When budgets fail, minority governments fall

CTV.ca News Staff
February 17, 2005 8:19 AM ET

There are two ways to trigger an election by having your budget defeated -- the planned way, and the unplanned way.

For the 1979 Progressive Conservative minority government of Prime Minister Joe Clark, it was the latter.

Clark took the feisty but ill-advised approach of governing as if he had a majority with his 136 MPs (the Liberals had 114, the NDP had 27 and the Social Creditistes had five).

"I think that was their first mistake," Lawrence LeDuc, a University of Toronto political scientist, told CTV.ca.

On Dec. 13, 1979, then Finance Minister John Crosbie got up to deliver his government's first budget. He was going to bring in controversial measures like mortgage interest deductibility, and he was planning to increase the excise tax on gasoline by four cents a gallon -- "short-term pain for long-term gain," was how the outspoken Newfoundlander termed it.

News accounts from the time show a Tory miscalculation: They didn't think the Liberals, sent packing after 11 years in power, wanted to go to the polls anytime soon.

In addition, they believed the public would punish the party that defeated them, LeDuc said.

When Parliament commenced, the Tories refused to recognize the Creditistes as an official party. Under Parliament's rules of the time, 11 seats were required for official status.

But the Tories required the goodwill of the Creditistes to survive. Only three of the five Creditistes showed up in the House of Commons for the vote, and they abstained.

Meanwhile, the polls indicated the Liberals had a large lead in popularity over the Tories, which had trouble finding its feet in government. As a result, the Liberals sent out word that all MPs were to be in their seats.

When all the votes were counted, the Liberals and NDP defeated the Tories 139-133.

The next day, Clark asked the governor-general to dissolve Parliament and call an election. On Feb. 18, Pierre Trudeau -- who had resigned as Liberal party leader but was coaxed back -- was back as prime minister of a majority government.

"Welcome to the 1980s," he told adoring supporters, his face lit up with a cat-who-ate-the-canary smile.

"It certainly shot itself in the foot," LeDuc said, summarizing the Clark government.

On May 8, 1974, Trudeau was on the other side of a minority government's budget defeat -- one that damaged the Liberals so badly, they won another majority.

But the budget defeat was by design.

Writing in last September's issue of Policy Options magazine, historian Desmond Morton said Trudeau "persuaded John Turner, his finance minister, to index social payments and de-index personal taxes, creating both wild public pleasure and the structural deficit that soon crippled Canada's federal government.

"When the NDP's David Lewis forced an election to protest Trudeau's utter irresponsibility, editorial writers blamed him for a useless election."

In the ensuing election, the Liberals went from 109 seats to 146. The NDP went from 31 to 16, causing Lewis to resign the party's leadership.

The Liberals had calculated correctly, Stephen Clarkson, a University of Toronto political scientist and co-author of Grits: A Portrait of the Liberals in Power, told CTV.ca.

"They had done pretty well in surviving, and they obviously knew what the poll figures were, and they felt it was time to go for a majority," Clarkson said. "Clark was completely different. He didn't expect to be defeated."

Lessons for today

The minority government of Paul Martin can't rely on one party to prop him up the way Trudeau could rely on the NDP in 1972-74. Martin must broker support from all the parties -- the Conservatives, NDP and Bloc Quebecois.

"The Liberals only want an election if they can get a majority," Clarkson said. "The chances of that with the Gomery inquiry going on day after day are very slight."

A Toronto Star poll published Monday put the Liberals right around 40 per cent in national support, with Conservative support at 26.5-per cent support.

However, most public opinion experts say to guarantee a majority, the governing party should be in the mid-40s or higher in popularity, as they tend to see their popularity erode over the course of an election campaign.

While no one might want an election, there is the issue of brinksmanship.

Clarkson noted it appeared the Martin government could fall over its throne speech back in October. The Bloc Quebecois moved an amendment to the speech, which the Liberals declared to be a vote of confidence in the government.

That got sorted out, but Parliament came close to being dissolved soon after it began.

"That was the Liberals governing like Clark, as if they had a majority. They didn't put enough in the speech from the throne to give the Conservatives and the Bloc anything to claim they extracted anything from the government," Clarkson said.

"Brinksmanship sometimes creates a disaster. That's what happened with Clark: He dared the opposition parties to defeat him and they did."

While Martin has poor political instincts, "that doesn't mean to say Goodale does," Clarkson said, referring to Ralph Goodale, the finance minister.

"If he's been doing some serious consultation, where he agrees with something they (the opposition parties) say and does something about it, then if they don't want an election, they can claim they got something from Ottawa."