Dion and the Speech from the Throne

Liberal sources said Dion wanted to force an election, fearing his reputation as a champion of the environment and progress he's made wooing Green and left-wing voters will be seriously hurt if Liberals don't vote against Harper's anti-Kyoto message.

- The Canadian Press

You're goddamned right it will be. And it's not going to be helped by the fact that one of the amendments the Liberals plan to move to the throne speech is to reduce corporate taxes.

In Westminster-style democracies, throne speeches matter. Governments are granted an incredible amount of control over Parliament - too much if you ask me, which you didn't - and the one concession they have to give in exchange for this power is setting out their priorities at the beginning of each sitting, that it might be subjected to a vote. Voting in favour of a throne speech does not indicate, as Stephen Harper has suggested, that an MP is then bereft of authority to vote against any government bill alluded to in the speech, but it does mean that the MP is consenting to give the government the power to push ahead with its agenda. And it's pretty difficult to keep up the kind of rhetoric in which Stéphane Dion's been engaging about Harper if you're de facto consenting to this.

But forget substance (n.b. please don't actually forget substance) - let's talk about strategy. Stéphane Dion has, thus far, been a catastrophe as Liberal leader (full disclosure: I donated to his campaign, but this was in the belief that he'd make a good Prime Minister, not in the belief that he'd be a good party leader). But what do the election naysayers expect to change between now and some unspecified future time which will be more opportune for an election? It's a lesson of Canadian political history that leaders redeem themselves at election time: Turner 1988 (sort of), Trudeau 1980 (sort of), Stanfield 1972 (sort of)...if Dion is going to be successful as Liberal leader, it's going to be because he outperformed expectations in an election campaign. Therefore, he needs an election campaign. Moreover, Liberals who think Dion is doomed to remain a failure need an election campaign: either they're right, the Liberals perform badly, and Dion is swiftly replaced by whoever happens to be The Next Pierre Trudeau that week, or they're wrong, Dion kicks ass, and the Liberals are the only place they're comfortable being - in power.

Instead of getting the election they so sorely need, the Liberals have opted to give themselves at least a few more months of imploding in the opposition benches. Maybe Stéphane Dion really isn't a leader.

An interesting side plot is Garth Turner's vote on the throne speech. He has been an unabashedly public advocate of two things recently:
1. The Liberals should bring down the government at the first opportunity, and
2. MPs should vote as they see fit.
Combine this with the fact that he recently told me that he doesn't think Joe Comuzzi would have been kicked out of the Liberal caucus if he'd told Dion in advance and in private of his intentions to vote in favour of the Conservative budget, and I can't see how he could justify anything but a vote against the speech. My hunch is that he abstains, though.