Central New Jersey thoughts

Greetings, dear readers, from Terminal A of Newark Liberty.  I just refueled at TGI Friday’s — a tall Stella and a Jack Daniel’s burger (medium), for the curious — and so I’ve logged on to the wireless here and am able to post what I wrote during my New Jersey train trip.

I don’t mind the whole SEPTA-NJ Transit run up from Philly — reminds me of my college days, and I passed within a couple of miles of the alma mater.

But my thoughts today were Canada-bound.  (Even though I was unable to see the longish conversation here.)

Keep in mind that things change awfully quickly in politics, and my guy — a very smart guy, usually — may yet pull a rabbit out of his hat.

But here’s what I was thinking in the late morning –

What Harper forgot

It’s looking more and more like the second Conservative government is done.

Even if it survives the next month, it is critically wounded — the opposition will circle and wait to strike the killing blow, if the government somehow escapes this one.

So now, one must ask, what went wrong?

The answer is this — the Prime Minister (and we, his supporters) forgot the basic rules underlying both the 39th and the 40th Parliaments: although only one party’s support was required to pass any given confidence test, the possible winning coalitions were actually fewer than it might have seemed at first.

The main point is this — on major confidence tests, i.e. the Throne Speech, economic updates, and the budget, there were only two possible partners: the Liberals or the Bloc. The New Democrats were and remain fundamentally opposed to the direction the government would like to take the country in. This is no sinister plot — it is simple ideology. The Conservatives are (or would like to be) the party of the individual, whereas the New Democrats are the party of the collective. Simple and plain reality.  (The NDP can vote with the government on individual measures — like some of the crime bills — but not on budget bills.)

Why was the party funding issue such a killer? It was tied to a major confidence issue — the economic update — ensuring that there could be no New Democrat support, and it was a dagger aimed at the hearts of the Liberal Party and the Bloc — ensuring that they would have to vote against it.

If the PM wanted to get that measure through in the 40th Parliament, he would have to have approached Jack Layton privately, made the case for how it would cripple the Liberals and allow the NDP to assume the mantle of major party of the political Left in Canada, and passed it as its own bill, later in the year.

It wasn’t — and isn’t — wrong on the merits, but the execution was fundamentally flawed. Harper thought that the Liberals were so weakened, and so into their own internal fight, the Ignatieff-Rae-Leblanc leadership contest — that they would have to let his measures pass.

Instead, he has discovered that he could push the opposition so far and no farther — they made their stand here. And so this government will probably fall.

What’s more, it has poisoned the well — it is unlikely that Stephen Harper can ever govern again in a minority parliament. It seems to this observer that his only chance for survival involves winning a majority mandate in a new election in early 2009.

***

Running a minority parliament when one is not the party in the middle is always a tricky business — a highwire act with much balancing against the other parties.

Prime Minister Harper forgot that, pushed too hard, and now appears to be ready to tumble — and there is no safety net to break his fall.

Update:  Coyne’s still bitter.  (As is the Post.)

See also the Maclean’s roundup.

Update again:  But if you want policy content, go see Chuckercanuck.  He’s on fire.