There has been much talk recently about whether Canada is doomed, at least for the foreseeable future, to a series of unstable, short-lived minority governments. As long as the Bloc Québécois holds a lock on 40 to 50 seats in Parliament, neither of the two main political parties will have an easy time winning a majority.
True, if either had reliable coalition partners to prop it up, then minority government would not necessarily mean short-lived government. But the idea of the Bloc as a coalition partner – as last year's unhappy experiment shows – is a non-starter. Hence, we seem fated not just to minority governments, but to governments that focus far more heavily on short-term electoral success than the country's long-term needs.
What to do? One of the reasons the Bloc is able to fight elections with such vigour is that the federal Treasury provides quarterly allowances to parties based on their share of the popular vote. As long as a party earns 2 per cent of the vote nationwide – or 5 per cent in the ridings where it chooses to run candidates – then it collects $1.95 a year for each vote it wins. To the Bloc, which garnered 10 per cent of the national popular vote in last year's election, this means about $3-million annually – about 77 per cent of its funding.
But there's something jarring about this formula. After all, in other arenas of our political life, we Canadians have always moderated the principle of popular vote, of apportioning power in decision-making structures according to raw popular support, by a federalist principle.
For example, when it comes to constitutional amendments, ratification by provinces representing 50 per cent of the population is not enough; an amendment must pass muster in at least seven provinces, which requires it to win support in multiple regions of the country. When it comes to Parliament, the popular principle does not completely hold sway even in the House of Commons. Smaller provinces enjoy greater representation than their population alone would justify, thereby encouraging governments to play to more than one region.
When it comes to election law, then, why shouldn't we also moderate the principle of popular vote with the principle of federalism? Why not require that any party eligible for an allowance win, say, a minimum of 2 per cent of the popular vote in at least two regions of the country? Or 5 per cent of the vote in ridings in which it chooses to run, provided that this threshold 5 per cent was earned in more than one province's ridings? In the last election, the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP and Greens all managed this. Only the Bloc didn't, because it runs candidates exclusively in Quebec.
Implementing such a rule would not stop the Bloc from running a full slate of candidates in Quebec, only from having access to the federal allowance to do so. Nor, in fact, would it prohibit the Bloc from running candidates outside Quebec, perhaps on a Canada-wide platform of radical decentralization, and collecting an allowance if it managed to get 2 per cent of the vote in the West, say, in addition to its traditional support in Quebec.
There is an important difference between restricting funding to federal parties and restricting it to federalist parties.
The first – requiring that any party eligible for federal tax dollars win votes in more than one region – would be in keeping with the norms of Canadian federalism. The second – requiring that any party eligible for federal tax dollars support Canadian federalism – would be incompatible with basic rights.
But we can easily do the first without the second.
