A Minority win for the Tories is really a majority win.

This is a complete bunch of balderdash. The truth in it is that because the Liberals were a completely cynical wimpish opposition party that the Conservatives were able to act in many cases as if they had a majority. However, in some cases they were able to come to a compromise as with the Afghan mission expansion. A very deft and devious route to producing a bill the Liberals would support. In any event a minority government cannot govern as if it has a majority unless the opposition allows it to do so. But that is all the truth there is in it.
Stark might also be right that Harper would act as he has in the past if he got another minority that is ignore the fact that the opposition can defeat him. But unless the Liberals again sit on their hands his government will not last long.
So what Stark recommends is voting for the Liberals to try and produce a Liberal majority. So we are to reward a party that among other things sat on its hands to produce the shameful situation that existed in the last parliament, a party that extended our mission in Afghanistan, originally got us there and gave us green rhetoric plus a huge growth in emissions.
Why not vote for third parties to ensure that our two bankrupt main parties finally get the message that they are not the only alternatives and that we are completely fed up with them. Who gives a hoot whether the Liberals or Conservatives get a minority or a majority. Lets at least start by ensuring that both lose seats.


A minority win for the Tories is really a majority win

ANDREW STARK
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
September 13, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
Stephen Harper has introduced a critical innovation into the federal government: He has taken a giant step toward erasing the distinction between a majority and a minority government. This has had crucial implications for the kind of governance the Prime Minister has given us. But it now also has deep electoral implications.
Mr. Harper has done two things that may seem at odds. But, in fact, they have combined to erode the majority/minority distinction. First, the Prime Minister has subjected more government bills than normal - not just the Throne Speech or the budget but other measures such as the immigration package, the crime bill and the softwood lumber deal - to confidence votes, thus elevating the significance of those pieces of legislation.
Second, Mr. Harper has demoted the significance of other pieces of legislation: opposition bills requiring the government to meet Kyoto targets or to implement the Kelowna aboriginal accord, for example, or even his own law setting fixed election dates. Instead, he has treated them as advice from Parliament that his government could freely disregard.
By designating so many pieces of legislation as confidence matters, the Prime Minister, in effect, extended the reach of his whip from the government into the opposition benches. The whip, of course, is the MP who requires government caucus members to vote in the way the prime minister directs, with the threat that, if they do not, the government will fall and they will have to fight for their jobs. What Mr. Harper managed to do was to whip the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois as well.
At different times, both the Liberals and the Bloc allowed legislation to pass - legislation that they had criticized but that Mr. Harper had designated as confidence measures - because they did not wish to precipitate an election. By extending the whip in this way, the Prime Minister was able to treat Parliament as if it were just a larger version of his own caucus.
In regarding opposition legislation as if it were merely advisory, Mr. Harper also treated Parliament as if it were his own caucus but in a different way. After all, a prime minister is under no obligation to follow the will of his MPs; he has the right to view caucus sentiment as merely advisory. Mr. Harper began extending that principle to the sentiment of Parliament as well.
So the Prime Minister has taken notable strides toward eradicating the difference between Parliament and his own caucus and, in so doing, between what a minority and a majority government can do. And he has some things he could say in defence of this strategy. In other countries, such as Israel or Germany, there exist strong traditions of coalition government, in which a prime minister will invite opposition members to join the cabinet in minority situations so as to provide effective government. But we have no such tradition.
And so his only option, Mr. Harper might say, was for him to find ways of managing Parliament as if it were his own caucus. If he hadn't, Parliament would have been able to defeat all the government's legislation with impunity, while requiring the government to follow all of Parliament's legislative directives. And then there would have been no difference between our Parliament and our government.
But in politics, you live by the sword and you die by the sword. There is already speculation as to whether it will be possible to hold the Conservatives to a minority on Oct. 14, or whether they might win a majority. This discussion is largely irrelevant because there's little difference. Canadians must understand that to elect a Conservative minority is, in effect, to elect a Conservative majority. And this, finally, is Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's strongest argument (and I say this as a lifelong Tory who has known Mr. Dion for many years and admires the conviction and intellect he's brought to Canadian politics).
For strategic voters on the left, an NDP seat or a Green seat would be no different than a Liberal seat as long as a minority Conservative government governed as a minority, meaningfully reined in by the opposition in Parliament. But if electing a Conservative minority is effectively the same as electing a Conservative majority, then the only option for its opponents is to defeat it entirely. And there is only one party that can do that. In which case, Mr. Dion can plausibly say that a vote for the NDP or the Greens is, except in rare instances, nowhere near as effective as a vote for the Liberals.
Put it another way. If there's less and less meaning to the notion of minority government in our system, and given that there's no tradition of coalition government in our system, then the point of voting for smaller parties rapidly diminishes. There's much discussion of a “divided left” in this election. But if anything is likely to unite the left, it's a party of the right that will govern as a majority even if it wins only a minority.
Andrew Stark is a former policy adviser in Brian Mulroney's PMO.