirt with the separatists?  One can never completely discount human stupidity. Harper has walked away from the cliff edge, some of the more hot headed Liberals may not be able to disengage.  Case in point, Scot Reid, Paul Martin's director of communications, has smelt blood:

This becomes relevant because suddenly, he is weak. In fact, at this particular moment, he is almost unable to defend himself. Owing to a ridiculously ill-considered act of hubris, he has laid himself vulnerable to his opponents. Their imperative could not be more clear: kill him. Kill him dead. Do not, whatever you do, provide him with an opportunity to extend his hold on power. Because you can be damn certain he will never again be so reckless as to give you a chance to finish him off.

Fate tends to be grudging with gifts of this significance. To ignore it would be an error every bit as historic as the one Mr. Harper himself has made.

So don't get fancy. Don't get confused. And don't get weak in the knees. If you don't put Mr. Harper in his grave, he'll put you in yours.

Yikes.  You think Scotty has gotten into the eggnog just a little too early this morning?  Trudeau abolished the death penalty, so at best you can lock up Stephen into the Chateau Laurier for six months, after that I think he'll have to get probation.  It's a pity Scott - and his former boss - lacked this kind of killer instinct three years ago, they might still be in power.  This current crisis has shown, if nothing else, how desperate and disoriented the Liberals have become.  This is worse than 1984, which could at least be blamed on Trudeau.  Having never fully recovered from Quebec's abandonment of the party after the Night of the Long Knives, and now precariously dependent on the ethnic vote in the country's three largest cities, Harper has frightened the party elites.  Mulroney could be dismissed as a decade long time-out for misbehaviour; today the Liberals must rethink the winning formula they've had since Mackenzie King.  Quebec and the West are wastelands, the Atlantic provinces go where the money is (usually to the party in power) and Ontario is highly contested.  Slowly but surely the ethnic vote is turning Blue.  The sons and daughters of those loyal Trudeau voters are waking up to the realities of the Canadian welfare state.  They're not liking it.  When they go the Liberal Party, in its current form, is done.  We are seeing tonight it's death throes.  An urban boomer rump out of step with the times.  If Harper can survive the crisis of the moment he will establish a Conservative hegemony for years to come.