The Pro Rogue

It's a new year and here's the first of what should be 71 posts in 2010, according to the statistical average of the first two years. Anyone care to play the over-under?

Anyone care at all?

This last query isn't really a dig at myself or the blog. It's more of an open question in the wake of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's successful move last week to prorogue Parliament for the second straight year. Late in 2008, Harper sent Canadians to their political dictionaries to look up "prorogue" after he created a furor by trying to cut off public funding for political parties. The request, granted by Governor-General Michaelle Jean, bought the Conservatives enough time to avoid a non-confidence vote that could have thrown them out of power.

Harper clearly prizes effectiveness over originality when it comes to political strategy. No wonder, then, that he went back to the prorogue well when the heat got turned up about the Canadian military and the possibility that they'd handed over prisoners in Afghanistan to local authorities with a thing for torture. Opposition leaders demanded answers and Parliament as a whole agreed that the Prime Minister needed to supply them. So Harper did the logical thing - he put Parliament to sleep until early March.

An article in today's Vancouver Sun enumerates some of the advantages and disadvantages of this move by the Conservatives. Author Barbara Yaffe points out that, by the time Parliament sits again, Conservatives will have had the chance to look all official and important at Olympic photo-ops and will also be able to set the agenda with the Throne Speech. She also speculates that the Conservatives are betting Canadians will be more engrossed with the fate of the Canadian Olympic hockey team than Afghan detainees over the next couple of months.

She could be right. Andrew Coyne at Maclean's certainly seems to think so. Coyne suspects Harper will absorb less political punishment from this latest prorogation because Canadians will be more desensitized to it and distracted from it. Jaffe cites a poll showing that 43% of Canadians oppose this prorogation, but Coyne believes we're just not likely to notice the death of our democracy if the murder is carried out by numerous paper cuts.

I'm inclined to agree with Coyne. Harper's willingness to render Parliament irrelevant by ignoring and then silencing it - twice - suggests he's perfectly capable of this kind of slow democra-cide. If citizens don't show resistance, we'll be accomplices. And it's going to take more than a Facebook group.