I thought I was done with dispelling government formation misconceptions, having responded in detail here and here to claims that the party winning a plurality of seats in the House of Commons was somehow entitled to form government even if it lacked an overall majority. But I return to this issue, briefly, to address the converse mistake: the claim, advanced by Patrice Dutil in a Macdonald-Laurier Institute Inside Policy essay, that “[r]esponsible government requires the support of the majority of the House of Commons”, so that “in order to form government in a parliament that is split among five parties, one of them must earn the support—at least the tacit support—from the others”. This is, at best, an oversimplification of the conventional position.
As explained in my previous posts, what responsible government requires is for the ministry to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. Whether the ministry is doing this is assessed by its ability to win certain key votes: that on the Speech from the Throne, which outlines its legislative programme, at the beginning of a new session of Parliament, and then mainly “money votes” on taxes and spending, as well as anything that the ministry itself designates as a vote of confidence, or a motion of non-confidence brought by the opposition. This has a couple of important corollaries.
One is that at no point does the ministry actually need “the support of the majority”. It simply needs not to be outvoted. If it can win votes with less than a majority of MPs supporting it because even fewer are voting for the opposition, that’s fine. Maybe this is what Professor Dutil is alluding to this when he refers to “tacit support”, but I’m not sure that this is a fair description of all conceivable political arrangements. Tellingly, Professor Dutil’s review of political precedents runs from King’s minority governments in the 1920s to that of Joe Clark in 1979. It does not consider Stephen Harper’s governments from 2006 to 2011. These were kept in office, in part, by the opposition’s failure to vote against the Conservative government in sufficient numbers ― the opposition either abstained or made sure that too few of its members turned up to outvote the government. This did not involve any sort of lasting arrangement or even cooperation with the opposition, which was either in no position to fight an election campaign (being leaderless, penniless, or both) or afraid that an election would yield even worse results for it than the status quo. I don’t think this counts as support, even tacit, but it was enough to keep the government in office. In short, a government lacking majority support in the House of Commons can stay in office without making any sort of deal with the opposition, so long as the opposition does not bring its full numbers to bear to vote it down on a matter of confidence.
This brings me to the second corollary from the convention of responsible government outlined above. A government ― by whatever count or margin it wins the votes of confidence it must win to remain in office ― does not “require the support of the majority of the House of Commons” for anything else, constitutionally speaking. There is no impediment to a government remaining in office despite taking a loss on a legislative project or a symbolic motion, provided it has not been designated as a matter of confidence. And other than money votes and motions of no-confidence brought by the opposition, governments have the choice not to designate votes as implicating confidence. If they do so, that is a political choice for which voters ought to judge them. If a majority government whips its MPs and forces them to toe the party line on every vote, and not just on matters of confidence, that is also a political choice for which voters ought to judge it. If a government won’t allow a vote on a private member’s bill to be held, or won’t let it be treated as a free vote on which individual MPs are free to follow their conscience and/or their constituents’ wishes, that is a political choice for which voters ought to judge it.
Such judgments do not seem to be occurring in Canada, despite our governments controlling their MPs to a much greater extent than those in the UK or in New Zealand. I’m no political scientist and not in a position to speculate as to why that is the case. (One common hypothesis ― that with a smaller House of Commons than the UK, Canadian MPs are too blinded by the higher prospect of a ministerial position than their UK colleagues to show independence ― does not account for the greater prevalence of free votes in the much smaller House of Representatives in New Zealand.) But I think that misrepresenting the constitutional position, even by implication and even with the laudable intention of making it accessible to ordinary citizens, by suggesting that governments (always) need to be supported by majorities to remain in office does not help matters.
I may be wrong, of course, but I would like to think that the conventions of responsible government do not require oversimplification to be understood. A government needs to maintain confidence, which is assessed by its ability to win ― by whatever head count ― a limited set of votes in the House of Commons. All the other stuff that is being discussed these days ― pluralities, majorities, popular vote ― is largely or entirely irrelevant. It’s not that complicated.
Double Aspect 