The Conservatives are forming a minority government in Canada, led by Calgary MP Stephen Harper. It is a cautious change from twelve years of Liberal government and a fragile move from one minority government to another.
The Conservatives gained 124 seats with 36.25% of the popular vote in the 23 January election, trading places with the Liberals who won 103 seats with 30.22% of the vote. The result toppled Paul Martin, whose long-sought campaign to secure the Liberal crown (that eluded his father in the 1960s) led to a short-lived, uninspiring premiership of a party plagued by controversy over financial scandal surrounding the 1995 Quebec referendum.
The centre-left New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Toronto MP Jack Layton, increased its parliamentary representation from nineteen to twenty-nine seats and secured 17.49% of the popular vote. By contrast, the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois (BQ) lost three seats, returning fifty-one MPs to parliament with 42.2% of Quebec's popular vote.
While the pecking order of the parties bore few surprises, the election raises important questions about the forthcoming period in Canadian politics. Has there been a shift to the right? How long can this new minority government last? How will a Conservative minority government cope with Quebec? Who might contend for the Liberal crown? Will the long-standing dynamics of western alienation in Canada be resolved?
A shift to the right?
Stephen Harper's Conservatives will try to pursue a right-of-centre agenda that includes tax cuts, increased privatisation of health care and retrenchment on Canada's Kyoto accord commitments. Moreover, Harper's likely cabinet will include members who developed political careers in the hard right "common-sense revolution" of the Mike Harris-led Conservative government in Ontario in the 1990s, a government allied with key Republican perspectives in the United States. While Canadians have not elected a government that will simply move to a Bush-defined right, they now have a prime minister with little international experience and it is not clear how this will affect the trajectory of Canadian foreign policy in the months ahead.
Harper's political roots are in the Reform Party that emerged in the west in the late 1980s, committed to a laissez-faire, right-wing agenda with strong anti-immigration and pro-family positions. Harper, however, is a strategic thinker who, as his careful election campaign demonstrated, will try to position the Conservatives as a responsible, accountable, right-of-centre minority government.
How far he will be able to pursue this ideological agenda in a minority government situation is questionable, particularly as he will have to court support from three parties, each of which is positioned to the left of the Conservatives: the social-democratic NDP, the Bloc Québécois, and elements of the Liberal Party.
A minority government
This is the tenth minority government in Canada and Harper is more vulnerable than most. The Conservatives face a larger gap between minority and majority government than any other previous minority government in Canada and the need to secure cross-party support makes it fragile.
Harper must hope that his fate is more like that of John Diefenbaker than Joe Clark. Diefenbaker called a Canadian election in 1958, one year after heading up a Conservative minority government and won the largest election victory in Canadian history. By contrast, though Joe Clark, in 1979, terminated an eleven-year reign by the Trudeau Liberals, it was only a matter of months before Trudeau was back to continue the "love story" between Canada and the Liberal Party.
Harper has three things on his side. Canadians have gone through a protracted election campaign that has followed close on the mid-2004 general election, and therefore have little appetite for further elections at present. There is some relief that the pattern of Liberal dominance has been curtailed. Moreover, the Liberals will take time to regroup, recover from the sponsorship scandal and elect a new leader that can reposition the party for government.
The Quebec factor
The pursuit of Quebec sovereignty remains high on the nationalist agendas of provincial Parti Québécois and its federalist counterpart, the Bloc Québécois. In the hours following Monday's election results, BQ leader Gilles Duceppe hardened his position emphasising the sovereigntist goals of his party more directly than during the election campaign.
The Harper Conservatives made significant inroads into Quebec to secure ten seats and 24.6% of the provincial popular vote. Harper trod a careful campaign course, recognising Quebec's desire to act more autonomously in the field of international diplomacy while asserting that the Conservatives will pursue federalist goals for Quebec.
When Harper was first elected to federal office, in 1993, he quickly became the Reform Party's spokesperson on intergovernmental relations. I interviewed him in the run up to the 1995 Quebec referendum and was struck by the measured, reflective tone in which he talked intelligently about the complexities of the situation. It may be that this approach will serve him well if sovereignty issues re-emerge in the years ahead.
For now, however, the intriguing question is how Harper will manage the relationship with Jean Charest, the current premier of Quebec's Liberal government. After all, when Harper entered the federal parliament in 1993, as a member of the rightwing Reform Party (whose emergence led to the decimation of the Conservative Party Harper now leads), Jean Charest was the federal Conservative leader. Charest's move to lead the federalist Liberal Party of Quebec in 1998 was not a straightforward decision and had that change of fortune not emerged, it is possible that Charest would now be prime minister of Canada in Harper's place. Harper's potential to cope with Quebec is not simply therefore one of dealing with the ever-circling threat of Quebec sovereignty but of negotiating with a powerful provincial premier who must, at some level, covet Harper's new job.
The Liberal crown
When Paul Martin conceded defeat early on Tuesday morning, he noted that it had not been an easy evening "but there will be another time". Canadian political history tells us he is correct, not least because the Liberal Party of Canada can orchestrate itself in various ideological directions to mount effective electoral challenges. Beyond the gossip about the reasons for Michael Ignatieff's decision to return to Canada and seek public office, or rumours of Bob Rae, the former NDP premier of the Ontario, joining the Liberals to seek the leadership, there are plenty of significant contenders within Liberal Party ranks who may emerge in the coming weeks.
Frank McKenna (the former Liberal premier of New Brunswick, now serving as Canada's ambassador to the United States), John Manley (the former minister of foreign affairs), Brian Tobin (the charismatic Liberal politician from Newfoundland) and Allan Rock (Canada's current ambassador to the United Nations who held ministerial portfolios of industry, health and justice) are all potential candidates. In short, before too long, Harper may find that he has a tough, well-motivated Liberal opposition to fight down.
Harper and the west
The 2006 election marks the first time in a generation that the Canadian prime minister has come from the west. The Conservatives took every seat in Alberta and after tough three-way races secured the greatest share of the popular vote and seats in British Columbia. The Conservatives also took Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Whether this means that western agendas about regional reform of the senate, gasoline taxation or gun control will intensify in Canadian politics is hard to predict. These questions may re-emerge but in the end, when the chips are down and the Conservatives are facing the next election, it will be the fight for votes in the most populated province of Ontario that will be critical. This after all is the province where the Liberals, though diminished, did not relinquish their lead.
