If you follow the political columnists, you would be excused for thinking that Canada is tiring of our electoral system failing to generate a majority in Parliament.  There is widespread agreement among them that the House of Commons is dysfunctional, that the nation’s business is not getting done, and that politics has become a perpetual election campaign.  Many favour the Liberals decision to vote against the government in confidence votes, apparently hoping that an election will yield a majority.  These are almost the same columnists who viscerally trashed the idea of a coalition government at the end of 2008.

I want to thank Neil McArthur, a professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba, for bringing to my attention polls in the United Kingdom which suggest that the next election there may fail to produce a majority. Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are all splitting voter intentions.  While it has been commonly assumed that the Conservatives will manage a majority when voters go to the polls next spring, pundits are now revising that prediction somewhat.  Voters are showing less then total enthusiasm for either the Conservatives or Labour, and the Social Democrats are as a result making some gains at the expense of each.

Except for a brief period of Labour Government in 1974 after the Conservatives tried unsuccessfully to form a coalition with the Liberals, the  United Kingdom has not seen minority election results since the 1920’s.  That was the period when Labour was displacing the Liberals on the left as the alternative to the Conservatives.  The trend was to Labour, but it was still a third party for most of the 1920’s.  The result was successive coalition governments.  By the early 1930’s the Liberals had been reduced to permanent third party status, and minority results disappeared as the system reverted to two party domination.

Thus during the period of three party competition, the response of the parties was stable government through coalitions.  Labour Leader Ramsay MacDonald was twice Prime Minister as leader of coalition governments.  Following this tradition, should the result in the next election be a three or four party split, two of the UK parties will almost certainly combine to form a coalition government.  The tradition there is to seek stable government and functional parliaments through coalitions when no party has a majority.  And it would almost be unthinkable in the UK to try to go through a major crisis such as an economic recession with a minority government.

Contrast that with Canada.  Coalition governments constituted from minority parties are unthinkable to opinion leaders.  Undereducated and uninformed, they know litttle of Westminster government.  Last November when a coalition government was proposed by the Liberals and the NDP, the major political columnists unthinkingly attacked the whole idea with ridicule.   Wells, Coyne, Simpson – the whole lot went into a frenzy as they failed to  get their closed and unimaginative minds around what is considered normal and expected in the Westminster parliamentary system.  They blanketed the media with ridicule of the idea that the Canadian parliament might actually work the way parliaments are designed to work, and successfully  discredited any possibility of a coalition government.  Of course the real problem was their inability to overcome their biases against the so-called socialists and separatists participating in government.  Not for them the idea that a large number of voters actually support the ideas and policy of those parties, and therefore the parties have a legitimate claim to play a role when conditions provide for it.

So Canada is not to be permitted coalitions of the kind that are natural and expected in the Westminster system.  Our ever watchful columnists, incestuously writing in their papers and  holding forth on TV panels, virgorously break the back of any coalition ideas before they are ever tested.

But that is not the way it has to be.  If the election comes out as the polls suggest in the UK, it will be a different story there.  It is our  misfortune that while the home of  Westminster government has the maturity to let parliament work as it was intended, we do not.  Perhaps we need another few generations of experience to let prominent journalists learn how the system works.  Or fewer reactionary and uninformed journalists dooming us to never ending unimaginative provincialism.