Among the many messages from Canadian voters that could be discerned from the results of the September election is that we like minority governments—more than governing parties do, for obvious reasons. As Tom Axworthy, veteran Liberal strategist and close adviser to the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, writes, the record of policy accomplishment of minority governments in Canada may explain that appreciation.

Thomas S. Axworthy 

Since the election of John Diefenbaker’s minority Conservative government in 1957, Canadians have elected minority governments more than 50 percent of the time. Of the 21 governments since 1957, 11 have been minorities. Recently, five of the seven governments since 2004 have been minorities. How to make minority governments work has not only been a practical and strategic issue for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals since 2019, it is now one of the central governmental and political management issues in Canada.

At first glance, when the 44^th Parliament begins its work, its composition will replicate almost exactly the party seat totals of the preceding House.

In the 2019-21 Parliament, Justin Trudeau had an informal alliance with the NDP that gave him a working majority and that alliance is almost certain to be recreated in the 44^th House. 

Yet, the political dynamics of the upcoming first session of the new Parliament have been greatly altered by Trudeau losing his gamble to win a majority government of at least 170 seats. 

In December 2019, I wrote an article in Policy magazine titled, All Parliament, All the Time, making the case that, in a minority parliament, skill in House management becomes the most prized commodity in Ottawa. 

In dealing with the opposition in a minority parliament, the ultimate power of the prime minister is to threaten to go to the people if support from the other parties on legislation is not forthcoming. Prime Minister Harper, for example, had quite a narrow plurality of seats in his minority governments of 2006-08 and 2008-2011, but due to Liberal Party disarray, Harper’s oft-used threat to call an election ensured begrudging Liberal support of Conservative legislation.

But in calling an election in August 2021 to end a minority parliament that was working well, Trudeau’s decision became a persistent negative issue for the Liberals during the campaign. Trudeau will not be able to use the threat of a snap election to leverage legislative support, as Canadians would be unforgiving about another election within so short a time. The onus on the party leaders, therefore, should be on genuine cooperation, as no party has an incentive for an early election.  

What are the lessons and accomplishments of previous minority parliaments that can guide our leaders as they prepare for the 44^th Parliament? In October 2019, Geoff Norquay, a veteran Conservative strategist, wrote a useful historical summary in Policy asking How Effective Are Federal Minority Governments? I will build on this theme. 

With his surprise victory in 1957, John Diefenbaker had a narrow plurality of only seven seats over the Liberals (112-105), but his significance in the history of minority governments dwells in the primacy of political judgment, for better and worse. In 1958, Lester B, Pearson, the newly elected leader of the Liberal Party, demanded that the Conservative government voluntarily resign and hand power back to the Liberals. Diefenbaker used this stunning display of Liberal arrogance to call an immediate election and was rewarded with the largest seat majority in Canadian electoral history, 208 members in the then-265 seat House. 

But Diefenbaker’s judgment and management skills had eroded by 1962 when he won a minority of 116 seats to 99 the Liberals. Minority governments demand intense sensitivity in human relations. Every backbencher counts and cabinet consensus must be worked at every day. Diefenbaker’s cabinet, however, fell apart over the issue of whether Canada would accept nuclear warheads on the US-backed Bomarc missiles Diefenbaker had agreed to station on Canadian soil before it was clear they’d be nuclearized. In the subsequent turmoil, the opposition parties united on a non-confidence vote. In the ensuing 1963 election, the Conservatives and Liberals changed places but the NDP’s 17 seats gave Pearson a de facto working parliamentary majority.

Lester Pearson was not a very good politician on the hustings—he never won a majority government in four tries—but the Liberal Party was content to stick with him. And a good thing, too—his minority governments were transformational and the Pearson years from 1963-68 are regarded as the Golden Age of minority governments. What was so different then compared to today?

Two characteristics that defined the Pearson government’s creativity are now almost totally absent from Ottawa: the first was the wide latitude given individual ministers to launch initiatives and direct their own departments. The main reason that the Pearson governments were so reformist was that every minister had the opportunity to reform. Today, in contrast, the centre rules all: Cabinet meetings have been described as a focus group for the prime minister, the PMO—not the minister—selects the minister’s staff, and communications are excessively controlled. 

The second fundamental of the Pearson era was that policy and the party process really mattered. Party conventions were not just photo-ops for the leader. Three party events were seminal: the 1960 Kingston Thinkers Conference discussed fundamental changes in social policy, the 1961 National Liberal Rally of 1,800 Liberals in Ottawa put this new social policy agenda into the platform, and the 1966 Liberal policy convention entrenched it. 

In just five years, Pearson minority governments created Medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada Assistance Plan, the Guaranteed Income Supplement for low-income seniors, and the Canada Student Loans Program. As a very junior researcher for Walter Gordon, president of the Privy Council, I was witness to this burst of social policy progress. 

Medicare was the biggest idea of all the 1960s reforms and when the Department of Finance began a counterattack to delay or shelve this transformation, progressives used the 1966 policy convention to insist that this fundamental change go forward. The party checkmated the department. 

None of the great advances of the Pearson minority governments were choreographed by today’s political techniques of constant polling, deep analytics, micro-targeting or minute-by-minute communications. The Liberals did not even begin serious polling until well after the 1961 Rally. History, ideas and notions of the public interest set the framework.

The Pierre Trudeau minority government of 1972-74 had only a two-seat advantage—109-107—over the Conservatives and day-to-day management of the government’s future depended on David Lewis and the NDP. Allan MacEachen, the legendary Liberal House leader, never made the mistake of Joe Clark, who said he would manage his minority government in as if he had a majority, thereby ignoring the views of the six members of the Créditiste party who joined with the Liberals and NDP to defeat the government’s budget, 139-133, in December 1979. The first rule of minority government management is to know how to count.

The Trudeau minority parliament had some enduring accomplishments, notably the 1974 Election Expenses Act, which introduced limits on campaign spending, partial public funding, and the introduction of tax credits for voluntary contributions. But given the controversy over Justin Trudeau’s unilateral ending of Parliament in 2021, it is instructive to learn how his father’s government maneuvered in 1974. James Travers, the late columnist for the Toronto Star, once wrote “the art of minority government is engineering defeat on the most favorable terms”. By 1974, the Trudeau Liberals had regained popular support by increasing family allowances and creating Petro-Canada, but how to reap the electoral rewards? Enter Finance Minister John Turner in May 1974 with one of the most politically astute budgets in Canadian history. The budget addressed the inflationary times by removing sales taxes on clothing and footwear and by introducing a Registered Home Ownership plan to assist young families with housing. But the government rejected the Conservative plan for wage and price controls and most crucially rejected the NDP demand for significant increases in corporate taxes. The budget was progressive enough to run on in an election but not so progressive as to ensure NDP support. The NDP joined with the Conservatives to defeat the government and Trudeau got the election he wanted. But it was the NDP that was blamed for pulling the plug. Re-elected, Trudeau then imposed wage and price controls in 1975.

Three minority governments in a row occurred in the mid-2000s. In 2004-2006 Paul Martin led a minority Liberal government followed by Stephen Harper’s two in 2006-2008 and 2008- 2011. Martin had a very narrow minority: in 2005, the House voted evenly 152-152 on a budget amendment, leaving the speaker of the House to dramatically break the tie. The Martin minority government made advances—notably, same sex marriage was legalized. Yet public opinion was angered by the Liberal sponsorship scandal and the Martin government was defeated on a non-confidence vote in November 2005. The Conservatives won the subsequent election with 124 seats to the Liberals’ 103 in the then-308- seat House.

Harper moved skillfully, in his two minority governments, to implement his vision of a much-reduced role for government while not moving so radically as to threaten his future electoral prospects. He reduced the GST from 7 to 5 percent, increased equalization grants to Quebec and stayed out of provincial jurisdictions. (In the January-February 2015 edition of Policy, Rana Shamoon and I discuss Harper’s “Conservative Dominance”).

The Harper era is generally regarded as a time of rising partisanship and increasing political divide. But one of the most moving days in recent parliamentary history occurred on June 11, 2008 when Harper rose in the Commons to make an eloquent apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools. Eleven extra chairs were placed on the floor of the House for five Indigenous leaders and six residential school survivors as they listened to the party leaders apologize for this national tragedy. It was a day when politics was put aside. And the Harper government created and adequately funded the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2008-2015. Minority parliaments can rise above partisanship, as they did in 2008 on Truth and Reconciliation and as they did again 2020 when the COVID epidemic first hit. Politics does not always have to be negative.

The minority government that will now govern Canada already has some markers in the ground. The Liberals ran on $10- a-day daycare, with most provinces already agreeing to the scheme and Ontario likely to follow before the next provincial election in June 2022. The NDP and the Bloc Québécois strongly support the initiative, so a national system of daycare support will almost certainly be a legacy of the next Parliament. Similarly, the Liberals are committed to greatly increasing the carbon tax and this, too, will move forward. 

But what other measures could follow the precedents established since 1957? The first is that the next Parliament should provide more of a countervail to the growing power of the executive. Every party caucus should take advantage of the potential powers available to them through the 2014 Reform Act of electing their own caucus chair, deciding on who should be expelled from caucus, electing interim leaders and even initiating a leadership review if necessary. The Conservative caucus has recently agreed to opt in to these powers, the other party caucuses should do the same. 

Second, in the past, minority parliaments have enacted legislation to make Canadian elections much fairer. Today there is almost universal criticism of the televised leaders’ debates. A better plan would be for the parties to nominate a spokesperson for a debate each week of the campaign on a different topic, culminating in the leaders’ debate towards the end of the campaign. This would ensure that a variety of issues would be covered in-depth and have the added benefit of showing the bench strength of the parties.

Lastly, in the most fruitful era of minority governments, policy was uppermost. Today, parties largely spend their tax-supported resources on micro-targeting and negative advertising. A percentage of the public subsidy given parties should be mandated to go towards the creation of party policy foundations so that our parties are also focusing on policy innovation in addition to organizing, and fundraising.

Minority governments can be effective. Past governments have shown the way.  

Contributing Writer Thomas S. Axworthy is Public Policy Chair at Massey College at the University of Toronto. He was Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau from 1981-84.