Notes From a Toronto Pub

Did you hear the latest about Harry Reid?  Apparently he’s running a stealth campaign.  He has been attracting so many protestors at his public appearances that he cancelled one speech, at a Mormon chapel, and has now stopped announcing his Nevada appearances on his website.  But still they find him.

Poor Senator Reid.  He is the most prominent test subject in an experiment that the Democratic Party has been conducting with the 111th Congress — viz., can a party holding a large congressional majority enact a major new entitlement that a clear majority of the country (55-60%) opposes, and still maintain their hold on political power?

It’s a big gamble.  Never has been done in American politics.  The Democrats are betting that once the shouting and the tumult die, there will not be a majority of American citizens willing to vote in a different legislature with sufficient majorities to repeal what they have done.  It’s a bold move by my liberal friends.  (And they are my friends — most of my friends are liberal Democrats.)

Unfortunately for my friends — and fortunately for our country — it doesn’t look good for them, if Senator Reid’s experience is any guide.

Still, I can add a little context for you, dear readers.  With one hat on, I am a libertarian Republican, registered to vote in the Commonwealth of Virginia; with the other, I am a Canadian Tory who votes in midtown Toronto, which is roughly the political equivalent of midtown Manhattan, in terms of politics — perhaps a little more left-wing.  And up here in Canada, we too had a grand experiment in ignoring public opinion, back in December 2008.  Let me tell you the tale of the Great Canadian Parliamentary Crisis.

Back in the summer of 2008, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, got himself a case of election envy and decided to call one — you can do that in Westminster-style systems.  (It’s fun.  Really.)  Harper was leading an unstable minority government, and thought he could win a majority mandate in order to ride out the coming recession.  Harper — an economist by education, if not by trade — saw breakers ahead. 

For various reasons, mostly involving the market meltdown but also including some severe missteps in Quebec (Harper would be a Republican if he were American; it gets noticed from time to time), he didn’t quite get there — on election day in mid-October, the Conservatives stood twelve seats shy of a majority of Canada’s 308 seat federal parliament.  Nevertheless, his main opposition, the Liberals, were humiliated — Harper’s party had won 12% more votes than they — and their leader announced that he was stepping down.  All seemed calm in Canadian politics — the expectation was two, three, or maybe even four more years of Prime Minister Harper before the next election.

All of this changed in late November. 

Harper, sensing weakness in his opposition, tried to ram through a measure ending public financing of political parties.  This would have had the salutary effect of bankrupting the Liberals.  Suffice it to say, they weren’t having any of that, and the three opposition parties banded together with the intention of defeating the Tories, turfing Harper as PM, and replacing him with the recently defeated and humiliated leader of the Liberals.  It was to be a coalition government with a cabinet composed of members of parliament from the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (Canada’s socialists), and a vow from the third party, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, that they would support the new government for at least eighteen months.  It seemed a done deal — the new coalition had the support of over 160 Members of Parliament to Harper’s 143 Conservatives and one Independent.

The coalition made this calculation: Canadians almost never want new elections.  If you poll them, there is a pretty consistent set of results — about sixty to sixty-five percent of the voting population would rather not be bothered and would much prefer that the jokers in Ottawa get on with the work of governing the nation. (A very healthy attitude, incidentally.)  The assumption was that this would continue to be so.

It was not.  Harper gave a fiery speech or three in parliament about how governments need to gain their mandates from the people, how this coalition “with the socialists and the separatists” was not what the Canadian people had in mind, and how he would use every power at his disposal to prevent this abomination from seizing power in Ottawa.  His caucus crisscrossed the nation over the weekend, speaking to rallies, pushing the same message.

Constitutionally, this was nonsense.  It was absolutely within the power of the opposition to replace him, if they could only hold their rickety coalition together and convince the governor-general not to call a snap election.  Politically, however, it hit home.  Canadians had been under the impression that they had returned Harper to power, albeit with an opposition to watch over him and to make sure that he didn’t do anything too right-wing.  Offered only the choice between this new government and Harper, their preference was clear — the polls swung, sixty percent of Canadians were “truly afraid for the future of the country”, fifty-six percent favored having an immediate election, and in that election would have given Harper a crushing majority (on the order of two-thirds of the seats).

The rest was anti-climax — Harper asked the Queen’s representative to send parliament home for a few weeks, the Liberals replaced their leader, and the coalition threat passed when he introduced a moderate stimulus-oriented budget in late-January 2009.

Throughout that week, however, most journalists were saying that Harper was finished, and Canadians had better get used to the idea of their new Coalition overlords — after all, they hate voting, and the Coalition had the support of a majority of the legislators.

My point?  Betting that the public is just too distracted to care is not a smart strategy.  Heck, Prime Minister Harper discovered this himself when he sent Parliament home for the Olympics in January 2010 and, not-so-coincidentally, avoided some inconvenient committee hearings — it turned out that people did care about that stuff, and he took a ten point hit in the polls.

In 2008, fifty-five to sixty percent of Canadians thought they had returned Stephen Harper to office for another term.  When the opposition tried to overturn that result, they were pilloried in the polls and would have been crushed at the ballot box.  In 2010, fifty-five to sixty percent of Americans thought — and now, almost a month after its passage, still think — that the Obama health care reforms were bad for the country, that this was not what they put him in the top job to do, and that it should be repealed.

People aren’t sheep.  When the governing class thinks it can ignore public opinion– as even our normally complaisant Canadian brethren showed us — they usually end up being the ones who pay at the polls.

With both my Canadian and American hats on, then, I say this — betting on public apathy is a dangerous thing. 

So at this point of the game, I have only a single piece of advice for my liberal friends — “DUCK!”

Ben Sharma