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The Confidence Convention and the May 2005 Vote on the Finance Committee Report by Andrew Heard* Canadian parliamentary democracy is hinged upon the fundamental principle that the government of the day must enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons. The principle of collective responsibility provides the basis of deciding who has the right to form a government after an election. Canadians do not vote for a prime minister or for a cabinet, they vote in general elections to elect 308 individual members of parliament. The leader of the party who is able to command a majority on confidence votes in the House of Commons is the person who has the right to be prime minister. It is a firm constitutional convention that prime ministers must either resign or call an election if they lose a vote of confidence in the House. The May 2005 vote on the finance committee report is essentially a vote on whether the government should resign, and as such it should be considered a clear vote of confidence. The confidence convention There are three generally-agreed categories of confidence votes:
If a government loses a confidence vote it has only two choices: to resign or to call an election. Generally speaking a government would only resign if it lost a confidence vote within a few months of an election. For example, Ontario premier Frank Miller resigned in 1985 after losing a vote on the first speech from the throne right after provincial election, and the Lieutenant Governor appointed the leader of the opposition as the new premier (who then won a subsequent vote of confidence). Occasionally a government is defeated on a vote that calls into question whether it still enjoys the confidence of the legislature. In the most prominent of these loses, governments have introduced their own explicit motion of confidence for the House to vote on; this is an important response which is needed to settle whether the government still has a right to govern. For example, the Saskatchewan government introduced (and won) a confidence vote in 2001 after their legislature's finance committee had defeated a supply motion. Prime Minister Pearson introduced (and won) a confidence vote in 1968 after losing a supply vote. The May 2005 Vote The House of Commons vote on Conservative Party Steven Harper's motion has generated considerable controversy over whether it is a vote of confidence. The motion reads:
At first glance the motion appears to be simply a procedural matter, sending a matter back to the finance committee with an instruction to amend its report. The wording of the motion, however, indicates that it should be considered a clear vote of confidence. What is important in this motion is that the House must collectively is express its view on whether the government should resign. One cannot vote for the motion without agreeing that the government should resign, which is the essence of a non-confidence vote. While the wording of the motion is convoluted, the essential content is a clear expression of non-confidence. It should not matter what procedural context a vote of confidence occurs in. The fundamental basis of a confidence vote is that the elected members of the legislature express their collective view of the government. If that view conveys a loss of confidence or states that the government should resign, then the government must either resign or call an election. The current motion is strikingly similar, in procedural terms, to that proposed by H.H Stevens on June 26, 1926. That motion also recommended that a committee report be amended and precipitated the whole King-Byng crisis, when the Governor General refused a dissolution to King on the grounds that he should not avoid a confidence motion then before the House but not voted on; this was the Stevens' motion. For information on those motions, see: House of Commons Debates, 1926, Vol.V, p.4832 and p.4933. Where a motion is passed that appears to convey a loss of confidence but some ambiguity remains, the precedents indicate the proper constitutional course of action is for the government to introduce its own confidence motion within a few days. The wording of the May motion certainly conveys enough of the essence of confidence that the government should at a minimum respond to its passage with its own clearly-worded motion of confidence. In light of the past precedents, and especially the relevance of the 1926 motions on the Customs Affair, the current motion appears to be clearly a vote of confidence which would require the government to resign or call an election in the event it loses the vote. NOTE: these comments were written prior to the motion on the Public Accounts Committee being put to the vote. As the motions are similar, the same views hold with respect to that vote. * Associate Professor
Prof. Heard's publications on constitutional conventions include the book Canadian Constitutional Conventions: The Marriage of Law and Politics, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991; "Constitutional Conventions and Election Campaigns," (1995) 18 Canadian Parliamentary Review (3) 8; "Constitutional Conventions and Parliament,"(2005) 28 Canadian Parliamentary Review (2) 7 (forthcoming).
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