Canadian TV fails to learn the lesson of the 2008 debacle

At this time last night I was watching a live-stream of the Canadian election results programme on CBC. It was mostly a pleasurable experience, with one of the nastiest right-wing governments in the democratic world being shown the door at long last.  The pro-independence and left-wing Bloc Quebecois also made a partial recovery, jumping from two seats to ten, which will nicely complicate the (bogus) narrative that the Quebec sovereignty movement is in relentless decline.  The main disappointment was that the Liberals unexpectedly won an overall majority, because that will probably turn Trudeau into a conservative on the subject of electoral reform.  As we know in this country, it's very hard to convince a leader who has just won a majority under a majoritarian system that it would be far better to make it almost impossible for anyone to win a majority again.

And I had one other little bugbear.  I really hoped that the Canadian broadcasters had learned the lesson of their 2008 debacle, when they nonsensically "projected a Conservative minority government".  What they meant by that, of course, was that the Conservatives would be the largest single party in a hung parliament.  But their loose use of language had serious repercussions a few weeks later, when the Liberals and NDP entered into a coalition agreement with Bloc Quebecois support.  Some people were outraged : "This is a coup!  Didn't we just elect a Tory minority government?"  Well, actually, no you didn't.  You elected a parliament in which the Liberals, NDP and Bloc held a majority between them, and therefore what was happening was entirely legitimate, and should have been considered unremarkable.  But the confusion was understandable given that TV networks had fed viewers the fiction that it's somehow possible to "elect a minority government".  That may well have played a part in the coalition agreement failing to stick.

I regret to say that they've learned nothing.  When the moment came to project a Liberal government last night, the CBC host added as an afterthought : "we're making no call on whether it will be a majority or minority government".  In which case they weren't in a position to project a Liberal government at all - merely that the Liberals would be the largest party.  If there's any chance of a hung parliament, you don't yet know for sure who will be forming the government - it's as simple as that.

So why did they do it?  It was probably an infatuation with the idea that an election programme is only complete when viewers can be presented with a clear-cut winner.  But the reality is that if voters decline to choose an outright winner on the night, the TV networks have no business choosing one for them.

Wisdom on Wednesday : The independence imperative

"We are seeking sovereignty because it is absolutely essential, like the ripening of fruit, like reaching adulthood, like a river opening out into the ocean. It is necessary because we are a people."

Said by Lucien Bouchard, moderate leader of the (very nearly successful) Quebec independence movement in 1995. And I bet that quote sounded even better in French!

Vive L'Écosse Libre!

As I've spent a fair bit of time recently calculating poll averages, I thought I might take it a step further and do the same thing for what is probably the closest international parallel to our own independence referendum, namely the Quebec referendum of 1995. I'm sure most of you know that, in the early stages, the Yes camp in Quebec found themselves in a seemingly hopeless predicament, before recovering with a few months to go to roughly where we in Scotland are right now on a mean average of the polls - 40% Yes, 60% No (with Don't Knows excluded). They then made further impressive gains which took them all the way to a narrow lead by the close of the campaign.

That part of the story is well-known, but what might surprise you a little more is that an average of the polls from September 1995, the month before the referendum, shows that Yes were still trailing by more than five points...

SEPTEMBER 1995 AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 47.4%
No 52.6%

An average of polls conducted during the month of the referendum itself shows that the position had been dramatically reversed...

OCTOBER 1995 AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :

Yes 50.7% (+3.3)
No 49.3% (-3.3)

Then of course came the famously cruel twist in the tale that has poisoned Quebec politics to this day. Fieldwork for the final poll was concluded three days before the referendum, too late to pick up any late swings. The No campaign indulged in some rather questionable practices in a desperate effort to rescue the situation, and it appears that this was sufficient to generate a small but decisive late swing back to No. However, this didn't reverse all or even most of the gains that Yes had made between September and October, as a comparison between the final result and the September average will demonstrate...

REFERENDUM RESULT, 30 OCTOBER 1995 (changes from September polling average) :

Yes 49.4% (+2.0)
No 50.6% (-2.0)

I'd say those numbers fairly definitively give the lie to the hoary old myth that you'll still sometimes hear otherwise intelligent people trot out, namely that a Yes campaign is bound to suffer a seepage of support during any referendum campaign, and that undecided voters are bound to break for No. More specifically, it suggests that our own Yes campaign in Scotland could still hope to win even if it remains a few points behind next August. It currently stands at 40.1% in the Poll of Polls with Don't Knows excluded, so if the Quebec precedent is anything to go by, it would probably need to increase its support by at least 7% or so over the coming seven or eight months. For my money, the crucial period will be from May until early August, because it's in May that the official campaign period starts, and from that point on the broadcasters will finally be obliged to treat both sides of the debate equally (and it'll be fascinating to see how faithfully they live up to that obligation).

NOTE : Apologies if I got my French grammar wrong in the title of this post. If so, hopefully Tris will correct me!

A few thoughts on the forthcoming Quebec election

Quebec goes to the polls in a few days' time, in a provincial election which could in theory set in train a sequence of events leading to a third referendum on independence. I recall watching a live stream of the election results last time round, and fascinating it was too - although the anti-independence Liberals held on for another term, it was generally agreed that the Parti Québécois had secured a moral victory by finishing a close second and by comprehensively seeing off the party (the ADQ) that had pushed it into third place in 2007. In a way, it almost looked as if the PQ had "provisionally won the next election", because it seemed inevitable that by 2012 or 2013 the electorate would be looking for a change after a decade of Liberal rule, and that the PQ would be best-placed to take advantage.

Four years on, however, the legacy of that moral victory looks somewhat less than clear-cut. The PQ do indeed hold a lead in most of the polls, but it's a narrow one, and a new party called the CAQ has risen from the ashes of the ADQ to once again threaten the Liberal-PQ duopoly - something which is potentially dangerous for the PQ under a FPTP system that usually severely punishes any party outside the top two. Intriguingly, the CAQ is led by a former pro-independence government minister who claims that his new party is neither sovereigntist nor federalist. To Scottish (and Northern Irish) ears that probably sounds like sophistry - people in this country who want to "move on" from the constitutional debate generally want to do so in a decidedly anti-independence way. But to be fair, the CAQ are only suggesting that the sovereignty debate be put on the back-burner for ten years, and claim that in the meantime they will advocate neither independence nor Canadian unity. This could yet be a dilemma that the SNP have to grapple with one day, because if the worst happens and there is a No vote to independence in 2014, the question of how long it would be before another referendum is appropriate would be very much of the 'how long is a piece of string' variety.

As for the PQ themselves, I'm always struck by the unalloyed hatred the party attracts in English-speaking Canada - way beyond anything the SNP have to put up with here. I know that doesn't seem possible, but just take a look at the comments section of Canadian news articles some time. There was a recent article branding the PQ as "xenophobes" for wanting to introduce a law requiring that candidates for public office should be fluent in French. On the face of it, that is indeed a bit of a draconian step in a province that has a large number of native English speakers, but there is an arguable justification for the proposal. At the last federal election, the social democratic NDP shocked everyone, not least themselves, by sweeping the board in Quebec. Because it was such a surprise, many of the successful candidates were 'paper candidates' from other parts of Canada who couldn't speak French. By definition, this means that much of Quebec now has very poor parliamentary representation - an MP who can't communicate properly with the majority of his constituents is not a good MP. It's impossible to imagine this scenario happening in a majority French-speaking independent state, so it's understandable that a legal remedy is being sought to ensure that as far as possible it can't happen to French-speakers as a linguistic minority within Canada either. But it's still a bad, illiberal idea, and also tactically foolish - why introduce a law that will ensure your opponents put up a better quality of candidate against you?

Michael Ignatieff's A-Z guide on how to lose votes and alienate people

If unionists are looking for advice on how to prevail in the independence referendum, they might do well to be wary of taking it from the man responsible for the Canadian Liberal Party's idiotically tribal decision to renege on a 2008 coalition deal with the NDP and Bloc Québécois that would have turfed the Tories out of office. That man then led his party to a catastrophic meltdown in last year's federal election, costing them even official opposition status, and leaving the Tories in majority control for the first time in a generation. And yet Michael Ignatieff seemingly has no embarrassment in penning a Financial Times article that lectures Scotland in holier-than-thou fashion on the "lessons" it must take from him. It boils down to two points - a) don't have a referendum, and b) if you must have a referendum, vote 'No'. Yup, if you thought Alan Cochrane lacked subtlety, nuance and all sense of perspective in his approach to this topic, you ain't seen nothing yet.

"In our 1980 referendum on Quebec, the result was a clear cut victory for Canada."

I really would caution you not to think of the forthcoming referendum as one that will produce "victory" for either "Britain" or "Scotland", Michael. If the choice is framed in that way, there can only be one winner.

And "our" referendum in 1980? It was a Quebec referendum, Michael, and you are not from Quebec, nor were you a Quebec resident in 1980. Perhaps before going any further you should start by clarifying whether you actually believe in the well-understood (and legally-enshrined) principle of the SELF-determination of peoples, and if not, why not?

"We learnt the strongest argument for leaving countries as they are turns out to be that most people don’t want to choose between different parts of their identity."

Unless this is to be a one-way dialogue (admittedly that's almost certainly what you have in mind), perhaps you should be open to learning a few lessons about just how far the SNP has moved in terms of respecting the British sense of identity in Scotland, and how that identity will not be imperilled by independence any more than Scottishness is imperilled by union. If you cannot even conceive of British identity existing independently of dry constitutional structures, you're guilty of precisely the one-dimensional thinking you accuse Scottish "secessionists" (yes, really!) of.

"The issue is whether Scots feel they can only assert their Scottishness by parting with the Unionist part of their soul."

Which bears out my previous points. Conveniently, the choice is not between "Scottishness" and "Britishness", because only by pretending that the terms "Britishness" (an identity) and "Unionism" (an adherence to a constitutional structure) are interchangeable can you claim that the alternative to Scottishness is somehow threatened by independence. Well, two can play at that silly game - why not frame the choice as between "Britishness" and "Scottish sovereigntism"? In that case, only a Yes vote to independence would allow people to keep both "identities", whereas a No vote would jettison one part of people's "soul".

Yes, Michael, linguistic conjuring tricks do tend to produce exactly the answer you want. Another valuable "lesson" learned.

"So the independence side is campaigning for a ballot question that allows Scots to have it both ways. “Devo max” is the ungainly option: full self-government with fiscal powers within a sovereign UK whose parliament would retain jurisdiction only over foreign affairs. This would give Scotland a future in Europe looking like that of Wallonia, Catalonia or the Basque country.

Scottish patriots such as Neal Ascherson favour this package but the question is why it has to be put to a referendum at all. It could be negotiated with Westminister between now and 2014, avoiding the existential moment of truth altogether."

You'll be relieved to hear there's a very simple answer to your question, Michael - it has to be put to a referendum because otherwise Westminster won't budge an inch. Curious, isn't it, that it's the pro-independence side that has been far more imaginative in exploring potential solutions to how Scotland's multiple identities might be accommodated by means of innovative constitutional structures, whereas the side you're busy being a cheerleader for is still stuck in the bunker mentality of "resisting appeasement" and "drawing lines in the sand".

"And our Supreme Court adds another lesson about democracy itself: if the Scots vote to go, they can’t just walk out the door. They will have to negotiate, not dictate, the terms of divorce with the British government. Issues include the division of the debt, the nature of the border, the division of North Sea revenues, the future of the currency, the disposal of UK assets in Scotland and so on. It will be as messy and protracted as divorces usually are. And possibly as tragic too."

This may be a startling discovery for you, Michael, but I doubt if there's a single person in the SNP who thinks that Scotland wouldn't have to sit down and negotiate an independence settlement after a Yes vote. However, if you believe that the very principle of independence would then somehow be conditional on the UK side playing ball in those negotiations, you have a very curious definition of the word "democracy", with which you started that observation.

As for the use of the word "tragic", I must confess I laughed out loud at that point. For the last time that word was used in quite such a hysterically inappropriate way, I think we'd have to go all the way back to Donald Findlay's (deadly serious) reaction when the Estonian football team failed to turn up for an international match against Scotland in 1996 : "Let's put this tragic situation behind us, and get on with our lives".

* * *

James Mackenzie once innocently asked me on Twitter "why so confrontational?", but I'm pretty sure even I would have thought twice about the headline "Screw you, Floella Benjamin". I obviously sympathise with the underlying sentiment (ie. that it was wrong of her to vote against delay of the Welfare Reform Bill in the House of Lords), but the use of language does somewhat undermine James' notion that Better Nation is an oasis of constructive discourse in a desert of blogging "mentalism".

Such indulgence...

Scotland isn't the only country in the middle of the election campaign at the moment - Finland goes to the polls in a few days' time, and then it's Canada's turn on May 2nd.  The first of two Canadian leaders' debates has just taken place, and as is traditional, Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois took part on an absolutely equal basis, in recognition of his party's status as a major player in one province of the country.

Crikey. Are the Canadian broadcasters nuts?  Don't they realise that a ten-second reminder midway through the debate that a funny little local party is also available would fulfil the requirements for balanced coverage within Quebec more than adequately?

Unionist raps SNP for not being isolationist enough

AM2's latest wheeze is to claim that it's somehow an appalling thing for the SNP to have international alliances with parties that share similar objectives. I take it therefore he'll be as even-handed as ever, and call for Labour's immediate withdrawal from both the Socialist International and Party of European Socialists? Well, possibly not. He interprets the SNP's (perfectly natural) fraternal relations with the Parti Québécois as support for the 'dismantling of Canada'. Hmmm. So does the Liberal Democrats' relationship with the federalist Canadian Liberals (or the Tories' relationship with the federalist Canadian Conservatives) mean that the unionist parties can be similarly accused of outrageously seeking to deny the nation of Quebec its right to democratic self-determination?

Back on planet Earth, parties routinely build up international alliances with the parties which in broad terms they are in philosophical agreement with. It does not imply an automatic endorsement for every element of the other party's programme, and it most certainly does not imply any interference in another country's domestic affairs.