Harper: Meddling with human rights

Dawg's Blawg: Harper: meddling with human rights
The non-partisan International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, established by Parliament in 1988 to promote human rights and democratic institutions around the world, is under siege by the ideologically-obsessive Harper government.

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A backgrounder on prorogue this time around.

What’s at stake - Andrew Coyne's Blog - Macleans.ca

... The government’s professed rationale, that this is all about economic planning, is obvious bilge: nothing prevents a government from planning and meeting Parliament at the same time, or certainly shouldn’t. The informal justification its supporters are putting about is scarcely better: it may be inconvenient to the government that its appointees do not yet control all Senate committees, but that is no reason to shutter Parliament. It is a motive, not a defense.

So that leaves the obvious. As KDO has explained, the fact that the government is proroguing in December, rather than in late January, suggest this had more to do with shutting down inquiries into the Afghanistan detainee affair than anything else. Is this what we should now expect: governments shutting down Parliament whenever the questioning gets too intense? What will remain of Parliament’s ability, already greatly weakened, to hold governments to account then?

Each time Parliament allows one of these abuses to pass, its power is reduced a little more. Indeed, so diminished has it become that it is hard for some observers to muster much indignation at this latest assault: it’s only Parliament, after all. It’s exactly this sort of whittling away by degrees that has allowed closure, for example, to be invoked more or less routinely to cut of Parliamentary debates, where once it was to be used only in the most extreme circumstances. It was the improper use of closure, recall, that set off the wild, four-week brawl known as the Pipeline Debate. Now, nobody can be bothered.

The time has long since passed for Parliament to take a stand against its own evisceration. The really substantive issue is whether the government will yield to the Commons demand that it produce the Colvin documents, and perhaps that fight can be resumed in March. But proroguing to delay that day of reckoning, possibly in hopes of sneaking through another snap election in the interval, is worthy of some sort of Parliamentary rebuke, which is why the symbolic measure (and it could only be that) of MPs meeting in another place came to mind.

I recognize that Parliament always retains the ultimate sanction of voting no confidence in the government — or at least, on those days that the government will allow it to do so, or deigns to bring forward legislation, or recognizes confidence votes when they occur (see Paul Martin, above). But this is a very blunt instrument. It shouldn’t have to take a vote of non-confidence to get the government to obey basic norms of accountability. I don’t mean only that the government should observe conventions of respect for Parliament, regardless of whether it is conforming to the strict letter of the law. I also mean there should be mechanisms for curbing such abuses, short of dissolving Parliament.

For example, should the power to prorogue rest solely with the Prime Minister (I know, I know: the Governor General, acting on his advice)? Should it not require a vote of Parliament? Might the same rule not also apply to dissolutions?

No Prorogue! - What's this about?

No Prorogue!
(visit the site for more)

What’s this about?

“When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent is frankly when it’s rapidly losing its moral authority to govern.”
Stephen Harper, Canadian Press, April 18, 2005

On December 30th Stephen Harper announced that he will be Proroguing Parliament and suspending democracy until March 3. This is the second time he has done this in under two years.

Proroguing means:

1. All 37 bills being debated in Parliament are thrown in the trash. Discussion on bills starts from scratch in March, wasting months of hard work by all parties. These bills included new crime legislation, limits on credit card insurance rates, etc.
2. Committees investigating accusations of torture of Afghan detainees stop working
3. Discussions and decisions about the pension crisis affecting Canada’s seniors stops
4. Questions about Canada’s inaction at the Copenhagen climate-change summit are silenced. Opportunities to move forward with Canada’s plan for sustainable development are stalled for over a month.
5. Your MPs cannot raise your concerns in Ottawa

Conservative spin losing its thread

Liberal Arts and Minds: Spin, Losing it's Thread
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There is the need to consult over the economy, but Flaherty put that to rest by saying he'd consult with or without prorogation. Then there is the whole notion that the government has to set a new agenda, 'recalibrate', except they go on to say that it will be business as usual and the plan is simply to implement the second half of the EAP.

There is not one reasonable explanation that has been put on the table and they are now floundering and sound more ridiculous than usual.
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