Breaking a two-party system

I’m looking at the Canadian election results and can’t help but feel slightly jealous. This time last year, after the debates, the Lib Dems were looking at a surge similar to the New Democratic Party’s (NDP) surge, and Labour looked like it was heading towards electoral oblivion. The NDP has pulled off what the Lib Dems, and before that, the (British) Liberals, have dreamed of for almost a century – of destroying the comfortable two-party system (which, granted, was always weaker in Canada because of the Bloc Quebecois), and throwing the country’s electoral system wide open.

There were, of course, many subtle differences that meant that what the NDP managed in Canada could never have been replicated in the UK last spring. For a start, the (Canadian) Liberals were sick – infighting and uncertainty had churned through four party leaders since 2006, and the Liberals had been tarred by scandals from their last time in office. The once “Natural Party of Government” has been left with a rut of 30 or so seats, mostly in the maritime provinces, from their previous 120. Canada has also been a country where voters have long had a tradition of completely wrecking unpopular parties – the present Canadian Conservative party rose from the ashes of the Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s, which was ignominiously thrown out of power in 1993, winning only 2 seats in the Lower House, and the Progressive Conservatives had in turn arisen from the ashes of the old Conservative Party in the 1940s.

Finally, the NDP had easy, low hanging fruit – Quebec, Canada’s 2nd most populous state, which had been poisonous ground for the Liberals, and too social democratic for the Tories, and therefore usually elected representatives from the Bloc Quebecois – a broad coalition united only by support for Québécois sovereignty. When a credible, 3rd (well, 4th) party alternative emerged, one that actually had views which resonated with the population, the voters deserted the separatist bloc and plumped for the NDP – more than half of the NDP’s gains this election came at the Bloc’s expense.

The NDP is not the equivalent of the Lib Dems – it is the Canadian equivalent of Old Labour and still firmly rooted in social democratic traditions. It is the defeated Liberals who occupy the political ground most similar to the Lib Dems. The Liberals faced a squeeze from both sides of the spectrum – the right was buoyed by Harper’s competent economic management – Canada escaped the worst of the financial crisis, mostly due to the tighter regulations of banks that were brought in during the last Liberal government, and the resource boom that is fuelling China’s growth. The rise of the NDP in Quebec caused many left-leaning Liberals to reconsider their votes and plump for the NDP instead.

And yet, despite the hope and optimism of NDP supporters today, there are several potential problems on the horizon. Most prominent is the government itself – it important to keep in mind that despite the NDP’s success, Stephen Harper won the election. Harper has proved himself to be willing to use “dirty” constitutional tricks. He avoided an earlier vote of no-confidence by asking the Governor-General to suspend parliament. The Conservatives have shown scant regard for the environment, opting to continue producing oil from Albertan tar sands – an environmental catastrophe, both in terms of the waste from the extraction process and the dirtiness of the fuel itself. Harper has also pushed forward a conservative domestic agenda – getting “tough on crime”, and promising to build more prisons despite crime rates in Canada being the lowest in many years. This is also the first election in almost a decade that has produced a majority government – since 2003, every Canadian election (all under FPTP, I might add) has resulted in a hung parliament. Harper can now rule without cross-party support for its policies – in his previous two terms, Harper has had to act in a more restrained manner in order to secure cross party support to get his bills passed in the Commons.

And in the end, Canada might just have turned into the UK – a country where a centre-right party is in power for much of the time because of the split in the vote of the centre-left between two large, credible parties resulting in many wasted votes under FPTP. In many seats (such as Etobicoke-Lakeshore, the seat of defeated Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff), the combined Liberal-NDP vote would have been more than enough for a candidate to secure a comfortable majority, but the Tories snuck in because of the ideological unity of the right.

So Bravo, Jack Layton, because he has achieved the dream of every third party leader in many first past the post countries for many a year, for destroying the old comfortable consensus between the Tories and the Liberals, and for almost tripling the number of seats held by his party in a single election. This is a tectonic shift in the shape of Canadian politics, not only had the Liberals been crushed on home ground, but the destruction of the Bloc is a blow for Quebecois independence – not that it was a realistic possibility in the first place. For all that, the NDP still has some way to go before it finds itself in government, and I wouldn’t discount the Liberals just yet. The third party dream might prove all too fleeting.