Conservative myth #3 – The coalition government has no mandate to govern.

This myth is pretty rich coming from a party that itself only garnered 37ish% of the vote. The mandate to govern is given to the party who can command the confidence of the House of Commons. In the past, this has been done by parties with artificial majorities, that is a majority of the seats in the Commons, but less than 50% of the popular vote. When it comes to a minority government however, who has a clear mandate becomes even less clear. Ironically, the Tories are complaining about a coalition that can claim the support of parties that gained at least 62% of the popular vote, an absolute majority edging on a qualified majority. Add to this that the three parties involved also have 53% of the seats it is clear that the electorate favoured giving those parties more seats than the Tories. So we have a party that was given a less than average mandate claiming it has more moral authority and more of a mandate to govern than the parties that represent the 62% of the people that voted against them. That would be the opposite of democracy, where a minority of the people get to tell the majority what to do. Bizarrely this is what most of the grassroots of the Conservative party complain about when minority groups demand the same rights as everyone else. It would seem, for the Conservatives, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So what about the argument that the 62% of the people who voted for the opposition parties didn't vote for a coalition? This has come up from various Tory shills who, when confronted with the fact that 2/3rds of Canadians didn't vote for them. The counter to this is actually quite simple. If you look at the rest of the liberal democracies in the world, all but three routinely have coalition governments. In those countries parties run independent campaigns where they all try to get as many seats as possible, hopefully to get a majority. More often than not that doesn't happen and coalitions are formed after the elections and stable governments are then formed of multiple parties. What are the three countries where this doesn't routinely happen? Why the US, where they only have two parties and don't have responsible government so this really isn't an issue, the UK and Canada.

Usually at this point the Tory shill with then say "Well if you got 2/3rds of the vote before then you shouldn't have a problem getting it again". The counter to this is simple too. Given the proximity to the last election (less than 2 months) the likely result would be exactly the same thing we have now. Constitutionally it's not required so why spend another $300 million of taxpayer money and waste another month and a half of time to end up where we are right now.

So it can be seen that a coalition government formed with 62% of the vote and 53% of the seats has just as much of a mandate as a party that won 37% of the vote and has 47% of the seats.