Deal-making in Parliament

David Warren writes for the Ottawa Citizen on the current antics in the House of Commons and the shamelessness of a government clinging to power in the face of more than one obvious defeat in the Commons. Warren points out the danger of the Governor General "appearing a Liberal Party stooge if she does not herself order a dissolution of Parliament." He thus appears to agree with my assessment two days ago of the drawbacks of having a homegrown representative of the Queen insufficiently removed from domestic partisanship.

However, I cannot follow Warren's analysis in its entirety. I agree with Warren that Paul Martin is defying the constitution by delaying a confidence vote until one of the opposition members is in surgery and thus away from the Hill. But when I come to the following statement, I stop short:

The opposition NDP has already been bought off, publicly; and shamefully, but again, they do not know shame.

The expression bought off is tendentious in the extreme. If this country, following the recommendation of the Law Commission of Canada, were to adopt some form of proportional representation, all parties would likely become minority parties, with multiparty coalition governments becoming necessary. The sorts of political trade-offs called for by such governments might appear to some observers to entail the parties "buying each other off." Yet they would simply be engaging in the ordinary give-and-take of political life which currently occurs within the parties. The only difference is that such trade-offs would now be taking place among the party leaders within the context of a multiparty government. Call it what you like, but I do not see this as such a bad thing. In fact, I believe it might actually be a step in the right direction, as the parties themselves under such an arrangement would be more likely to stand on principle than to be pragmatic bodies attempting to be all things to all people.