Stephen Harper got away with it — again. He did it in his 2011 election interview with Peter Mansbridge, and last week Harper again managed to keep a straight face as he described to the CBC’s chief correspondent his fantasy version of how Canada’s parliamentary democracy works.

In Harper’s world, an Oct. 19 election that results in a first-place finish by the Conservatives but fails to yield a majority government leaves the country with no choice but to endure his tender mercies for a few more years. Any other arrangement, Harper insists, would be an utterly illegitimate government — a coalition of losers. To hear him tell it, the NDP and Liberal parties would have only two choices — live with a Conservative minority or go back to the polls — if the Oct. 19 vote denies Harper the majority he demands and (apparently) thinks he deserves.

Let’s assume that, once the dust settles on Election Day, the Conservatives are left with 120 seats to 110 for the NDP, 105 for the Liberals, two Bloc and one Green. Assume also that the national popular vote underlying that result works out to 33 per cent for the Conservatives, 31 per cent for the NDP, 29 per cent for the Liberals and seven per cent for the rest.

Harper’s theory is that he would still be the only party leader entitled to approach Gov. Gen. David Johnston seeking the requisite vice-regal ‘permission’ to form a government. Canadians, he told Mansbridge, would not put up with any governing alliance of second- and third-place parties, even (following the prime minister’s logic) if their combined seat count exceeds his own party’s by a wide margin.

“You have to have the most seats in Parliament to go to the governor general, and that’s … you know this country, in our system, we have what’s called a Westminster-style system, and we don’t, you know, elect a bunch of parties who then, as in some countries, get together and decide who will govern,” he told Mansbridge. “We ask people to make a choice of a government, and so I think that the party that wins the most seats should form the government.”

Harper is quite wrong — that is not how Canada’s system of government works. Sure, the first-place party gets the right to approach the governor general, to try to form a government. But if that doesn’t fly in a political climate where, for example, Harper’s rivals are committed to ousting him at the first opportunity, then our system allows for other options.

Harper knows the coalition option is completely legitimate — because he himself speculated about using it back in the 1990s, when he was wandering the political wilderness of a fragmented Canadian right. Harper knows the coalition option is completely legitimate — because he himself speculated about using it back in the 1990s, when he was wandering the political wilderness of a fragmented Canadian right.

One of those options is another party leader approaching the governor general (before any potential election call, of course) to try his or her luck at gaining the confidence of the House by winning majority support for a program of governance.

Has it ever been tried? Yes. And unless a Liberal-NDP governing alliance is such a terrifying concept to the prime minister that he’s blotted out the memory, he should be able to recall the defeat of Frank Miller’s first-place Conservative government in 1985 by combined opposition forces. If he can’t, he can always look up ‘David Peterson’ and ‘Bob Rae’ in Wikipedia and refresh his memory.

He doesn’t need to, of course. Harper knows very well how Parliament works, how it is designed for government by collaboration or coalition. He knows the coalition option is completely legitimate — because he himself speculated about using it back in the 1990s, when he was wandering the political wilderness of a fragmented Canadian right.

At the time, Harper was puzzling out how to topple the Chretien government. He and his frequent co-author Tom Flanagan envisioned a possible coalition of non-Liberal parties as one possible route to power for either conservatives or social democrats in a first-past-the-post electoral system that seemed frustratingly geared (back then) towards keeping Chrétien’s centrists in perpetual first place and sustaining his “benign dictatorship”.

Harper elaborated on the coalition option in a TVOntario interview with Paula Todd in 1997, floating the following idea while contemplating a hypothetical Liberal minority: “What will be the test is whether there is then any party in opposition that’s able to form a coalition or working alliance with the others. And I think we have a political system that’s going to continue to have three or four different parties or five different parties, and so I think parties that want to form a government are eventually going to have to learn to work together.”

The sponsorship scandal and the Liberal party civil war of the later Chrétien-Martin years created new opportunities for a reunited right. In 2004, when the tide was still turning and Paul Martin’s minority Liberal government seemed momentarily vulnerable to a ‘coalition of losers’, Harper again seemed amenable to the kind of cooperative governing arrangements by second- and third-place parties that he now compares to a coup d’êtat.

In 2006, as the leader of a fully reconstituted Conservative movement facing a fortuitously weakened and divided centre-left, Harper finally earned his right to govern in more conventional ways for nearly a decade — and even, it seems, to construct his own kind of quasi-dictatorship.

But winning didn’t give him the right to kick over the game board for anyone else who wants to play. When coalitions seemed like the only route to power for fractured conservative forces, Stephen Harper was careful to describe coalitions as legitimate. He can’t credibly change his mind now that the coalition option poses a threat to his own power.

Randy Boswell is an Ottawa writer and an assistant professor of journalism at Carleton University. He covered the 2011 election for Postmedia News, writing frequently about the coalition issue.

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