Imagine Canada 6 months on. There’s a Liberal prime minister. He will head an unstable coalition of Liberals and socialists aligned with separatists. To appease the socialists, he will have to raise taxes. To appease the separatists, he will have to direct disproportionate money and attention to the province of Quebec.
He will have zero democratic legitimacy. He will never be able to use the words, “That’s the job the Canadian people elected me to do.” His government will contain almost no representatives from the west. Everyone will understand that the only issue uniting this government was its members’ eagerness for public money for their own party funds.
This weak new prime minister will somehow have to deal with what is already shaping up as a savage recession.
And not just the recession. The new coalition government will face an equally savage constitutional crisis. The only way the Liberals can prevail is if the current Governor-General disregards constitutional precedent and democratic practice to transfer power without an intervening election. Lord Byng could not get away with that in 1926 -- and Byng was a governor-general who owed his office to the neutral British Crown. Michaëlle Jean, by contrast, was a patronage hire by one Liberal prime minister who now (under this scenario) will have repaid the favour by delivering up power to another. It will look like the most squalid political deal in Canadian history.
Battered by scandal and recession, the unpopular new government will have to worry constantly about treachery in the ranks. Perhaps the coalition can strike a deal now to divide up the offices and choose a prime minister, without either a leadership convention or an election. But six months from now, with the government polling at 20% or 25%, will that deal hold up? If Michael Ignatieff eventually ends up with the top job, won’t many old Rae partisans imagine that things would be better if only their guy had won? And vice versa? Even worse: If Stéphane Dion somehow succeeds in retracting his resignation and imposing himself upon his two would-be successors, his life will be about as secure and comfortable as a wounded tuna’s in a sea of sharks.
Sooner or later, this government will collapse. Probably sooner. When it does, and faces the people, it will have to bear responsibility for unemployment and budget deficits. It will look desperate and selfish and cynical verging on crooked. It’s hard to imagine any result other than a crushing once-in-a-generation defeat: another 1958 or 1984.
