Stephen Harper doesn’t have to leave Canadian soil to give Canada a black eye internationally, it seems. The Economist, often the last word on international affairs, weighed in today with two devastating articles on Harper’s iron-fisted manoeuvre of shutting down Parliament. It doesn’t seem so long ago that, under Liberal government, the influential magazine was proclaiming on its cover that “Canada is cool.”
The first article, an editorial, leads with this devastating analogy:
CANADIAN ministers, it seems, are a bunch of Gerald Fords. Like the American president, who could not walk and chew gum at the same time, they cannot, apparently, cope with Parliament’s deliberations while dealing with the country’s economic troubles and the challenge of hosting the Winter Olympic games.
Read the rest of the editorial.
Meanwhile an article summarizing prorogation later in the edition explains the “danger” of Harper’s cynical prorogation tactic.
Having prorogued Parliament last winter to dodge a confidence vote he seemed set to lose, Mr Harper has now established a precedent that many constitutionalists consider dangerous. No previous prime minister has prorogued the legislature “in order to avoid the kind of things that Harper apparently wants to avoid,” says Ned Franks, a veteran political scientist and historian of Parliament. Although other prime ministers may have had ulterior motives, they were less blatant, he says. The danger in allowing the prime minister to end discussion any time he chooses is that it makes Parliament accountable to him rather than the other way around.
