The reason Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer won’t win enough seats in Parliament on Oct. 21 in Ontario to form government is Premier Doug Ford.
Ford has ruined the Conservative brand in that province for at least a generation.
The reason the Conservatives won’t win enough seats in Québec to make a difference to the outcome of the federal election is that the Bloc Québécois and its leader Yves-François Blanchet are on their way to increasing their seat count from 10 to 12 or more.
So, as much as Conservatives like to eat their young, it’s not Andrew Scheer who will be responsible for one more Trudeau term.
It is Ford and Blanchet who will keep the Conservatives in the official Opposition.
If Scheer is able to overcome the Liberals, it will be less his doing than because Jagmeet Singh or Elizabeth May win more NDP and Green Party seats than expected.
This would cut into the number of ridings the Liberals win, and could pave the way for a Conservative minority.
If you like electoral reform that replaces the party who wins the most seats with proportional representation that divides seats in the House of Commons according to the national vote totals, the 2019 general election is a preview of future elections.
When Lester Pearson was the minority prime minister 55 years ago, we mockingly called a minority government an Italian Parliament.
The post-war Italian political system was so fractured, it could not produce a prime minister who could command the legislature and stay in power for more than, at most, a few months.
In 2019, there are 16 registered parties and at least two non-registered parties campaigning for seats in this election.
In a modified proportional representation system, as many as eight parties could glean enough seats to be eligible to sit in the next House of Commons. Independents would never have a seat although there were eight of them in the Parliament we are replacing.
The good news is that it would take democracy back from the journalists. Bloggers and pundits who set the political agenda and work to pre-empt other influences.
It would demote pollsters who try to predict the outcome of the election as if it were a horse race.
Electoral reform is more likely to be done by a minority parliament as a condition of a coalition formed to maintain a minority prime minister in power.
We have our national medicare system because it was a condition the NDP, led by Tommy Douglas, set for keeping the Liberals in government in 1966.
We had Petro-Canada, the Crown oil company, founded in 1976 with a $1.5-billion budget for corporate acquisitions, because the NDP, led by Ed Broadbent, made it a condition of supporting Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s minority government.
The Energizer Bunny of Conservative campaigns, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, has placed a heavy bet on an Andrew Scheer victory.
Kenney’s equalization, pipeline, oilsands expansion and anti-carbon tax agenda would not fare well with a Trudeau minority government dependent on NDP and Green Party support.
If Kenney falls back on the threat of separation from Canada, the rest of Canada may just say, “go ahead.”
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business, journalist and author.
