Parlement fédéral
Entendu lors du panel de fin de saison de At Issue hier soir, à CBC (vidéo ici) :
Most under-reported political event of the season?
Chantal Hébert: The way the federal Parliament is becoming irrelevant to major issues versus the provinces and how Gordon Campbell, we were talking about that, is coming up with, you know, trying to kick start the EI debate on some other notion than « your fault, my fault ». Jean Charest pushing free-trade with Europe and making deals over manpower training with European countries. And all of this speaks to a growing vacuum, how they’re getting together to try to get a carbon exchange, carbon tax in BC. All of this time, what they do in Ottawa? Mystery.
Andrew Coyne: Well, I’ll second that and I’ll add there’s a structural element to this that I think we really ought to be talking about. We’re now going to be in our, what, our 4th election in 5 years if we have one this fall. We are stuck in these perpetual minority governments, and minority governments of the least fruitful kind, particularly the Bloc’s presence is not terribly helpful. Sooner or later, [...] that we are trying to run five-party politics through a system that was designed for two. It is no accident that they behave this way, because the whole incentive structure of our system is inimical to minority governments, so they perpetually have there hands on the button, trying to [...] the trigger of the election if they get a two-point swing in the polls. This system is broken. And at some point, you know, they tried it in BC, they didn’t manage to get it through, but at some point this issue is going to come to ahead, and it may come to ahead federally. We all thought it would happen provincially. But it is at the federal level in many ways that our present electoral system is being the most damaged.
