Over his nine years as speaker of the House of Commons, Peter Milliken has ruled on hundreds of points of privilege but none of his many decisions falls in the same high-stakes category as the ruling he will soon have to render as part of the latest battle of wills between the opposition parties and Stephen Harper’s minority government.
As Milliken – a lifelong student of Parliament – is well aware, his verdict on the handling of the documents pertaining to the Afghan detainees issue is bound for the history books.
It will almost certainly come to the attention of the Supreme Court and it also could set off an election campaign.
If he rules that the government is within its rights to ignore a House order to hand over the documents until they have been vetted by an outside party of its choice, Milliken will have clipped the wings of Parliament in a way that stands to accelerate its current decline into irrelevancy.
The executive powers of the government will have been reinforced for all time at the expense of Parliament.
But if he rules in favour of the opposition and orders the government to find a process that allows parliamentarians to be the judges of the balance between national security and accountability, the speaker could set the ground for a spring election.
The opposition parties and, in particular, the Liberals are adamant that they are not seeking a snap campaign. But the matter is increasingly out of their hands and into those of the speaker and, eventually, the prime minister.
No one who watched Harper in action over the time of the 2008 parliamentary crisis doubts that he would be sorely tempted to take his latest conflict with the minority Parliament to the people rather than bow to the opposition and the speaker’s will.
A campaign triggered by this showdown would stack a prime minister wrapped in the Maple Leaf flag and claiming that it is standing on guard for national security and the Canadian military against three opposition parties waving the more virtual standard of parliamentary democracy.
The last thing Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff needs is to spend his first campaign fending off Conservative assertions that he would be willing to give the Bloc Quebecois – a party described by its leader as a resistance movement only last weekend – an inside track on national security matters.
While polls have blown hot and cold on the election prospects of the Conservatives since the new year, the Liberals have so far proven to be devoid of momentum. Ignatieff is not as ready to fight a campaign now as he might be in six to 12 months and Jack Layton is functioning on less than full capacity while he is undergoing cancer treatment.
With Quebec a Conservative black hole, Harper would have to weigh the potential perils to his leadership of a third failure to secure a governing majority versus the sense that this may be as good a re-election opening as his party is ever going to get for the foreseeable future.
Harper would not be prime minister if he was not adept at playing all the angles to his advantage and the latest parliamentary test of wills has the potential makings of a Conservative electoral opportunity.
Having put its head between the jaws of a crocodile, the opposition can now only hope it will not be bitten off.
Chantal Hebert writes for The Toronto Star Syndicate.