OTTAWA

When British voters went to the polls last week, they were reasonably certain that the outcome of the vote would be murky and totally certain that in such a case horse-trading between the three main parties would follow.

In the last stretch of the campaign, every British party leader talked openly of negotiations to come to try to ensure that a potentially hung Parliament be able to function.

The Liberal Democrats spelled out some of the concessions they intended to seek in exchange for their support.

The Labor and Conservative leaders both acknowledged the option of seeking a post-election arrangement with the third party.

When all is said and done, the British electorate went to the polls with its eyes wide open or at least at lot more open than the average Canadian voter.

In similar circumstances, this country’s federal parties have been content to play hide-and-seek with voters.

In the dying days of the last federal campaign, the NDP did hint at a possible post-election arrangement with the Liberals. But neither party would discuss the option openly.

Jack Layton was too busy pretending he might become prime minister and Stéphane Dion was too busy pretending the NDP had more presence than his Liberal party in most of Western Canada.

In the end the NDP talk was more about stopping the Conservatives from being returned to power than about making a minority Parliament work.

Until last fall, it was a point of pride for Jack Layton that he had never lifted a finger to sustain Stephen Harper’s minority regime.

Judging from the concessions Great Britain’s Nick Clegg has wrestled from the Labor and Conservative parties over the past week, Layton might want to rethink his approach and refine his bargaining skills.

Over the course of three minority governments, the NDP has failed to advance its cause of proportional representation one inch. In the current Parliament, Layton has been left at the altar of a coalition by the Liberals and routinely ignored by the Conservatives.

By comparison to the British party leaders, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, the minority winners of the past three Canadian elections, made no overtures to the other parties – even informally.

Instead, Martin brought his minority government to the brink with his first Throne speech. A subsequent Liberal budget was rewritten to accommodate the NDP in the panic of another parliamentary showdown.

Harper prorogued the first Conservative minority Parliament to rush the country to the polls in the hope of securing a majority. When that failed, he opened his second mandate with a fiscal statement so inflammatory that it brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

Canada’s federal parties have spent the past six minority years putting a gun to each other’s heads in the Commons.

Given a choice between brinkmanship and cooperation, they have almost always opted for the former first and fallen back on the second when all else failed.

That approach has served none of them well.

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If polls are to be believed, the next election could well prolong Canada’s current minority cycle. Given the current party standings in voting intentions, the next Parliament might be even more prone to deadlock than the previous three.

If minority government is going to be the new normal in Canada, bringing voters in the loop of the available alternatives before they cast their ballot and negotiating how a minority Parliament best could work ahead of installing a government might actually make a lot of sense.

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