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As a practical matter, that means the Liberals cannot force the committee to adopt a given plan on the strength of their own votes alone. That was always unlikely: for a government to unilaterally alter something as fundamental as the voting system, without the support of any other party, would be so contrary to the laws of political warfare as to poison the rest of this Parliament.

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While majority governments in our system more or less have the run of Parliament at most times, a really determined opposition, one that felt both that its vital interests were at stake and that it had the public’s support — for public perceptions are the ultimate arbiter of these disputes — has its own arsenal of parliamentary tactics at its disposal, and could if it chose make life extremely difficult for the government.

So the greater likelihood was always that the Liberals would have to enlist the support of at least one other major party for whatever they proposed. But the symbolism of setting up the committee with a Liberal majority was squarely at odds with that, in ways that set off all sorts of alarms: Why would you insist on the ability to act unilaterally if you did not intend to do so? The concession, then, is reassuring in like measure.

The controversy has revealed the government both at its best and its worst. If it was wise to have given ground in the end, it was stupid to have been so needlessly provocative in the first place, especially after the series of arbitrary measures the spring session has already witnessed: the repeated invocation of “time allocation” to shut down debate, the infamous “motion 6,” which would have given cabinet almost absolute control over the parliamentary agenda (thereby disarming the opposition of many of its procedural weapons) and so on.