Grazing Rites

All across this country people have been learning this word over the past week – if you don’t know it yet here’s Wikipedia’s take: “When a legislature or parliament is prorogued, it is still constituted (that is, all members remain as members and a general election is not necessary), but all orders of the body (bills, motions, etc.) are expunged.”

Today at the request of Harper this is what the Governor General has done.

Ostensibly this was done so the government can create a federal budget in a historically short amount of time, or so Harper claims. He also invited the Liberals and NDP to offer suggestions but he doesn’t want to hear from the dirty Bloc whom he seems one step away from declaring enemies of the state.

The opposition leaders were quick to point out dates, times, locations, and specifics of budgetary suggestions they had already made but the substance and occurrence of which Harper rejected.

Hopefully all this has done is delayed the inevitable collapse of Harper’s government and made the electorate seriously reconsider the role of the Governor General.

For those of you wanting an unbiased rundown of what’s happened I recommend the Wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Canadian_parliamentary_dispute

I got into it on The Huffington Post; here are some highlights of my comments…

I was disappointed to see our Governor General, who left Haiti to escape a dictatorship, facilitate this; her actions may not have violated the letter of the law but she betrayed its democratic spirit. It is unprecedented in that it’s never been done with a vote of confidence on the agenda; so to those who see a constitution as a living, evolving thing this has set a potentially dangerous precedent. Plus the term of prorogation makes up the busiest shopping days of the year. If clear relief and better days were clearly ahead we’d be more likely to spend over Christmas and Boxing Day but with things in question consumer confidence will likely drop, along with the value of our dollar, and even if things are fixed in the early spring I don’t think we’ll rush out and make up for the lack of spending over this crucial period. Suffice to say the damage done today to the constitution and the economy may not ever be completely undone.

I thought Layton did pretty well; he’s been stepping up during this crisis in my opinion. Frankly I thought all the leaders were poor choices during the election but this seems to have brought out the best in Jack. Just so long as he continues to lead by example - during the election and the years before that he just seemed to be sniping all the time, if this represents true growth and maturity for him I’m confident he can lead us to better days.

Remember the things Harper tried to do that brought us here. He proposed $2 billion in government cutbacks but refused to say what programs would get cut. He wanted to sell off $2 billion in government assets without saying what they were going to sell off! He wanted the MPs to vote for this economic update even though it had no specifics! He promised the MPs an opportunity to vote on the economic update twice and has twice now broken that promise. Harper mentioned that we all have to “tighten our belts” but somehow his definition of “tighten our belts” involves destroying all political parties but his, selling off $2 billion in government assets without telling us which assets, cutting the budget by $2 billion without saying what will be cut, removing workers right to strike, and limiting women’s rights to ensure equal pay.

No economic crisis is sufficient to warrant destroying democracy, workers and women’s rights, and government infrastructure – particularly when doing so offers no solutions to the crisis!

I’ve heard all the speeches and all the arguments and I still support the coalition.

This entry was posted on December 4, 2008 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.