THE Conservatives are calling it a “parliamentary coup-d’état,” a bit of a misnomer since the term implies an illegal overthrow of a legitimate government by illegitimate forces.
When the opposition coalition-of-the-ambitious defeats the government, as it is vowing to do as soon as possible, it will be constitutionally legal, presuming the Governor-General accepts that just weeks or months after an election, the duly elected government should be trashed.
But it surely will be unseemly. It surely will be dangerous.
And it surely will put the Liberal party and the New Democratic Party at great risk for many years if this does not work out as they dream.
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Make no mistake, the Dec. 1 accord between the Liberals and NDP to form a minority government propped up by the separatist Bloc Québécois is based on dreams and opportunism, not some grand plan to save Canada from the evils of Conservative government.
For starters, the BQ does not want to save Canada from anything. It exists to destroy Canada.
Then there is the question of prime minister Stéphane Dion. Six weeks ago, Canadian voters, by a score of three to one, rejected him as, in the Conservative phrase, “not a leader, not worth the risk.”
Now the NDP and BQ are imposing him on Canada, but of course, only for six months. Then, Canada will be governed by ….. well, we don’t really know, whoever a few thousand Liberals meeting in Canada decide upon.
How comforting. How democratic.
If the Liberals and NDP carry through with this plan, they will wear for a generation the smear that the party of Laurier, Trudeau and Chrétien was willing to give a voice in government to politicians who consider Canada to be a mutant country, not a “real country” in Lucien Bouchard’s famous comment, just to gain power.
They will wear the fact that a Liberal-led government will drive Canada into a massive deficit, based on their spending plans and the demands of NDP and Bloc partners, even though they will try to blame it on the Conservatives for cutting taxes and reducing government revenues.
And many voters will remember that the genesis of this unprecedented parliamentary coup just weeks after voters gave Conservatives a strengthened mandate was not really the Canadian economy but a bone-headed and partisan attempt by the Conservatives to use the economic crisis to justify ending public subsidies to political parties.
The Liberals, once the party of big business donations, has been reduced to living in political public housing dependent on subsidies because they have not generated enough financial support from individual Canadians. Loss of taxpayer support would cripple the party.
It was a mean-spirited and partisan move by the Conservatives that backfired.
But no one should believe the opposition rhetoric now that the parliamentary coup is motivated by a lack of government financial plan. Without the party financing bombshell, they would have groused about the lack of Conservative action and waited for the late-January budget.
That’s when Conservative plans should be rolled out and the recently re-elected Conservative government judged.
This coalition smells like short-term gain for long-term pain.
