Thoughts on Prorogation

[c9]

From an email to a friend...

I'm pretty mixed on the situation. I think Harper clearly screwed up,
and lost the confidence of the House, but just hid from the vote by
delaying (which is legit but annoying) and then by proroguing (which I
think is pretty dangerous, it could have set a bad precedent).

Michaëlle Jean needed 2 hours of convincing to give him that though (I
think - can't wait for a tell-all book!) so hopefully she was very
resistant and set some rules or something so GGs in the future still
have flexibility and PMs can't just run and hide. She probably made
the right choice out of some shitty options.

The coalition is dead, I think. There are too many different competing
interests at play, and already you can see the Liberals fracturing all
over the place. As much as it's possible that A coalition could be a
good government, I think THIS coalition (because of the crappy state
of the Libs) would not have been very successful. I'd love to be
proven wrong on this, because I prefer their policies in general. But
the Liberals can't communicate these days (not just Dion), have no
leader with a mandate for these sorts of big decisions, and are
infighting already/again. *sigh*

If Harper spend the prorogation attacking and being all majority-ish
(60% odds IMHO), and the coalition stays together (30% odds), January
26th will be interesting! But all in all, I think we got the best
result of the worst possible options. If everything had actually
happened as fast as it tried to, I'm sure there'd be regrets in the
morning.

Comments

[zanate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think this sums up my discomfort with the coalition option. I've been fiercely defending it as an option, because its mere possibility is a stick with which to keep a minority government from "going rogue" (or prorogue as the case may be. :) )

I didn't think the coalition would work very well. And I'm of the opinion that the Liberals don't need to snuggle up to the NDP any closer-- the Grits need to consider why they've lost votes to the right when they shifted left, and what they need to do to fix that.

On the other hand, someone mentioned the possibility of passing electoral reform while a coalition was present. I thought that was a very interesting idea-- it would be one of the few times that the government would not have benefited from our First Past the Post system and therefore might be open to change.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

What disappointed me the most about this whole debacle (and there were lots of points at which I was disappointed) is how reactions to it exposed -- clearly -- how poorly most Canadians understand how a parliamentary democracy works in practice. The rhetoric that the coalition was somehow "stealing" or doing something underhanded is pretty much nonsense... a lot of other countries basically only function in coalition mode!

That, and the fact that Dion couldn't hold the party together for 72 hours on a single idea. And they're not getting rid of him til MAY?! It totally makes him (and by extension the Liberals) a lame duck.

January 26th will be interesting for many reasons, but the Liberal party better slack off between now and then. They need to whip themselves into shape and get ready to win an election -- because you know Harper certainly won't let the Conservatives do any less.