Yes, It's Utter Contempt For Parliament

Dale at Hill Queeries calls it:

The Conservatives’ contempt for Parliament apparently knows no bounds as they are expected to deliver their fall economic update today, in Mississauga of all places. No, you’re not mistaken – the House isn’t sitting this week. For them to deliver it outside of the House shows contempt in and of itself, but to deliver it on a week where it’s not even sitting is just rubbing it in. It shows that the government doesn’t care what the House thinks, because there is no speech to MPs, and no chance for the other parties to respond to its deliver at that time.

Of course, in making this announcement outside of Parliament at a time when the representatives of the people who didn't vote for the government (hell, even the representatives of the people who did vote for the government) can respond to the government's taxing and spending plans, the incompetent fuck-head Flaherty is just following in the footsteps of his brother in stupidity and incompetence, Ernie Eves, who presented a budget at one of the factories of anti-union, anti-democracy, ego-maniac Frank Stronach. So, to date, there is harper's serial contempt for democratic oversight as represented by two abuses of the power of prorogation. There's harper's cynical, hypocritical contempt for our political system itself, as represented by his labelling a parliamentary coalition as a "coup" despite having proposed a "coup" with the "socialists and separatists" himself when he was in opposition. There's harper's serial refusal to allow Parliament to know what the government is doing, first by claiming that our political representatives are unfit to see records of prisoner transfers in Afghanistan because of bogus "national security" concerns and then by refusing to allow political staffers to testify before Parliamentary committees (instead allowing ignorant cabinet ministers to appear in their place where they can smirk and assure the committees that they'll be sure to get back to them with the information they're asking for).

Of course, harper's contempt for the political system that he leads is mirrored by the opposition's apparent self-loathing for themselves and their own disregard for the democratic forms that they have so far refused to defend. Maybe some old-time Canadian politics junkies can help me out here, but has it ever been this bad? Has it ever been so bad that the very forms of Canadian democracy have been so debased and abused? Has it ever been the case that we have simultaneously suffered an autocratically-minded, anti-democratic government, faced by a mewling, ignorant, apathetic opposition and an electorate completely indifferent to the wholesale destruction of the one potential source of their power against the few elites who truly govern things?