Canadian Prime Minister threatens national unity with prorogation gambit Commentary
Canadian Prime Minister threatens national unity with prorogation gambit
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Robert Paterson [President, Renewal Consulting Group]: "The Canadian parliamentary system has an unwritten constitution based like the Common Law upon precedent and practice. It is also a system of indirect democracy where the voters elect a "Parliament," but do not vote for a Prime Minister. To operate as a government, a Prime Minister has to have the effective "confidence of the House." Crudely put, he has to have the votes. In majorities, this is easy as the use of the party system guarantees the votes. If in a minority, the PM has to keep the confidence of the house by balancing the appeal to his base while keeping the opposition reasonably onside.

Last week, Prime Minister Harper broke rule number one in a minority by setting forth a program that can only be seen as a provocation. What made this worse was that Harper said going into the session that he said would be more conciliatory. He had called the last election because he claimed the house was not working.

Harper thought he could get away with it because the leadership of the Liberals is up for debate and there are historic differences between the Liberals and the Bloq Quebecois. With a recent election, Harper knew the country was not up for another one and the idea that the three other parties could do a deal seemed remote to him.

But his plan misfired when the Liberals and the New Democratic Party formally worked out a plan with the support of the Bloq. With an agreed-on 18-month plan, the opposition would have the votes and hence the confidence of the House. They had an "Opposition Day" scheduled for last Monday that would enable them to table a vote of non-confidence, but the Prime Minister exercised his perogative and extended it to the following Monday.

Harper then asked Governor General Michaelle Jean, the Canadian representative for Queen of England, to prorogue Parliament until late January when he will propose the budget.

Practice and precedent suggest that the Governor General should have denied this request. Prorogation usually happens very late in the life of a Parliament. The meeting between the General Governor and the Prime Minister lasted nearly 3 hours, suggesting that Harper argued her into agreement. In practice the Governor General should act like a judge and give the Prime Minister her decision – one way or another.

So now we will have six weeks of bitter public debate, and in a time of great crisis, Canada has no Parliament. A Government avoided losing a vote of non-confidence by a strategem and can continue for six weeks without any accountability. It can also harness the full power of the state to act on its behalf.

The Prime Minister has set a precedent that allows a Government to avoid being held to account in Parliament. It is too early to know what this means in the long run, but it cannot be good. Canada must endure six weeks where all sides will campaign using fear of the "other" to get their way in the court of public opinion. Already the Bloq is being called "traitors" and "treasonous." Those who disagree with Prime Minister Harper are being called un-Canadian. The rhetoric is already at a fever pitch.

There are two very damaging possible outcomes to this process: First, the simmering regional divisions in Canada could burst into flame with the West versus the East and Rural versus Urban, resulting in the tense fabric of the nation being rendered. A second possibility is that Canada's 150 year use of the British Parliamentary system – itself a product of more than 1000 years of trial and error – is destroyed and replaced with a "plebisciteocracy" – the rule of public opinion. Regretfully, I do not see a counterweight to these gloomy predictions.

Americans know the price of a national split in values, as do Spaniards, Bosnians, and the Irish. It is easy to forget that good people can be whipped into a fenzy given the right circumstances and once the line has been crossed, even the best countries can destroy themselves. What saddens me is how this crisis has been manufactured out of political opportunism and miscalculation – much like the response to Archduke Ferdinand's murder inadvertently set in motion the events that caused World War I. We live in dangerous times."

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