While I’ll agree that Brian Topp’s series of blogs on last year’s coalition madness is required reading — especially for historians interested in the event as a political exercise — it’s disappointing to see that, in his concluding entry, he reveals he’s learned very little, if anything.

He seems to have only picked up on one thing learned: the coalition should have given Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc a bigger role in publicizing its virtues. True, Duceppe would have risked alienating the more extreme of the sovereigntist base. But the fact remains, Duceppe (not Stephane Dion) would have been the most logical person in the Coalition to refute Stephen Harper’s most blatant accusations against the idea, by explaining to Canadian outside Quebec the exact role his Bloc would play. (Certainly he would have been better at it than the hapless Dion.)

Apart from that though, Mr. Topp grumbles about wanting to pass a law preventing the PM from providing “advice to the Governor-General that interferes with the functioning of the House when a confidence motion is before it.” Trouble is, that’s unfeasible: as a senior member of the Privy Council, the PM is obligated to advise the Queen (or her representative, in this case the GG) about the functioning of Parliament, and therefore cannot be hamstrung by its machinations.

Then he launches into a futile musing about how the coalition would be handling today’s problems, giving him an excuse to hammer the Harper government while at the same time shilling for Jack Layton. Tons of wishful thinking, but “lessons learned”? Nah, that would be too difficult. People don’t want to read mea culpae, right?

Actually, they do. There are quite a few “lessons learned” that Mr. Topp should have picked up. Things like this:

• When the Finance Minister says there’s no need for stimulus, don’t waste breath demanding stimulus right now. Yes, the coalition crisis happened because the Harper government decided to get mischievous — but they had that opportunity because the Opposition kept demanding that the government do something right the hell now about the recession. The events of the coalition meant that the “economic update” was scrapped, and then rendered meaningless with the next budget. Which proved the point that adding stimulus, in the fall, was ultimately unnecessary. Far better, then, for the NDP to stress the need for stimulus in the next budget, and work behind the scenes persuading both other MPs and Finance officials of same, than to demand emergency immediate action.
• Pay attention to your fundraising. The popular perception is that the coalition idea came about because of the economic update’s phasing out of political party subsidies, and that in turn revealed how addictively dependent the Opposition was to them. And everyone suspects that if the Harper government ever achieves a majority, that subsidy phaseout could come back. It’s to their credit that Michael Ignatieff and other senior Liberals been devoting more attention to the party’s fundraising apparatus, trying to reduce their dependency on that subsidy. Can the NDP say the same?
• A coalition will never work if the majority partner isn’t stable. The Liberal Party of 2008 was a lot of things, but “stable” (in the sense of united with one vision or leader) certainly wasn’t one of them. You had a leader who was on the outs, other senior MPs machining for the job, and a whole ton of folks either gazing at their navels or whistling in the dark, trying to figure out how many more disasters could happen before they could kiss their political career goodbye. Throughout his series, Mr. Topp grumbled over the effort needed to persuade the Liberals about the NDP’s idea of a coalition. Is he able to call a spade a spade — and conclude that the Liberal Party just wasn’t a very good partner to have?
• Never ignore the Popular Will. This is when you absolutely have to get out of the choir you’ve been preaching to, to shut off the screen with the latest from your favorite blog aggregators, to really see what the Donut-and-Double-Doubles are thinking. If the majority of people suddenly find that the person they thought would be PM isn’t, then blithe acceptance of Fate (which is what Mr. Topp seems to be counselling) simply isn’t in the cards, no matter how long such a Coalition can stay in power. This is something that Harper successfully played on, and while Mr. Topp obviously doesn’t like it, he’d be a fool to think he can change or ignore it.
• And the biggest lesson of all? Always — ALWAYS — respect the cunning of Stephen Harper. Yes, the man made a big blunder last year. But as the November polls have shown, his political prospects have fully recovered, and he’s been able to take advantage of stimulus spending to enhance his party’s popular standings, much to the dismay of those who were smug about how business was done before. Remember: if you cannot respect your adversary, you will become smug about him; if you become smug about him, you will therefore ignore him; and if you ignore him, you’ll never learn what he can do to you — until it’s too late.

Here endeth the lessons. Think Brian Topp will ever learn them?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 10:38 and is filed under Harping, Media Watch, No DiPsticks, Politics, The Dion Curse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.