Liberals Declare Motion Invalid(Crisis brewing in Canada)

OTTAWA (CP) - The Liberals have declared invalid a motion opponents say could spell the death of the minority government within two weeks.

A Conservative effort to hold a confidence vote by May 18 was approved by the House of Commons on Thursday - but it took the Liberals just minutes to brush it aside. Constitutional experts say precedents in Canadian parliamentary history offer little direction as Prime Minister Paul Martin's government lurches toward a crisis.

House Leader Tony Valeri insisted the motion is simply a procedural matter that has no binding effect on the government.

"There is no non-confidence motion," Valeri said. Moments earlier, the Commons Speaker endorsed the Conservative motion, which calls on the government to resign.

The motion asked the Commons Finance committee "to recommend that the government resign."

A virtual deadlock exists in Parliament. A Liberal-NDP alliance is struggling to stave off defeat at the hands of the election-ready Tories and Bloc Quebecois.

The Liberals appear destined to face a confidence test soon, either in a vote on the budget or in a confidence motion sometime before late June.

The opposition insists a federal election should be automatic if they capture the vote on the motion.

"You can't have more of a confidence motion than this one. . . It asks for the government to resign," said Bloc House Leader Michel Gauthier.

"I can't sincerely believe there's not at least one person in that government with enough honour to say, 'Look, they've just asked us to resign. Let's stop, it's pitiful, we're clinging (to power).' "

"If a motion passes . . . that clearly says the government should resign; how could they say that's not confidence?" Jay Hill said.

But he struggled when pressed to explain what he could do if Prime Minister Paul Martin ignores the vote result.

"I think it will be up to the Canadian people and the people in the media to convince him otherwise," he replied.

Appeals to the media and public might be the only device in the opposition's political toolbox. The Constitution apparently offers little help.

Three experts said the government would not be forced to resign if they lost the vote on Thursday's motion. But the Liberals would be skating on thin ice by ignoring the vote result, all agreed.

One expert used a decidedly more colourful metaphor to underscore the seriousness of the vote.

"The prime minister can say it's not a confidence motion because it doesn't say 'confidence,' " said Ned Franks, professor emeritus at Queen's University.

"But to put it another way: This is where the flying excrement intersects with a rotating propeller.

"It's a pretty serious loss of face. . . . What the opposition could do then is just prevent Parliament from working, saying 'You have no legitimacy. Call an election.' "

Another observer agreed that the question facing the prime minister is a political, not a constitutional one.

"It's partly a political calculation about whether the government thinks it can escape the political price of refusing to resign when it seems to have suffered a serious political setback," said Paul Thomas, a political scientist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Apart from throne speeches, money bills or explicit non-confidence motions, it's up to the government to decide what votes it will treat as a life-death matters, he said.

But another observer suggested the motion appears perilously close to a confidence test and could seriously damage the government.

David Docherty pointed out that the motion certainly appeared like a confidence test when the Liberals appealed to the Speaker and fought its passage tooth and nail.

"If a motion explicitly says they do not have confidence in the government and that motion passes, then it's a non-confidence motion," said Docherty, political science chairman at Wilfrid Laurier University.

"If it truly wasn't a matter of confidence, then why was the government trying to stop it in the first place? It makes the (government) case a little bit weaker to say, 'Oh, well now that they can go ahead, we're not going to consider this a non-confidence motion.'

"It's clearly a fall-back position, which makes them look slightly more desperate than they presumably want to look."

In once case, Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King resigned in 1926 rather than face a vote on a similar motion in the Commons. The Tories appear to have copied their strategy from 1926, when they introduced a motion calling on the government to resign for failing to adopt key recommendations of a parliamentary committee.

On the other hand, the Liberals escaped parliamentary death in 1968 when they lost a vote on an actual money bill.

Then-prime minister Lester Pearson was away on a winter holiday when opponents defeated a tax bill that had already survived two readings in the Commons.

Robert Stanfield's Tories commissioned polls that suggested Canadians would be angry if they took advantage of the absence of Pearson and other Liberals to trigger an election.

Pearson was flown back from his holiday in the middle of a winter storm, and he organized a deal with Stanfield to save his government.

Stanfield faced down hawks in his own caucus who wanted an election, and allowed the Liberal government to survive.

A few months later Pierre Trudeau was chosen Liberal leader and the Liberals went on to win eight of the next 11 federal elections.

Liberals Declare Motion Invalid

Man, those liberals think they can repeal natural laws like motion! What arrogance?

What? A legislative motion? Oh, sorry, forget I said anything...

I had some pretty interesting email conversations in the last two weeks with Canadian bloggers. Many think that if the Liberal Party finds a way to stave off a no confidence vote or even win an election whenever that occurs, it will speed up not impede Quebec secession. This arrogant move to ignore a no-confidence motion has just racheted up the anger even more in the last day or two.

Some of those I corresponded with think that a Quebec secession will result in the ultimate breakup of the country with the western provices(Alberta and Saskatchwan especially) also taking their leave.

Yes, and if the breakup does happen, the next interesting thing to contemplate is whether any of the breakaway provinces are candidates to become part of the US. This could be a more contentious issue than it might first appear.

Becoming an American state is like a marriage with no possibility of divorce - the Civil War settled that. So traditionally, there has been a "live together" period, in which an area was a "territory" instead of a "state".

I suspect Canadian provinces would be reluctant to join under that status, feeling that they should be treated equally to all other states from the get-go.

Another issue is what it would do to American politics to add a couple of very liberal leaning (by our standards) Candadian provinces to the list of states. With the partisan politics in play now, unless the Republicans had a huge majority in the Congress, I think they would be very reluctant to cooperate with adding likely-Democratic-voting Canadian provinces to the union.

Frankly, I think the three western provinces could go it alone and do quite well for themselves. They've got an abundance of oil and gas along with a large cattle industry in Alberta. Saskatchwan is the breadbasket of Canada and in Vancouver you have a world-class international port facility.

An independent state comprised of these three provinces would succeed IMHO.

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