Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Stupid arguments against electoral reform - Part III - "It doesn't produce stable governments"

Here's fun with semantics - people throw the word stability around a lot when talking about governments, when what they really mean is "majority". See, the fun thing about governments in Canada is that if you're the leader of your party, and you have a majority government, you can do whatever you want.

Legislatively, that is. You pick a cabinet minister, you tell him (or, 29% of the time if you're Harper, her) what bill you want introduced, you have it put on the House schedule, your party members vote for it, in the House and in committee, and ta daaa! Buffalo wings are now the fifth major food group. Of course, the PM has to have been around enough to have stacked the Senate with his appointees, or he can try and persuade opposition senators to his way of thinking, with many buffalo wings.

And this is what people mean by stability. No, not buffalo wings - the ability of a government to pass whatever legislation it wants, with only the threat of losing a future election to rein it in. And of course, the wisdom, foresight and good intentions of government members. So yeah, the threat of losing future elections.

Without this ability, the reasoning goes, the opposition will prevent bills from passing, effectively neutering our virile, manly and turgid governments. And with our current partisan system, it does kinda work that way. The Parliamentary system was conceived as adversarial, with an opposition holding the government accountable (the main vehicle of this being Question Period, or, as it is currently known, recess ("I'm rubber, the Honourable member is glue.." "No, I'M rubber, THAT Honourable member is glue...")).

And, thanks to three consecutive minority governments, we've had approximately 17 elections this millenium, and a 2000% increase in the use of the word "dysfunctional" to describe something other than the Spears family.

While the thought of going to another election in the next year makes me want to vomit (or maybe that's just all the buffalo wings I had), it's hardly a solid argument against proportional representation, for several reasons:

1) The "norm" of majority governments means that the parties aren't inclined to cooperation, preferring instead to engage in political (and, possibly, literal) dick-measuring;
2) If the first-past-the-post system isn't producing majorities, which it is already predisposed to do, then people are really divided on which party to support, then the answer is for the parties to work on not being so sucky, and not rewarding them for their suckiness with an artificial majority;
3) These shitty governments were produced by our current system - using them as examples of the ills of proportional representation is like microwaving tinfoil to prove the evils of the oven;
4) And, similar to Part II of this series, it assumes that "stability" (as defined by the ability of the govern to legislate as they see fit) it always preferable to "instability". Again - if that were the case - then we'd be better off under some form of dictatorship.

So here's the thing - proportional represenation may very well produce more minority governments. But only if that's what the electorate wants. And at the end of the day, that's the whole point of democracy - to get whatever government we want. Not for the government to get whatever it wants.

And maybe - just maybe - if minority governments become the norm, we'll see more groundbreaking policies developed through collaboration, and less "No, YOU'RE glue to infinity plus one nyah nyah nyah nyah boo boo."

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