Corey Pierce

In the Great Parliamentary Crisis of ’08, the turning point arrived at exactly 5:26 p.m. on Wednesday, December 3. Things were looking increasingly desperate for Stephen Harper. Television networks had just broadcast his pre-recorded, five-minute “address to the nation.” It was not exactly a performance for the ages. The speech contained virtually nothing we hadn’t already heard, conveyed no sense of the PM’s strategy for moving forward, and didn’t so much as mention the possibility of prorogation.

The on-air pundits were left scratching their heads. If Harper had thought that this uninspiring five minutes of video was going to change the tides of history, surely he had miscalculated yet again. Harper was on the ropes.

But hold on. The prime minister’s address was to be followed by a speech from Stéphane Dion, who would make the case for the coalition. Just minutes before the time-slot had expired, Dion took to the airwaves, and — just like that — everything changed.

For a fleeting moment, it looked as though Rick Mercer had just pulled off the most stunning hoax in the history of Canadian politics. No, this was no prank: this was Dion talking in grave tones about overthrowing the government and making himself the prime minister, and all of a sudden, this whole coalition thing was beginning to look slightly ridiculous.

In fact, it looked as though Dion had just unpacked his webcam and hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it. The image was grainy and out of focus. The sound was dreadful. And the performance itself was as coarse as the production value. Dion insisted that Harper had lost the confidence of the House, but his own pinched expressions and awkward manner seemed the very antithesis of “confidence.” He looked like a doormat. You could practically feel the coalition curl up and expire.

Of course, there were many persuasive arguments against the coalition, the most obvious being that the constitutive parties have mutually conflicting agendas, that the Liberals were a minority within their own minority coalition, and that coalition would install as prime minister a weak leader who had already agreed to step down from his own party. However, the best argument against the coalition came from Gilles Duceppe, who looked directly into a TV camera last Tuesday and roundly stated that the coalition would be good for Quebec sovereignty. We should take him at his word on that.

It was Dion’s video, however, that had shattered the rebel alliance. By Friday, December 5, Harper had secured his prorogation, and by Saturday, senior Liberals — most notably, former deputy prime minister John Manley — were openly calling for Dion’s resignation. The most recent numbers from Ipsos Reid indicate that a large majority of Canadians (60 per cent) support the Harper government to “fight and do everything they can legally do” to keep governing, while 37 per cent support the coalition. The same poll showed that the Conservatives had the support of 46 per cent of decided voters, while Liberal support had sagged to 23 per cent. In an election, those numbers would translate into a massive Conservative majority.

Of course, those numbers paint a deceptively rosy picture for the Conservatives, and they almost certainly will not hold. Voters may have been spooked by this power-hungry consortium, but they are justifiably furious with Harper for instigating the whole debacle. The obnoxious combination of malevolence and recklessness on display in his fiscal update seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears about Stephen Harper.

The real tragedy here belongs to Dion. In the space of two months, Dion lost the election, the coalition, the leadership of his party and his reputation: in crafting a deal that would have left his own party beholden to the separatists in matters of confidence, Dion seriously compromised his own reputation as a proud federalist and author of the Clarity Act. Dion has nothing left to lose.

In the end, though, everyone’s a loser. Confronted by the worst financial meltdown in many decades, the United States embraced a figure of hope and change in Barack Obama. Faced with the same crisis, the Canadian Parliament self-immolated in a moronic inferno of viciousness and incompetence. Separatist resentment is once again on the boil in Quebec, and the West is ready to explode with self-righteousness and self-pity. Welcome to the prorogation nation. What a sad time for Canadian politics.