In December 2008 the Governor General prorogued the parliament, which is to say on request of Prime Minister Harper she sent the MPs home. This was unprecedented in Canadian history because prorogation was never used before to keep a government in power that had lost majority support in the house. Harper had to go and see the GG for a serious two hour visit.
In 2009 it was a similar situation because his only reason was to be afraid of loosing support in the House and among the people soon. But by exploiting the 2008 precedence he was able to just phone the GG and be done with it.
By now the GG would have realized that she made a huge mistake in 2008 by not using the precise and confined power and duty of the office in checking the illegal executive action. Constitutional convention requires majority support for government at all times.
Harper’s attack on the constitution by steamrolling the GG office had not come entirely unexpected.
Since Harper is in office he chastised the GG several times publicly.
And finally the GG has clearly been sjdelined in her specific procedural duties in safeguarding us against totalitarian danger.
Michaëlle Jean has been a very graceful and aware of her office GG, referring to herself once or twice as head of state very much in the proper context. Which is not just representing the queen on a symbolic level. More so it is a practical reminder for Canadians that responsible, peaceful government has strong common law as well as, uniquely in the Western world, indigenous constitutional traditions. With these interesting components, in the real world more so than in soap opera and other sound bite talk, it had functioned better than the philosophical abstractions of the one dimensional, race and text based European constitutions that Australia, the US, France, Britain and others have.
Canadians know their tradition of constitutional monarchy which included multiple identities, common solidarity, dynamic progress, reciprocity of loyalty and powerful oral conventions since before confederation. We understand the pitfall of a republic, that it's healthy for our democracy to keep the glamour aspect of state representation away from corrupting the political leadership. Harper doesn't know or doesn’t like to accept it.
It is therefor in order that the first prime minister who rejects the constitutional laws of Canada has turned himself officially now into a pompous monstrosity.
Unfortunately the opposition has put themselves in a position were they think they can't call him on that. It was a massive failure of political instinct to let the political language of Canada be taken away from them.
How exactly did the opposition parties loose touch with reality?
Here is what happened:
The opposition parties responded to the 2009 prorogation by making a few lame comments avoiding to mention the violation of our constitution.
Harper calculated correctly ‘in it for a penny in it for a pound’, he knew they would become even more complicit and stepped up his attack on democracy.
In the 2009 prorogation he was cocksure because he had carefully secured the opposition’s complicity different to 2008. Back then he faced resistance at least initially until after December 2008 Ignatieff fell apart like an incoherent, overcooked dumpling. Following Ignatieff’s appearance as Liberal leader the demoralized opposition allowed themselves to be smeared by Harper when they accepted as economic stimulus the 75 billion dollar embezzlement to his friends, the Canadian banks in Jan/feb 2009 (see the finance minister’s website). Harper’s heist is responsible for the entire deficit.
One effect of his gigantic donation to the banks is that the he gets to fool Canadian home owners because the Canadian part in the world real estate market crash is delayed, he hopes until after an election.
Its not fair to blame the ongoing constitutional decay solely on Harper. The bed for Harper was made a long time before he became Prime Minister. It has to stop, people should wake up to danger and re-consider their ivory tower vanities more carefully and more deeply. Harper’s action are not the first nails into the coffin of democracy, remember John Manley who as Chretien’s Deputy Prime Minister promoted a republic, nobody said a word in the House of Commons.
Denial of danger is cleverly promoted in the media but still, all anti-intellectual nonsense. Supposedly politics are evil but totalitarian danger exists never here, only in history, in China and North Korea or perhaps where our colonial puppet dictators like Uribe and Karzai rule.
It's an illusion to think that only neocon ideas produce radicals like Harper.
One reason that provokes radicalism is a peculiar elitism which has become like rampant disease in the Canadian Zeitgeist and a serious problem when at times it afflicts even decent people like the CBC’s Michael Enright. I believe him that he can fill out a long gun registry form. Reality is that many who don’t read or write well are just as good or perhaps better than him in safely handling dangerous equipment. It is hazardous to loose sight of our populist democratic roots and invite in this way false populists like Harper who really is a weird kind of 17th century feudalist; a conman dressed up in confused but costly market abstractions. Common people are sidelined by Harper’s clever exploitation of a very blind and widely proliferated neo-liberal class thinking. An intentional cynicism about politics establishes room for creating a mob mentality that serves a strongman game, that floats on a drunken nihilism. In this kind of scenario it is easy for Harper to disguise his power hunger and connect the image of false authority with the force of thought, art and tradition. He tries to slip a brave new sick world view into Canadian living rooms and coffee shops aided by a mesmeric spell the mainstream media have cast over Canada. A view that can be understood as phony survivor, a fascist tumor version of the egalitarian rights vision which informed the confederation of Canada.
There is self defeating lack of awareness by some which translates into unintentional support for Harper’s vision of a new class society.
Just one more indicator for society loosing its centre are the Human Rights Commissions who tend to increasingly cater congenially to the vanities of excessive entitlement thinking. There seems to be always someone who is just short of one more perk in the benefits package, one more promotion to go after with a complaint, which is fine. The Walmart workers who are persecuted as soon as they even think about exercising basic human rights like the one to organize, who wet their pants standing on the shop floor because they are not allowed to go to the washroom have no access to human rights complaints. That is where the problem is, in the loss of balance, in the loss of equal access to rights and law, in the cutting of legal aid. As first important action in office Harper changed the appointment of judges to a recruitment of judges for the neocon cause, we are years down that road.
Liberals and NDP are not attacking the constitution like Harper, but like him they live without history which is how they have lost confidence in our very dynamic roots and are dangerously toying with other ideas.
As much as they seem to dislike what he stands for, one of Harper’s ideas they bought into is the neocon principle according to which elitism trumps service. Its OK as long as the tracks are covered with exclamations of a false populist nature. Decisive textbook example is the ‘tough on crime’ legislative fashion which was generating so much crime and high graded drug revenue in Mexico that public safety had collapsed. Mexico backed off from ‘law and order’ and decriminalized possession of Heroin, Marihuana and Cocaine in August 2009.
The Liberals and NDP participate in Harper’s escalation of drug prohibition and crime wars which targets the First Nations with astronomical incarceration levels; and in this way also slyly tries to infiltrate and weaken their communities with criminal, neocon and other corrupt mentalities, and by attempting to roll back the liberty First Nations have achieved against the prison camp character of the indian act history. The growing, radical over policing, the community disruption and the street drug as well as alcohol incentivisation through prohibition excesses against the First Nations will no doubt some day be seen as reminiscent of the British Opium War strategy against China. This crime war is detrimental to respect for law and safety and well being in all our communities. It is a clear and manyfold violation of our constitutional laws to diminish the judiciary independence. This is the deceitful centerpiece of recent crime legislative pieces such as the omnibus crime bill, increased mandatory minimum sentencing, illegal SCAN and Safer Communities legislations etc. A vibrant democracy has no big crime trouble, civilized justice and enforcement doesn’t let the privileged off the hook and everybody understands. There is no need for delivering a pound of meat out of the poor, guilty or not.
The public was mislead with a real pick-pocket diversion trick, was shown dishonestly construed public safety concerns while in reality these legislative actions compromise the ability of the judiciary to check the most dangerous kind of crimes. These are the crimes committed by the powerful and especially by an authoritarian government that is out of control. It's just so easy to accelerate this self asserting path of ever more inequality in the courts, ever more anarchy for the rich and powerful and a million rules and rising for little people. Every parent, every teacher knows two sets of rules don’t work, deterrence against crime goes out the window, generations have known that.
After enough betrayal of common solidarity people will not necessarily respond in expected and in Goodie Two Shoe ways. If opportunities, fairness, authenticity and equality in justice in Canada are not renewed but continue to be methodically shut down in front of people’s noses Harper and Rupert Murdoch are not shy to recruit the disenchanted. This is why Harper has a majority in reach.
The misleading of public sentiment with anti crime rhetoric and creating intentional political confusion and disenchantment without making differentiation are classical early warning signs for fledgling police states that push authoritarian leadership. However, history shows that concerns are usually overlooked or belittled. Once the plane has been tilted almost everything and everybody tends to slide towards short circuited escalation of insensible thought and action. The opposition parties behaved admirably innocent about the political purpose through the instigation of the anti crime campaigns, which is to hogtie the fundamental democratic watchdog function of the judiciary by entangling and polluting it with corrupt class justice.
Loss of judiciary independence feeds directly into a lack of accountability where we are stuck with ongoing and illegal prorogations of parliament.
If again Harper gets away with an illegal prorogation (dear reader be a little patient, courts as well as broad discontent bide their time) most likely the next thing we loose after loosing a law abiding executive will be free and fair elections.
It would be naive to assume that Bush and Harper would not have shared a thing or two regarding how to go about that.
The field of blockages and distortion, of media dilutions surrounding illegal prorogation is not located entirely out there in space. It disallows, it prevents to heal the ideological inflammation and coercion with which the Harper government is attacking the conversation about national and international issues.
Canadian constitutional democracy is in danger. The conservative Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Danny Williams had it straight already on the 10 Sept 2008 when he spoke to the Newfoundland and Labrador Board of Trade: “Stephen Harper is a fraud”, “Anything but Harper’s Conservative Reform Party”, "A majority government for Stephen Harper would be one of the most negative political events in Canadian history.", “Stephen Harper’s agenda has been cleverly hidden”. Danny Williams failed to mention that with Harper’s buddy John Howard from Australia in retirement he is now the slickest racist leading a country.
What is clear to many patriots of all stripes is that the waters are being tested for a totalitarian democracy. Nobody knows what will happen but the executive dictatorship model could turn out as bad as any other dictatorship. There is a problem to consider with all these dictatorships, they are very much like a jail, easy to get in and hard to come out.
Isolating and voting down the toxic PM Harper, in the house and in elections is priority and from there one can expect a necessary renewal process in the country, involving all parties.
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