A Minority Is Still A Minority, A Majority Still A Majority

There is already speculation as to whether it will be possible to hold the Conservatives to a minority on Oct. 14, or whether they might win a majority. This discussion is largely irrelevant because there's little difference. Canadians must understand that to elect a Conservative minority is, in effect, to elect a Conservative majority.

This bit of mythology has had too wide a circulation for too long a time. In fact, though, the Tories minority status has imposed significant constraints on their ability to pass legislation over the past several years. Here's just a quick list of really awful Tory bills that, for various reasons, died:

Legislation to kill the CWB (I forget the formal title)
Bill C-484 (Abortion Legislation)
C-10 (Film Censorship Legislation)
C-61 (Copyright Legislation)
Senate Reform (can't remember the name of that one either)
C-6 (Veiled Voter Legislation)

Now, the particular histories behind these bills are different in each case, but for the most part (and in a number of instances I am not probably not recalling at the moment), they were basically killed "by the process" after passing their first or second reading in the House. And the reason that they died in this way, and other ways equally inauspicious, is because, in a minority government, the government does not control the committees designed to examine and amend proposed legislation. The backroom maneuvers that killed them never achieved the same public profile as, for example, the Liberal abstentions in the House that sent them to committee in the first place, but nevertheless they worked.

Give Stephen Harper a Majority, and all of that changes. His party runs the committees. His party rams through what it wants to ram through. The quality of legislation that comes out of the HOC depends entirely on his whims.