Have you heard the news? It seems Stephen Harper is not only a snappy dresser, but he's a tyrant as well, and out to destroy the no-doubt fragile democracy that he so despises in our fair land. Prorogue city. The short-pants Parliament. Oh sure, it's constitutional, but who ever let legality ever get in the way of accusing someone of breaking the rules?
Now, at this point, perhaps I should explain, lest I be accused of playing the Tory shill. After all, I wouldn't want to put words in other peoples' mouths, create a straw-man, do all of those things that a good writer just shouldn't do. You got me. So, on to a couple of examples:
Michael Beheils in the Ottawa Citizen:
"It seems Stephen Harper, our not-so-benign dictator, can't stand Canada's constitutional democracy. He is fed up with Parliament's restrictions on the almost unlimited power of his office and his executive.
Harper has, again, spoken with the Governor General and requested the prorogation of Parliament, this time until he is ready to bring down his government's budget in early March 2010.
[...]
It is becoming patently obvious Harper now presides over a minority government that can all-too-readily be characterized as a not-so-benign dictatorship. Harper successfully exploits the first-past-the-post electoral system -- which he and Flanagan denounced as immature -- and the ideological and political divisions within the opposition parties, to impose his unflinching will on his cabinet, caucus, and what he characterizes as an utterly dysfunctional House of Commons, one made so by the government itself. With his appointment of yet more Conservatives to the Senate, Harper will exercise full and unfettered power over Parliament, a power which he will readily use to cow the judicial branch of government with his so-called tough-on-crime legislation."
John Baglow at Dawg's Blawg:
"Stephen Harper keeps out-doing himself. With the connivance of a quaint relic of feudalism, in the person of a pliant Governor-General, the unfriendly dictator is preparing to wave away the inconvenience of Parliament once again. He'll shortly be sending the MPs packing, and stacking that other relic, an unelected Senate, with his political pals, thereby seizing control of the upper chamber and its working committees.
Harper's continuing assault on democracy is by now too obvious for anyone to ignore. On his watch, his MPs were issued instructions on how to subvert the work of Parliamentary committees. Last year he cut and ran when faced with a vote of non-confidence, effectively padlocking Parliament. More recently, he has openly defied Parliament by refusing to produce unredacted documents pertaining to the Afghanistan detainee issue. And with the new prorogation in the offing, that committee will be automatically stood down, its work nipped in the bud."
I'm sure other examples could be found. At any rate, I think you get the point: Harper bad, prorogue undemocratic.
And as a whole, I don't really want to defend this latest prorogue. It's not that I don't have my partisan stripes - I just think it would be hard for me to say kudos to Stephen Harper and keep a straight face.
Because the fact of the matter is, while this move of his has not been unconstitutional, it still reeks of somewhat under-handed behavior. Whether this prorogue is for the purpose of dodging the Afghan detainee/unredacted document question, for the purpose of grabbing hold of the Senate, or perhaps even for the purpose of deliberation supplied by the Tories, it will undoubtedly be used against the Opposition to further the Tories' goals while in office. Same game, different name.
But undemocratic? Hardly. To suggest that this somewhat unprecedented, but perfectly legal, move of Stephen Harper equates to some sort of Conservative diktatorship power-move is, frankly, ridiculous. And it's insulting, not only to those who suffer under real undemocratic governments - take your pick, from the Philippines to Venezuela - and not just to our collective intelligence, but to language itself.
Language is really about context; there are a myriad of words with different meanings depending upon their context within a certain conversation. That's one of the great things about language: it relies upon, really, a shared understanding of the world, on some level. It's a great connector.
As such, words hold great power. If one were to, suddenly, change the context, meaning changes with it. A perfect example would be the term liberal: it's a dirty word in conservative circles these days, but even a few decades ago it meant an entirely different group of people, who are now forced to call themselves 'classical' liberals, or even libertarians, in order to distinguish themselves from their Leftish counter-parts. It's a rather strange shift in the meaning of a word, but it's also a rather strange shift in the very context of the word liberal - although terms like 'illiberal' still seem to hold much of their former meaning and power.
Now, I am not here to say that words should keep their meaning for ever on end with no exceptions. That's another of the beauties of language - it changes. The only danger is when it changes without us realizing it. Or when it's changed by certain people for their own aims, while the rest of us stay in the torpor of assumption. Which leads us back to the word 'undemocratic'. With every repetition in such a petty context as our recent prorogue, the word becomes devalued. It loses its meaning, and the replacement is really quite a shallow, pathetic thing.
So, by all means, criticize the move. Condemn the prorogue as shifty, underhanded, politics at its worst, perhaps even undemocratic in spirit if not in letter ( although this one may be a hard point to prove ) - these may well be points worth considering. But please, if only for the sake of our future political discourse, let's stay away from scare-words like undemocratic, shall we?
