Best two out of three?

So now money bills are no longer to be considered confidence votes. Or rather they are, but confidence votes are not to be taken as final:

The federal Liberals would consider ignoring a House of Commons defeat should they lose any of the several coming votes that are matters of confidence between now and the end of the spring session, Chief Government Whip Karen Redman says. Although no final strategy has been decided, Ms. Redman said the government could respond to a defeat by bringing in a motion on whether the government has the confidence of Parliament to make sure MPs actually want an election... In an interview, Ms. Redman said the government would consider several possible responses to a government defeat. "There are options. Clearly if there was a loss, the government may decide to put forward another confidence motion when everybody was there to see if it held the day. Those options are available," she said. Unlike the Conservative motion that passed earlier this month calling on the government to resign, Ms. Redman said the Liberals do not dispute that the money votes between now and the end of the session are clear matters of confidence and are taking each one seriously. The government must bring in money or "supply" motions before the end of the session for the Commons to approve the government's $188-billion operating budget for 2005-2006.

So they're taking them "seriously," but not quite seriously enough to, you know, respect them. SOME HON. MEMBERS: Since "Pearson pulled the same stunt in the 1960s," a reader notes, citing the Globe article above, perhaps I should not be so persnickety about the present government's refusal to take no-confidence for an answer. Wasn't the nine-day interval between the Pearson government's defeat on a money bill and its eventual reconfirmation in a confidence vote the same as the nine days the present government took before holding a vote it was willing to recognize? My reply:

1) Pearson had a much stronger claim to the confidence of the House to begin with, having come just two seats short of a majority in the 1965 election (131 out of 265). The original vote was lost, on a bill that had already been approved in principle, in a half-empty House, during a late-night debate on third reading: 48 Liberal members were absent, including some cabinet ministers campaigning for the leadership. (Indeed, it's not even clear that the vote should have been held that night at all, for procedural reasons I won't go into.)  The Tories, as the journalist Anthony Westell recalls, "ambushed" the government, rushing in a number of members at the last minute.

Admittedly, defeat on a money bill is a more obviously serious matter than defeat on a procedural motion, even one that effectively instructs the government to resign. But the current opposition did not have that option available to them -- the government's majority was in such doubt, as it had been for some time, that it had refused to put its budget, or budgets, to a vote. When the House finally got a chance to vote on something resembling a confidence vote -- opposition supply days having been suspended -- there was plenty of warning, and Members flew in from cancer wards to be present.

2) The issue in Pearson's day was whether the government should resign, not whether or when it should hold a re-vote. The re-vote, indeed, was regarded as at best an innovation, at worst illegal. (Though, as the present discussion indicates, it became a 'precedent' others could cite, even in wholly dissimilar situations.)

In the present case, the government at first declared it would simply ignore the vote -- ''merely an instruction to a committee" -- and only later agreed to confirm that it had the House's confidence -- that is, to stop filibustering its own legislation, and actually bring the budget to a vote.

3) Pearson returned from vacation the next day, flying through a snowstorm to get there. The confidence motion was introduced the day after that. There was no nine-day interval: the Globe story is wrong. There was a seven-day debate on the government's confidence motion, in which several hard-line Tories argued that the government should have simply resigned. (One member even resigned from caucus in protest that the party had allowed the motion to come to a vote!) And whatever the interval, they did not use it to bribe opposition members to cross the floor, or paper the country with money.

4) Perhaps most important, Stanfield agreed to the re-vote. Pearson dragged the governor of the Bank of Canada in to convince him it would be terrible for the economy to go through a snap election -- something about a run on the dollar -- and, in an excess of high-mindedness, he agreed.

In the present case, the opposition did not agree. Nor were they required to. So whereas in Stanfield's case it could not be definitively said that a majority of the House believed the government was acting contrary to its wishes, in the present case it could.

5) In the ensuing re-vote, Pearson's goverrnment won 138 to 119. Need I say more?

UPDATE: PoliticsWatch has more. As usual.