why we’re having an election

After weeks of speculation, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is set to visit the Governor General tomorrow morning and drop the writ. It’s actually going to be an exciting and potentially nasty campaign by Canadian standards, and it will be all the more fun to watch it unfold beside the U.S. presidential race. If the rumors hold true, we’ll be headed to the polls on October 14.

The circumstances under which we’re going into an election are slightly more interesting than average affairs in Canadian politics, so I thought I’d devote a post to examining the context of the election call. For my curious American readers, you can find out more about how elections work up north in the Wikipedia article on Elections in Canada.

In 2006, Harper’s newly-minted minority government introduced legislation to set fixed election dates in Canada with the intent, as Harper put it, to “… prevent governments from calling snap elections for short-term political advantage.” The spirit of the bill was to remove the traditional power of a Prime Minister to call an election on a whim, say when public opinion polls look favorable to the governing party.

The legislation fixed the next election date at October 19, 2009, so how is it legal for Stephen Harper to call an election now? Of course a government can fall at any time and cause an election after a vote of non-confidence, but the bill as it received assent also maintains the power of the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at his/her discretion, triggering an election. The Prime Minister therefore maintains de facto power over the timing of an election, as the Governor General must act on the advice of the Prime Minister by constitutional convention.

So Stephen Harper is acting perfectly legally by calling an early election, but flouting the spirit of a statute that he created carries some pretty terrible optics for him, especially given that he already has some trust issues with the electorate.

So what’s the deal, yo? Why are we having an election now? When Harper visits the Governor General, he’ll tell her that the current Parliament is “dysfunctional” and cannot make any more progress. He met with opposition leaders earlier this week apparently to try to gain assurances that his government will be allowed to govern for another year, which Liberal leader Stéphane Dion called a “charade”. Jane Taber retells details of Dion’s meeting with Harper in today’s Globe and Mail:

[Dion] met with reporters for a drink this week at his national caucus in Winnipeg, and described in hilarious detail his meeting Monday with Mr. Harper at 24 Sussex Dr.
…
The meeting [with Harper] lasted a quick 15 minutes, five of which was taken up with talk about what they did on their summer holidays. Mr. Dion was offered a glass of water.

The fact that Dion met reporters for a drink reflects the vastly different views of openness in politics — after all, Stephen Harper rarely speaks to the media — but the tone of Dion’s meeting with Harper also makes it pretty clear that the Prime Minister wants an election and it has nothing much to do with a dysfunctional Parliament.

Notwithstanding repeated evidence that Conservative MPs are making good use of the Party’s Parliamentary Obstruction Document, a 200-page manual providing instructions for MPs to deliberately obstruct parliamentary proceedings, Parliament is dysfunctional even on a good day. Just sit in on question period in the House of Commons and you’ll get an idea. As Rex Murphy said earlier this week on The National, “If dysfunctional is the test, they’d drop the writ every single day after question period.”

The real reason we’re having an election — and it’s not altogether subtle — is that the Conservatives are sitting on healthy polling numbers and they’re not likely to get any better any time soon. 37% of respondents said they would vote Conservative in a poll earlier this week, which is frighteningly close to the support necessary for Harper to form a majority government.

This isn’t unusual: Canadian political history is rife with examples of opportunism in calling snap elections, especially from sitting majority governments. Harper’s statutory transgression on a fixed election date is opportunistic for sure, and it plays directly into long-standing sentiments of distrust and manipulativeness that Harper will need to shed during his campaign, but it’s also a touch cowardly — if not a little condescending — to pass off a politically opportunistic election call as a result of parliamentary dysfunction. Grow a pair, man: we’re having an election because the time is right for the Conservative Party.