Government could fall tonight
Liberals have declared tonight's motion of vote of confidence

CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA - Paul Martin and his two biggest opponents were locked in a major political showdown today that threatened to topple the Liberal minority government and force another election.

The Conservatives said they would vote with the Bloc Quebecois on a sub-amendment to the throne speech Thursday evening.

The Liberals have declared the motion a vote of confidence, which means that if it passes, the government falls.

If all MPs showed up for the vote, the Conservatives and the Bloc would still need the support of Independent Chuck Cadman, a former Tory, to beat the Liberals and the NDP.

The Tories said it's not their intention to collapse the government. They urged Martin to reconsider his position that the vote is one of confidence.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said the vote does not have to be a confidence matter.

A Tory spokesman said that if the Liberals lost the amendment vote, they could simply ask for another vote expressing support for the government. He said the party would then consider voting in favour to keep the government alive.

But the Liberals were sticking to their guns. Martin maintained the vote will be one of confidence because it involves the throne speech - the government's main planning document.

"It's up to Parliament to control public finances, they cannot be delegated to someone else," he said.

"And this is such a fundamental issue that if the government were to fall on that point we would go to the polls."

The Bloc amendment asks that Ottawa respect provincial jurisdictions and take into account that its greater taxing power lowers provincial revenues.

Liberal House leader Tony Valeri said the proposal would give up control of the federal treasury to the provinces.

"This is a fundamental issue," he said. "Fundamental to how this country is governed, fundamental to how, in fact, we work with provinces across this country."

The 99 Conservatives and 54 Bloc MPs would have the power to vote down the 134 Liberals and 19 New Democrats provided they got the support of Cadman in the 308-seat House.

Speaker Peter Milliken, a Liberal, only votes in a tie.

The Conservatives have also proposed amendments to the throne speech that will be put to a vote Oct. 18. MPs are to vote on the full throne speech Oct. 20.

Layton alleges Tory-Bloc plot
Bid for Harper to be PM, he says
Accusation called `bizarre,' `flaky'

SUSAN DELACOURT
OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF

OTTAWA—The high-stakes showdown looming today in Parliament is part of a plot to make Conservative Leader Stephen Harper the prime minister, NDP Leader Jack Layton says.

The allegation — dismissed by Conservative spokespeople as "bizarre" and "flaky" — came after the Tories and the Bloc launched a power-play in the Commons yesterday to force Prime Minister Paul Martin's government to change the Speech from the Throne.

The Liberals were huddling last night to assess whether the raft of proposed changes would amount to a fundamental rewriting of the Martin government's blueprint for minority rule. The choice rests with this shaky minority government to reject the changes as a threat or accept them, in whole or in part, which would in effect allow opposition parties to have a hand in designing the governing plan.

A throne speech has only been successfully changed by the opposition twice in the history of the Canadian Parliament; in 1899 and in 1951, and the changes in both cases were minimal.

The vote on the Bloc gambit takes place later today, and if Government House Leader Tony Valeri judges the proposed changes to be a sharp shift in the Liberals' chosen path, the Commons will be in a mad scramble around 6 p.m. as the three-month old government tries to hold on to its precarious control of Parliament. A loss by the Liberals in this case would amount to collapse of the Martin's barely-begun government.

The Liberals hold just 135 seats in the Commons, compared to the 154 held by the combined heft of the Conservative and Bloc opposition. Layton's NDP holds 19 seats and there is one independent, Chuck Cadman of British Columbia. Any vote would be extremely tight and a Liberal victory is not at all assured, even if the NDP sides with the government.

Layton said he recognized the amendments put forward yesterday as the product of meetings held between opposition leaders over the summer — talks he abandoned, the NDP leader said, when he realized the ultimate aim was to shortcut the electorate and put Harper into the prime minister's chair.

Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe admitted as much to him during their private conversations, as late as last week, Layton said.

The talks "included the proposition that if these amendments carried and therefore the confidence in the government was lost, the Governor General would have to turn to one of the other party leaders to form the government. Well, we all know who that would be. It would be Mr. Harper of the Conservatives. That was when I decided I was not going to play along with any risk such as that."

The NDP leader repeatedly condemned yesterday's move as a game, with nothing less than control of the federal government as the prize. "Mr. Duceppe apparently is okay with that. We certainly are not."

Duceppe, however, merely shrugged off the charge.

Asked directly if he would be interested in making Harper the prime minister, he replied: "It's a way to ask Paul Martin to be responsible. Period."

Layton urged Martin and his Liberals to wake up to the plot.

"What we see unfolding here is a dangerous game of driving cars towards each other at accelerating speed with the lights on in the dark."

Harper was reportedly livid last night at Layton's accusations and Conservative communications director Geoff Norquay said of the NDP leader's charges: "This is really flaky behaviour."

There were no such conversations with any leaders about making Harper the prime minister, Norquay said, and this early episode is forcing Conservatives to reconsider how they should deal with the NDP in what Harper has been calling the "co-opposition."

"These are wild allegations from Mr. Layton, perhaps because he can't explain why he's going to force his caucus to reject a set of proposals that line up almost exactly with what the NDP platform said," Norquay said.

The Conservatives' proposed changes to the throne speech include calls for the government to consider these five new program or policy proposals:

An arm's-length commission to ensure that employment-insurance premiums are used only for workers' benefit.

Reduction of taxes for low and modest-income families.

An independent parliamentary budget office to give advice on fiscal forecasts.

A non-partisan citizens' assembly to study electoral and democratic reform, including proportional representation.

A vote in the Commons on Canada's participation in the U.S.-led continental missile defence shield program.

The five add-ons are deliberately culled from common ground in all three opposition party platforms from the last election and are thus billed as proof that Harper — more than Martin — has done the groundwork of consulting necessary to make a minority Parliament effective. They are also purposely cloaked under the mild term "consider," to underline the spirit of constructiveness in which they are being put forth, Tory spokespeople said.

Harper said yesterday that if the Martin government adds these tenets to the Speech from the Throne, the 99 MPs in the Conservative benches would readily endorse the Liberal blueprint. The Bloc leader made the same offer on behalf of his 54-member caucus.

Duceppe proposed an amendment calling on the government to make sure that all of the measures implementing the throne speech "fully respect" provincial jurisdiction, and that the financial pressures the provinces face because of the fiscal imbalance be eased, "as sought by the premier of Quebec."

As Duceppe had said he would, he based the amendment on positions that are fully supported by all of the parties in the Quebec National Assembly.

However, as Martin rejects the idea that the federal government should be restricted to acting in areas of federal jurisdiction, and does not accept the idea that there is a fiscal imbalance (preferring the phrase "fiscal pressures"), the amendment will be difficult for the Liberals to accept.

But Valeri was adopting a cautious, let's-see approach to the raft of amendments tossed at the government yesterday in the first day of debate on the throne speech.

"What I'd like to do is take the time required to analyze and look at the impact of what they're saying," Valeri told reporters after he saw both sets of proposals.

If the government does endure past today's showdown, yesterday served as a debut for the kind of debate that Canadians can expect to see from this minority Parliament.

Editorial: Opposition plays dangerous game


As Prime Minister, Paul Martin is accountable to the people of Canada for the promises in his throne speech and for the measures he takes to see them through. The leaders of the opposition parties, by contrast, are not accountable for the measures they propose, and that freedom gives them a great deal of latitude for making irresponsible and often contradictory recommendations on what the government ought to do.

And so it was not surprising yesterday to see Conservative leader Stephen Harper take every opportunity in his response to the throne speech to push Martin in one direction, while pulling him in the other.

In a masterful display of disingenuousness, Harper criticized the Liberals for not going far enough in one area after another. In health care, for example, he took them to task for not announcing a new catastrophic drug plan; in defence, he urged them to pump more money into the military — while complaining at the same time that they were spending too much and not offering Canadians anything in the way of new tax cuts.

While such inconsistent hyperbole is as much a parliamentary tradition as are overblown throne speeches themselves, Harper strayed into dangerous territory when he introduced a multi-pronged amendment to the throne speech that would almost certainly blow a large hole in the government's budget plan.

At the same time that he spoke earnestly about giving Canadians a constructive opposition that "will demand better ... not by toppling the government at the first opportunity," Harper threw down the gauntlet by demanding, among other things, that the government bring in tax cuts for low- and middle-income families.

It is impossible to imagine that the Liberals could support that amendment when Martin used the throne speech debate to emphasize yet again that "nothing we want to do in our country, nothing we want to help do in the world, can be accomplished if we again allow ourselves to be caught up in the vicious circle of fiscal irresponsibility."

Ottawa's situation is already very tight, according to Don Drummond, TD Bank's chief economist and the government's former fiscal expert in the Department of Finance. Drummond told the Star Monday: "It's not inevitable that they will go back into deficit, but there is certainly a higher degree of risk of that happening," even without Harper's tax cuts.

Harper wasn't alone in putting the Liberals in a financial squeeze. After giving his usual tiresome speech on what Quebec separatists want, Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe tacked another amendment onto Harper's, demanding a federal-provincial revenue rebalancing in which Ottawa would give Quebec all the money it thinks it should get.

If all Conservative and Bloc MPs were to form an unholy alliance by voting for each other's amendments, the government would fall.

But don't count on it because Harper and Duceppe both know full well that voters don't want another election now.

So look for a few opposition MPs to suddenly take sick when the vote is called, which will reveal the unfortunate truth that Harper and Duceppe are still not ready to pursue the kind of constructive criticism that has made minority government work so effectively in the past.