Coalition government and/or a left-wing merger in Canada is all the rage at the Globe and Mail, with a Globe and Mail editorial discussing the ramifications of a shift left, Jeffrey Simpson arguing that the whole thing is a stupid idea, and Neil Reynolds talking about the Whigs for no good reason. The arguments on all sides contemplate a merger or coalition of the Liberals and the New Democratic Party, which is the most logical assumption considering that the Greens are nonviable nationally (although I did enjoy discussing the “hypothetical Mango Coalition” that could result from the 2008 election if the red, orange, and green parties joined up).

I’m interested in the effect of a merger, so I’m going to make some assumptions, not all of which are warranted:

• The Bloc Québecois is not party to any coalition. BQ voters will always vote for the BQ. (This is probably the weakest assumption, since the BQ actively campaigns for votes and almost certainly won marginal candidates.)
• The Green Party is not party to any coalition. Green voters will always vote for the Greens. (Again, this is a fairly weak assumption and I might examine the hypothetical Mango Coalition in a later post, but they’re not considered relevant by the editorialists so I’ll ignore them. However, they would have made quite a difference in the model below.)
• Ridings won with a majority by any party remain with that party.
• A riding won with a plurality by a Liberal or NDP candidate would remain with the merged party regardless of the current vote split.
• A riding won with a plurality by a Conservative or BQ candidate needs to be reconsidered. I’ll do so by assuming that 66% of the NDP vote goes to the merged party and the other 34% evaporates (to model voters being displeased by a perceived shift to the middle and staying home). Based on those numbers, the party with a plurality takes the seat.

There were some surprising results. The Liberal-NDP merged party ended up poaching 24 seats in total, including 17 from the Conservatives and 7 from the Bloc Québecois. In total, that puts the parties at:

• Liberal Democrats: 137 seats
• Conservatives: 127 seats
• Bloc Québecois: 41 seats
• Independent: 3 seats

This puts a different spin on the current House. However, we must take into account the Bloc’s behavior. After the 2008 election, there was discussion of a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition government. However, it is not in the Bloc’s interest to form a coalition, since the Grits’ position on Québec sovereignty is not compatible with the Bloc’s. As a result, we must consider this a non-coalition government – a majority run by the Grits.

It’s difficult to imagine this situation as being much better for the Grits. Dion would have run a minority government, but as a weak leader he likely would have been forced into an election some time between October 2008 and now. Ignatieff would still have been waiting in the wings to take over the leadership of the party in the ensuing chaos.

A merger is not a panacea.

[I]t is clear that a large part of the world either derives disutility from the seal hunt, derives utility from decrying the seal hunt, or some convex combination thereof. If it the former, there is a possibility for a Coasian bargain, i.e. the rest of the world pays off Atlantic Canada to stop the hunt/transport the seals somewhere else. If the latter dominates, then it is optimal for the hunt to continue.

A Coasian bargain is an application of the Coase Theorem, which in this case basically says that if the seal hunt imposes externalities on the rest of the world, then the rest of the world can pay Atlantic Canada some amount a) greater than or equal to the economic benefit derived from the seal hunt, and b) less than or equal to the economic cost generated by the seal hunt.

The Coase Theorem is applied commonly in tort law, where the cost of the tort is allocated to the party most able to bear it, and the parties are expected to negotiate out a more efficient allocation themselves (with failed negotiations penalizing the more-able party). The idea is that if the court’s allocation is inefficient, the parties are in the best position to make it optimal.

That said, neither of us is aware of any situation in which a Coase bargain has been attempted in a similar situation.

There have been a number of complaints about the separatist/sovereigntist influence on the House of Commons under the proposed left-wing coalition in Canada. The concerns appear to be that A) Separatists are a bad thing to have in the national government, and B) It is undemocratic to topple the plurality government of the Conservatives. Behind the cut, I’d like to discuss these concerns.

Argument: Separatists should not be involved in the government.

Example: Vince Versace of On Deadline, who argues:

Our federal government, which represents the interests of all of Canada, will have its foundation of power based on a separatist party, a party which does not believe in the Canada the federal government is caretaker of. How is this logical and in the best interests of all Canadians?

I think this argument conflates separatism of the home-rule variety with separatism of the segregationist or destructionist variety. The most extreme example of destructionist sovereignty is Hezbollah, which aims to destroy Israel. Mr. Versace’s argument would be persuasive if it pertained to a destructionist party.

However, the BQ does not appear to envision the destruction of Canada-minus-Quebec. The BQ envisions Quebec-qua-nation as a trading partner of Canada. It is in the interest of a nation to maximize the economic health of its allies. Therefore, it is in the Bloc’s interest to maximize to the extent possible the economic health of anglophone Canada. To that end, their separatist intent is irrelevant to their ability to govern, and should not be seen as a concern.

B. It is undemocratic to overtake the Conservatives’ plurality government.

This coalition does not represent how the majority of Canadians voted in the recent federal election. You cannot count on the Bloc Quebecois numbers because they are skewed, having run candidates only in Quebec, they are not a national party…what are they again…oh yes, a separatist party. The Liberals and NDP will assume power thanks to the backing of a separatist party. You combine just Liberal and NDP election results and a majority of Canadians still did not choose them to govern.

This argument has two main weak points, in my estimation. The first is that the Bloc, while it is indeed a separatist party, they have adopted a pragmatic standpoint including policies aligned with the centre-left. (Cite 1. Cite 2.) The Bloc’s stated goal in this election was to prevent a Harper majority.

Anti-Conservative sentiment is not enough to base a coalition on. However, it is misguided to dismiss the BQ as a player in national politics based solely on their status as a separatist party. The party likely siphoned significantly more voters from the Grits and Dippers than from the Tories.

Incidentally, arguing that a majority of Canadians did not elect a coalition government is misguided; a majority did not elect the Conservative government. A party opting to administer a minority government, particularly one which is outnumbered by a divided opposition wing, does so at the risk that the divided wing will coalesce in order to strip it of power. The left-wing coalition will likely be shackled by disagreement at the margins of the parties’ platforms, but such is the fate of a coalition government.

If the Conservatives disagree, they’re free to attempt to court enough Bloc spoilers to take power.

Background: After spending $300 million for an election to congeal his minority into a majority government, Stephen Harper made little progress and ended up with another minority government. This appeared to be well and good, despite the fact that a coalition of the left-wing parties plus the Bloc Quebecois could easily defeat the Conservative government in a confidence motion if it decided to do so. However, because Harper failed to deliver an economic stimulus package in his fall budget, the coalition is attempting to take over as government.

That’s the official reason, anyway. Stanley Hartt argues that the whole thing is a pretext to prevent the Conservatives from cutting per-vote campaign funding. Lysiane Gagnon, predictably, thinks this is fantastic.

Governor-General Michaelle Jean is faced with an essentially subjective decision about whether to accept the coalition’s overtures to replace the minority government.

Bloggers are amused.

This is an interesting bit of political theatre in that the left coalition is one of rejection rather than agreement. Dion disagrees with the Bloc’s reason for existence. Layton smelled blood in the water and was poised to take over for Dion at the slightest misstep. I have no doubt that the parties can cooperate, but their agenda will be difficult to characterize as anything but white bread.

This all assumes that Michaelle Jean feels it’s appropriate to allow Dion to step in as Prime Minister, of course, though it would be difficult for her to disallow it. The political costs to defeating a motion of confidence and calling another election would be ridiculously high; if Jean values continuity and stability over effective government, then it would be against the left’s interest to defeat a motion of confidence lest they go through another election just to have a similar result but provide a procedural opportunity to request to form a government.

• The Gazetteer has a stop-the-conservative Ivins Rule list up for the West Coast. Looks like a lot of work went into it.
• Cyberwanderer links to AnyoneButHarper.ca, which allows you to input your postal code to find out who the correct strategic vote is.
• AOL News quotes Robert Bothwell, director of the international relations program at the University of Toronto. “I think the absolute best result for Harper is a stalemate.” (Bothwell is suggesting that the economic crisis will cause Harper trouble.)
• Finally, according to the Hill and Knowlton seat predictor, using the numbers from the latest polls at Nodice, the Conservatives lose one seat, the Liberals lose 14, and the Bloc gains 4. This may be thrown off by the fact that the Nanos polls are consistently a few percentage points higher for the NDP than anyone else’s polls. We’ll see.

I don’t think it would. In each of three polls ending 2 October posted on NoDice.ca, the three-party left could take a majority of the popular vote with a fair margin of error in their favour. (The numbers are: 52% left coalition, 37 Conservatives, 9 Bloc; 57, 35, 10; and 54, 36, 9.) Of course, the caveat of distortion from taking the popular vote rather than the riding-by-riding vote applies. The seat projections at NoDice are nearly a month out of date.

So here’s a simple approach: I mapped (in OpenOffice.org Calc) the popular vote for each party, the number of seats, number of seats divided by percentage of the popular vote, and percentage of the popular vote per seat won. (I threw out the Conservatives’ 1993 number, since 2 seats and 16 percent of the popular vote skewed the numbers badly.) I then averaged the Seats/Percentage numbers over the last 5 elections to find the coefficient of the popular vote.

The coefficients are:

BQ:4.18

Conservative (plus Canadian Alliance): 2.76

Liberal:3.92

NDP: 1.52

Based on incumbency advantage, I’m going to arbitrarily adjust the Conservative coefficient upward 50 basis points to 3.26. I’m also going to arbitrarily issue the Greens 5 seats, because their lack of representation makes it impossible to find a coefficient. Thus distributed, I multipled the coefficients by averaged current support based on the 3 polls and rounded. The seats (accounting for 292 seats) are:

BQ: 40

C: 117

L: 97

NDP: 28

Green: 5

Under these numbers, a Liberal/NDP/Green coalition would have 130 seats – not a majority, even of the smaller number of distributed seats, but still more than the Conservatives.

This is NOT A PREDICTION, though. The numbers are utterly lacking in rigour. It was merely meant as a very rough demonstration that the Bloc would not be necessary for a coalition government by the left.

A number of commentators have discussed Stephen Harper’s attempt to move the government of Canada rightward as well as fill a niche as the “natural governing party” of Canada. That seems at odds to me – I would think that the natural government is a party of the radical centre, and that attempting to fill that niche would require a step centreward by a given party rather than an attempt to move the country.

My conjecture: Harper’s ideal of Canadian government does not match that of the average Canadian citizen. I’ll take a look at an editorial and a specific case, then make a prediction, after the jump.

Harper’s goal, says Michael Adams, is to gain control of the government and move it to the right through a series of incremental steps. The first issue is Harper’s definition of conservative: shrinking government and shrinking taxes as fiscal policy, traditionalism as social policy. As the leader of the government, he has the ability to enforce those ideals through party discipline – he act positively, by cutting taxes, or negatively, by refusing to raise taxes to allocate funds for programs. In the case of the continuing debate on the arts, in fact, both aims are served by a single act of refusal to fund – an artist categorized as nontraditional may be refused funding, lowering federal spending and preventing the spread of subversive ideas.

Adams asserts, and I agree, that the average Canadian is not in line with Harper socially:

Public opinion and values research data reveal a population that is socially liberal: secular, tolerant of differences, profoundly committed to social equality. Canadians are proud of the equality measures that have been advanced by their courts and governments in recent decades; in this area, the dominant orientation is liberal. Canadians, moreover, have relatively little appetite for culture wars. So-called ordinary Canadians demonstrated this aversion recently when they declined an invitation to engage in some angry resentment of greedy, effete big-city artists.

Canadians are socially liberal in terms of equality. I wrote a research paper on Canadian jurisprudence as an undergrad political science student. I examined situations in which the United States and Canada both had Supreme Court cases on the same issue, and in which the Supreme Court of Canada had cited the Supreme Court of the United States, and found that in almost every case the Canadian case made decisions which had significant marginal social liberalism. I did not have the tools at the time to correlate those cases with population data, and I’ll leave that exercise for another day. I will, however, proceed along the assumption that jurisprudence roughly reflects population ideals. (Project idea: rank significant rights cases on a scale from socially liberal to socially conservatism, and correlate that data with polling data on similar issues. Null hypothesis: no correlation.)

A Globe and Mail editorial notes, as an instance of Harper’s incrementalism, his introduction of a bill to replace the young offender law struck down by the McLachlin Court. After the Supreme Court struck down a statute presuming adult penalties for young offenders under certain circumstances, the Harper government introduced a bill simply making young-offender penalties similar to adult-offender penalties. Whether this is a useful method of assessing penalties is a question for the government, as well as for the Courts under any reasonable construction of Section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, it is also a question for the Canadian populace, which may find the Harper government’s insistence that young offenders be treated in a manner equivalent to adult offenders distasteful. It certainly represents the Conservative government’s decision to try to shift the administration of the country rightward.

As promised, a prediction: the election will proceed as a referendum on the incremental shifts and the Tories as the natural governing party of Canada. Because there is a divided left, one cannot evaluate the referendum based solely on the number of seats won by each party in the House of Commons. The Tories will almost surely win a plurality government. Rather, my hypothesis is that the Tories will have a plurality, but not a majority, of the national popular vote. Further, a significant number of ridings won by the Tories will be won by plurality and not by majority. That is, votes for leftist parties (Greens + NDP + Liberals) will outnumber votes for the Conservatives.

(Note to self: construct statistical model to correct for the NDP’s drainage of Liberal voters.)

Harper’s first tactic: fail to discuss the details of his own green plan, but devote his time to criticizing the Grits’ Green Shift, as Jeffrey Simpson details. The carbon tax, Harper says, would not only be fiscally unsound but would harm the Canadian citizens. Thus far, according to Simpson, he has not discussed his own plan to reduce emissions.

Tactic two: if you say it enough, Quebec will believe you. Harper appears to be counting on Quebec for support, especially considering the Liberals’ recent failures there. His hat hangs on the idea that he has restored fiscal balance in the federal government’s interactions with Quebec, and that he supports Quebec autonomy. The Quebec Minister of Finance publicly disagrees with him on the first point; on the second, he appears to be committing a fallacy of equivocation. Harper’s idea of Quebec autonomy is likely very different from what Quebecois mean when they use the word.

Tactic three: it’s those Ivory Tower Liberals! Harper is doing his part to appeal to any anti-intellectual sentiment he can find in Canada. The juxtaposition is valid, of course – Harper’s opponent, Dion, is a Ph.D. who left the Academy to enter politics. Harper’s cuts to arts programs also make sense from a purely fiscal standpoint, since his policy appears to be to cut whatever federal programs he can manage to. Harper’s attempt to shift his image appears dishonest to some, including the author of the linked editorial. The problem, of course, is that he can carry off wearing a cardigan marginally better than Stephane Dion can. Obligatory discussion of arts as non-elite.

Finally, tactic four: govern with a baseball bat. Harper’s style of minority government may well shift if he gets another minority, despite the Bloc’s fears that he’ll get a majority. What Harper is doing here, though, is not developing a “Conservative dynasty,” as Lysiane Gagnon argues in the second linked editorial. Gagnon’s choice of phrasing is important:

Mr. Harper wants to establish a Conservative “dynasty.” He wants to transform the Conservatives into Canada’s “natural governing party,” a status once held by the Liberals. This is another reason why Mr. Harper would have no choice but to stick close to the centre of the ideological spectrum.

She suggests that Harper wants to transform the party. I think that phrasing is incorrect – Harper’s take-it-or-leave-it governance belies a desire to transform the government.

As I discussed here, there’s a perception that the Liberal Party is suffering because Stephane Dion lacks charisma and the public perceives him as weak. Margaret Wente agrees – “At the start of this campaign, Mr. Dion decided to forget about his team and go head-to-head with Harper,” Wente says. “To hell with the Liberal brand!” Wente’s article isn’t terribly insightful – she points to Dion’s professorial manner and his poor public speaking skills, as well as the fragmented left and the charisma that the fragmentors (Elizabeth May and Jack Layton) bring to the table. She further blames him for staying on-message about the Green Shift when the voters are worrying about Wall Street, but that isn’t exactly a poor decision. Shifting gears in reaction to something that’s likely to be fairly transient in the news would simply label Dion as a panderer.

Jeffrey Simpson also criticizes the Dion campaign, discussing the Green Shift and the Liberal campaign’s attendant “‘funds’ [and] ‘studies’”. He points to the continuing cuts as something that the Canadian people just won’t stand for:

“If the Liberals ever got a chance to implement this platform – a highly unlikely prospect – they couldn’t do it all, even if they wanted to, unless the economy started roaring again or they dropped their insistence on a balanced budget with a $3-billion contingency fund.”

That is, the Green Shift is, as Simpson says, “a political loser” despite being the right thing to do. The externality of climate change must be imposed, Simpson says, upon everybody because otherwise the market will fail. This whole campaign keeps reminding me more and more of Jimmy Carter forcing the country to swallow the bitter pill of anti-inflationary policy.

The problem is that Dion isn’t in power yet.

Since my polling numbers ended on the 12th last week, I’m working with numbers from 13 september to 17 september. There’s no new seat projection this week, unfortunately. The data (I ran the numbers for day-by-day averages, but they didn’t show any unusual trend):