Politics in Plain English: Prorogation

Prime Minister Stephen Harper couldn’t stand the heat so he got out of the kitchen which is now starving the House.

“Stephen Harper is absolutely wrong in proroguing parliament and I think it was done in the most self-serving, partisan way possible,” Michael Crawford began, when I asked to tell me what he thought of prorogation.

“The opposition parties, particularly through the special committee, is investigating this and were really holding the government’s feet to the fire on the issue of how Afghan detainees were treated once transferred from Canadian to Afghan authorities. What was beginning to show was that Canada probably knew that they were putting detainees at risk when they were transferring them. That’s a very serious problem,” Crawford said, mainly believing that parliament was prorogued so Harper could avoid this issue. He explained that this is forbidden by the Geneva Convention and said if found true, it would not be a stretch to consider that the Canadian government was aware of possible war crimes.

“So what do if you are the prime minister in this situation?” he asked.

“You simply prorogue.”

“Most people don’t understand prorogation,” Crawford said. “We are hearing now from every servant that prorogation is natural and it has happened 104 times and on and on.”

When he said this I thought for a moment about what I would do as a journalist receiving this statement. If I were to question the process only to hear that it had been done over a hundred times before, I would think that it must be normal. I realized this is one of the challenges facing uneducated journalists. It is easy to be fed facts that make everything sound alright but there is more to it than that.

“Yes it is a normal part of parliamentary procedure, but it is really only done at the conclusion or near the conclusion of the parliamentary agenda,” Crawford said. “As an agenda winds down it is common for parliament to take a break and come back a couple weeks later to regroup and address a new agenda and set a new stage.”

“Well that hasn’t happened here. We had 30 to 40 bills moving through the House that are all gone. We had bills sitting in the senate waiting royal assent that have to go back and be reintroduced into the House. So, it’s not like we were at the end of a legislative agenda, we were in the middle of it.”

“Harper was just running and hiding on the Afghan detainee issue.”

“But he also had good reason to get out of the spotlight because of the incredible embarrassing performance he put in Copenhagan.” According to Crawford, Canada did not set any hard targets or put forth any strong emphasis on environmental progression: there were no timelines set or any sort of measured goals.

So maybe he personally had reason to lie low for a bit but did this mean Canada should have been subjected to this decision also?