While Parliament slept

Faced with mounting questions regarding his government’s complicity in potential war crimes in Afghanistan, our Prime Minister has done what all crafty despots do: shut down the pesky legislature.

The boldness and hubris of the move notwithstanding, Canadians must not be surprised. This Prime Minister, elected principally on a promise of making government more open and accountable, has in office stretched the legal boundaries of prime ministerial power to new heights. From a no-holds-barred war against the opposition parties, to slandering independent civil servants and institutions critical of his government, he has stopped at nothing to protect his reign and challenge any and all inconvenient checks on his authority.

The plethora of abuses is staggering: when Linda Keen, the country’s independent nuclear watchdog, sounded the alarm on his government’s mismanagement of our nuclear facilities, she was tarred as a “Liberal appointee” and fired; when the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page began to manifest too much of an independent streak by criticizing the government’s rosy financial estimates, his office was starved of funding; when the Military Police Complaints Commission attempted to investigate his government’s handling of detainees turned over by Canadian forces to potential torture in Afghan prisons, the head of the commission had his mandate lapse and was not replaced, effectively silencing the commission; when high-level diplomat Richard Colvin accused the government of deliberately ignoring warnings of Canadian-captured prisoners being subjected to torture, this government unleashed an all-out assault on the man’s reputation and character in a bid to deflect attention and save their own skin.

And now this. Ordered by Parliament to produce crucial documents on the Afghan detainee issue, the government has deemed itself above the rule of law by refusing to comply. Faced with potential legal ramifications in the courts, mounting questions in Parliamentary committee hearings, and escalating calls for a public inquiry, the King, backed into a corner, has bolted the doors to Parliament and decreed the matter closed.
Let us not forget. In Canadian parliamentary democracy, the Prime Minister is not directly elected; Parliament is. Nowhere in the country did Stephen Harper’s name appear on any ballot outside his Calgary constituency &- all of which is to say that a man never elected by any majority has now barred the people’s elected representatives from meeting and holding his government to account. Worse, he has set a dangerous precedent whereby a Prime Minister under fire can simply declare the House prorogued and retreat to greener pastures &- all, we might add, with the sanction of an increasingly irrelevant Governor General. It’s enough to make a Third World despot grin in admiration.

As the erosion of Canadian democracy continues apace, Harper is gambling that he can escape as unscathed from this prorogation as from the prior one last January. He is betting on our apathy, hoping that Canadians simply don’t care enough about the health of our democratic institutions to stir up much of a fuss. Rarely if ever, in fact, has this country seen so cynical and irresponsible a manipulation of prime ministerial power, one so insouciant of its corrosive effects, or so nonchalant about the legacy left behind.
Only time will tell whether Harper has in fact grossly underestimated Canadians’ democratic instincts &- or whether he has not. Already, the media response has been scathing and nearly unanimous, from the right as from the left, both within Canada and from abroad. The Economist magazine in Britain launched an impassioned tirade against the move, accusing Harper of “naked self-interest” and of rewriting “the rules of his country’s politics by weakening legislative scrutiny.” Andrew Coyne, editor-in-chief of Maclean’s and probably this country’s best conservative commentator, has raised the spectre of “the path to despotism,” arrived at through the “cumulative weakening of our democratic defences…and instincts.” Peter Russell, a constitutional expert and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, has bluntly warned that “Canadian parliamentary democracy is in danger.” The outrage has even spread to Harper’s own backyard, with the Calgary Herald denouncing Harper’s “cynical political play.” The “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” Facebook group was approaching 140,000 members by Sunday, and rallies are planned across the country for January 23, with organizers reporting a large and growing response.

Defenders of the PM have claimed that such glimpses of outrage are more indicative of a localized and minority-held view than of a generalized and gathering furor. If they prove to be correct &- if so brazen an attack on the democratic foundations of our country can pass with precious more than a collective yawn from coast to coast &- then all sentiments of Canadian righteousness and moral high-ground would officially have been a sham. Worse, if Harper should find political reward for this, then the values we ostensibly fight and die for in the deserts of Afghanistan will be revealed as mere senseless boasts, all hollowed by hypocrisy, and worth not the breath or paper wasted.

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