Chris Selley: There's no dishonour in the NDP refusing to indulge Trudeau's confidence-vote tantrum

It’s all over for Parliament’s latest snap-election melodrama except to decide “who won,” as a Wednesday Toronto Star headline amusingly asked. The correct answer was right at the top of the article: nobody. Untold person-hours were wasted managing a prime ministerial tantrum, not very many people even knew it was happening let alone cared, and nothing has changed as a result.

No one lost, either, which is pretty extraordinary. The Liberals threatened to pull the plug on a legislative agenda that includes the Canada Recovery Benefits Act — which is roughly as important as it sounds — because the opposition was demanding what the Liberals deemed an unreasonable level of transparency with regards to a scandal for which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has apologized, and that chased finance minister Bill Morneau all the way out of politics.

The Liberals believed they would not suffer for this at the polls, and while there’s no way to know if that’s true, it is entirely conceivable. Canadians are not exactly sticklers for accountability. Many seem to think the very idea is somewhat rude.

If anyone came closest to winning, if only to fight another day, I would say it was Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats. But because they were seen to “prop up” the Liberal government, even while denouncing its behaviour, some have been making chicken noises in their direction — including, reportedly, at least one Conservative MP in the House.

So looks like NDP are going to vote — and they’re voting with the government AGAINST the CPC motion. At least one CPC MP made a clucking sound like a chicken in the NDP direction. Leader O’Toole turned around to shush someone.

— David Akin ???????? (@davidakin) October 21, 2020

More sober voices wonder about the NDP’s role in this as well, though, as the National Post’s Jesse Snyder reported on Wednesday . Because Singh extracted no concessions for his party’s support on Wednesday, “a lot of people would say that the NDP folded,” said Karl Bélanger, Jack Layton’s former press secretary and now president of Traxxion Strategies. “They cannot let this become a trend.”

This is true. But the concessions Singh has previously won from the government on the only issue that matters to most people right now — surviving this bloody pandemic — are not negligible ones. Aid provided to students over the summer was considerably more generous and coherent than the Liberals had proposed, and, because of the NDP, Life After CERB features both higher unemployment benefits and better sick leave provisions than the government originally tabled.

Those concessions didn’t come cheap, many would say: Notably, in the spring, the NDP agreed to a very relaxed parliamentary schedule at a time when spending oversight could hardly have been more crucial. But again, if Canadian voters were passionate about parliamentary oversight, the Liberals probably wouldn’t have been prepared to call an election for the express purpose of avoiding parliamentary oversight.

It’s true enough that the NDP didn’t get anything for choosing the side it did in this ludicrous accountability-versus-election standoff. But in so choosing, it retained its ability to trade its support for what always matters most to its constituents: as much government support as possible for as many people as possible.

Now, nudging an already left-leaning government a bit further left might not be a great way to audition for prime minister. But Singh isn’t ever going to be prime minister, and it’s tough to imagine how any of his successors will be either. What he does have, however, with 79 fewer seats than Jack Layton and 20 fewer than Tom Mulcair, is considerable leverage.

The Orange Wave of 2011 gathered, crashed ashore and dragged all those seats back to sea over nearly a decade of majority governments during which the NDP had nothing to influence the government with except reason and moral suasion, neither of which a majority government needs to pay attention to if it doesn’t feel like it.

Today the government is happy to spend scads of money managing the pandemic, it needs just one other party’s support to get its agenda passed, and all it costs them is more scads. All that money will eventually need to be paid back, but for now, it will provide a lot of people a lot of relief. Until the NDP’s impossible dream of proportional representation is realized, this is about as good as it’s going to get for them.

Even if the polls showed any sign the NDP might surge, or if they thought a snap election might blow up in the Liberals’ faces sufficiently to produce sudden-onset Jag-mania, it would come at enormous risk. You have never seen cognitive dissonance like I saw at the Toronto Convention Centre on election night 2011, where New Democrats whipsawed minute-by-minute between elation at their historic gains and genuine certainty that Stephen Harper would use his majority to destroy everything they loved about their country.

In no facet of life is this a good time for bravado, for indulging fantasies, for taking unnecessary risks. It seems Canada’s head of government won’t suffer for behaving like a petulant teenager. No one else in the House of Commons needs to apologize for behaving like a sober adult.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley