My take on it.
1. Right after the election, the GG should have been wary of granting power to any minority party until a majority co-alition could be formed, to which the government would be given. Whether that would be considered excessively interventionist or not, I don't know, but it would seem to be a wise way to avoid problems in the first place, and a good precedent to start in my opinion. After all, how is a minority to govern without support from a majority?
2. Any minority government that truly cares for stability ought to enter into a majority coalition before it does anything. In this respect, all the parties were at fault for having failed to try to create a majority coalition from the start. As soon as the election was over, the Conservatives should have tried to form a majority by aligning themselves with enough independent candidates or another party to form a majority. The Liberals should have been trying to the the same thing. The NDP too. And even independents should have been aligning themselves with someone to form a majority,And of course the Bloc couldn't care less.
So the Bloc aside, they all acted irresponsibly by allowing a minority government to take shape in the first place.
3. Once a minority government was formed, the Conservatives should have recognized their error and vulnerability and tried to establish a majority co-alition at that time before presenting their budget. In this respect, the Conservatives are solely responsible to having put themselves in such a vulnurable position. Had they never accepted to take the government before forming a majority first (probably with the Liberals, let's say), they would never have been so vulnerable in the first place. So the responsibility for having put themselves at risk of failing a confidence motion is squarely the fault of the Conservatives. The GG was at fault for stage 1 above. Any MP who didn't at least try to form a majority as soon as the results of the election came out was equally at fault for stage 2 above. But in this stage 3, where the errors of stages 1 and 2 avbove had been done already, and the government was already formed, the failure to try to form a majority coalition at that stage before presenting the bill was exclusively the fault of the government itself (once the government was formed, the other parties thus officially became 'the opposition', and no longer had any responsibility to support a government of which they were not a part). Harper should have foreseen the possibility of this.
4. The opposition parties began to plan a united allied co-alition, to which they have a right (each MP is free to allie himself with whomever he wishes). No one is to blame here as it is a basic right for any MP to allie himself with whom he wishes.
5. Harper senses the threat, goes on TV and whips up separatist fearmongering, alienating Quebec (even many federalists) even more, thus bringing the threat of separation closer to reality. That is the fault of Harper himself (and not necessarily any other MP, Conservative or otherwise, unless they were involved in promoting this fearmongering themselves) for going on TV to do so.
6. Harper askes the GG to prorogue parliament. If I were the GG, I probably would have taken a more laissez-faire attitude to it and let him learn from his mistake, but having said this, I don't disagree with what she did. It was well within her rights to do so.
I voted maybe above since Harper might have planned all of this, but considering the complexity of it, I can also accept that there was no malicious plan as such. Clearly it was a series of errors on the part of all parties involved at various stages in teh formation of this government, with each party being at fault for each stage in which it made a mistake.
