In fact, under current constitutional conventions, as the leader of the incumbent government, Stephen Harper would be given the first opportunity to test the confidence of the House after the dust had settled from October 19th — even if the Conservatives came in third.
He would, however, be under no obligation to accept it — and according to what he told CBC News chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge, he would decline to do so, even if he was only “a couple of seats” behind.
That is, of course, his prerogative, and if he’d stopped there, he would have been well within the parameters of accuracy, at least as far as constitutional convention goes. But instead, he decided to take it a step further
“I think you have to have the most seats in Parliament to go to the Governor General,” he told Mansbridge in the interview, which was taped last week and aired Monday.
“That’s – you know, in this country, in our system, we have what’s called a Westminster style system … and we don’t … you know, elect a bunch of parties who then as in some countries, get together and decide who will … govern. We ask people to make a choice of a government. And so I think that the party that wins the most seats should form the government.”
Meanwhile, in his one-on-one interview with Mansbridge, which is slated for broadcast tonight, Trudeau reportedly echoes Harper’s view that “whoever gets the most seats [get] the first shot at trying to command the confidence of the House.”
UPDATE: As the full interview reveals, he did, at least, acknowledge that it is the “outgoing party” that gets the first shot, after Mansbridge pointed it out.
Leaving aside the fact that we do not, as Harper suggested, ask voters to choose a government — they choose an MP, who may or may not be a member of a party that may or may not end up in government — this is simply not how our system — or, indeed, any Westminster system actually works.
Responsible government is, at its heart, elegantly unambiguous: the party leader who commands the confidence of the House, as expressed through a majority vote, becomes prime minister for precisely as long as he or she continues to do so. It makes no difference if those votes come from a single party, or from all over the Chamber: all that counts is the final tally.
If one party wins more than half the seats, about 170 in the newly expanded Commons, its leader can be reasonably confident they will be able to do so without seeking support from outside their caucus.
But if no party can control a majority of votes on its own, control of the government goes to the leader and party that can cobble together enough votes to reach that magical threshold needed to pass a budget or survive any other vote on a matter of confidence, regardless of which party has the most seats.
Such an arrangement can be codified with a formal power-sharing agreement between two or more parties, or one party and several individual MPs. Alternately, in the absence of any competing bid for power, a party could take an ad hoc approach, and negotiate support on a vote-by-vote basis.
Just as the Conservatives did from 2006 until 2011. Regardless of how many seats they win next month, Harper and his party would at least have the option of attempting to do so again, should he choose to do so, although realistically, it seems unlikely that he’d be interested in rolling those dice unless he was sure he’d come out ahead.
Meanwhile, any other party or parties would be free to work up a competing bid to present to the governor-general in the event that Harper declined to try his luck, or the Conservatives went down to defeat on a confidence vote.
As important as the electorate — and the ballots it casts — may be, a government ultimately serves at the pleasure of the House of Commons, not the voting public directly.
That’s why we send MPs to Ottawa to vote on legislation, rather than putting every bill to a full referendum, and why it is the ability to convince a majority of those MPs to vote with a particular party that determines who will govern the country.
For any party leader to suggest otherwise betrays either a fundamental lack of understanding of the basics of our democracy, or a fundamental unwillingness to be straightforward with Canadians about the nuances thereof — neither of which are particularly desirable qualities in a prime minister.
UPDATE: Via Twitter, University of Ottawa professor and parliamentary maven Philippe Lagassé offers the following context:
-Incumbent’s right to meet the house first is grounded in the office they hold, the Crown’s first minister, not their party leadership.
-Responsible govt isn’t that the leader who commands confidence gets to be PM. It’s that the person named PM must command it to remain PM.
-Confidence doesn’t determine who gets to form govt. Non-confidence signals to PM that s/he should seek dissolution or resign.
-If a PM refuses to seek dissolution or resign after a vote of non-confidence, then the vote signals to the Crown to dismiss the PM.
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