McGuinty's Prorogation

Back in the immediate aftermath of harper's fraudulent majority win I argued that harper had no claim to legitimacy because he had eviscerated the whole concept of "responsible government" with his first controversial prorogation (the one that was called specifically to avoid an impending no-confidence vote).  His second prorogation was controversial because his request was phoned in to the Governor General (exhibiting a total lack of respect for the forms of our system of government that belies his reactionary pandering to the institution of the monarchy in general), because it was used to obstruct an inquiry into something as deadly serious as possible Canadian complicity in war crimes against humanity, and, finally, because at that stage of the session a LOT of legislative work had been done and it was all trashed and needed to be started all over again in the next parliament. But, from a constitutional point of view, the first prorogation was the inexcusable one. The one that showed that harper cares not a whit for a democratic heritage.(Jean Chretien was himself guilty of proroguing parliament when it was starting to get inconvenient and he had a majority. It's detestable but it's not unconstitutional.)

Then, when harper stood by Bev Oda for doctoring an official government document and then lying to Parliament about it, he again showed himself as irredeemable. Then, when he refused to provide Parliament (the people's representatives) with the official cost estimates for his prisons and his planes, he showed himself to be irredeemable. How are our representatives supposed to be expected to vote for policies when they don't know their costs?

Sickeningly, when the opposition parties DID THEIR JOB and voted his government down, AFTER he stole his majority through electoral fraud, we came to discover that his verbal assurances for the costs of the fighter-jets were blatant lies.

This is unprecedented anti-democratic behaviour. But, once you do something unprecedented, you've set a precedent. And it didn't take long for the decay of Canadian democracy to infect other legislatures. There's a whole tsunami of contempt for democracy that was just waiting for the first crack in the dam apparently. Lo and behold, the soulless doofus Dalton McGuinty decides that being the first government in the Ontario legislature's 220-year history to be found in contempt is okay if it helps him delay coming clean about the half-a-billion of the taxpayers' money he was willing to spend to help keep two MPP's in office.

When this, and other scandals started to weigh too heavily upon him, along with the failure of his bankrupt neoliberal policies, McGuinty decided to call it quits This calling it quits is, like Chretin's abuses, deplorable. But he's in his rights to do so.

It is his contempt of the legislature that makes him such a vile piece of shit.