Liberal, Tory, same old prorogation story
Written by: Adam Riggio
It’s just plain sad. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he will prorogue parliament, after the bombshell of Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s resignation. In the middle of a global pandemic that has smashed Canada’s economy worse than the Great Depression, and rocked our massive neighbour into dangerous and violent political instability, the prime minister is putting parliament on hiatus.
I want to see what we can learn about this prorogation by comparing and contrasting with the last such major offence to Canada’s parliament, Stephen Harper’s prorogation to save his government in the last weeks of 2008. This is because historical thinking will underline the important similarities between the openly repugnant Harper approach to parliamentary blockades of cabinet’s agendas, and the shiny, charismatic Trudeau approach to the same issue.
A Cabinet of Ideologists Avoiding Accountability
Ultimately, both prorogations are about a Prime Minister trying to avoid having to face responsibility for improper or wrong actions. Constitutionally, the Prime Minster has the right to ask our figurehead-of-state, the Governor-General, to pause parliament. Any bills in process are wiped off the order paper, MPs don’t formally convene (in-person or virtually), cabinet has a chance to regroup.
On paper (of the constitution, that is), prorogation is only for dire parliamentary emergencies. But Harper’s minority government set a precedence to normalize prorogation. After 2007’s international banking collapse (itself a product of high-rolling financiers overleveraging investments in junk mortgages by hundreds of billions of dollars), governments had to pump hundreds of billions back into the economy.
Despite this being sound economics, the Harper government held firm that there would be as little stimulus money as possible. Conservative Party ideology is deeply influenced by pro-privatization and anti-welfare economic arguments of the Austrian and Chicago School traditions. So they believed that it would take very little money returning to an economy through government fiat to send our currency spiralling into a Zimbabwe-intensity inflation crisis.
Delegitimizing Centuries of Democratic Tradition
Stéphane Dion’s and Jack Layton’s Liberal and NDP caucuses rightly saw that Harper’s anemic stimulus plan was an economic stupidity that would plunge many Canadians into ruin. So they negotiated what would have been, for the first time in Canadian history, a deal for a coalition government.
Since our Parliament is a first-past-the-post election model, minority governments are fairly rare, historically speaking. But Canada’s is one among a parliamentary tradition that began in medieval Europe, and there is literally centuries of precedent for several smaller parties that hold the overall majority (Liberal and NDP with a shrug from the BQ) to build a coalition government. Harper understood this, so aggressively attacked the coalition plan as a coup against the outcome of the recent election.
Here was a high-stakes battle over how one maintains a democratically accountable government in a contested, unstable Parliament. The Governor-General at the time was woefully unprepared for such a situation because she knew nothing of constitutional law, legal theory, or any of the political philosophies detailing the purpose and function of representative parliaments. Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed Michaëlle Jean in 2005, based on her record as a charismatic and photogenic CBC journalist and documentary producer.
Ignorant of the purpose of her post beyond cutting ribbons and reading other people’s speeches, she buckled under Harper’s demand to prorogue parliament so he would face no confidence votes and had the freedom to undermine public support for a Dion-Layton coalition government in the media. Harper ultimately relented on some, if not enough, opposition demands for healthier economic stimulus, and Michael Ignatieff killed the coalition deal after replacing Dion as Liberal Party leader.
It’s why I cheekily think of Harper’s as Prorogation 2008: Screw You, I’m Not Leaving!
Our current situation is a lot more complex than Harper’s simple ideological refusal to support working and middle class people through a global banking disaster.
A Bid-Rigging Scandal of Gross Entitlement
Here’s (what I hope) will be a short account of Justin Trudeau’s political clusterf—k, Prorogation 2020: The National Embarrassment of a Too-Handsome Man. It begins with the WE scandal, not only its own substance, but the genuinely unpredictable spinoff effects.
The core issue is that WE Charity was very easily able to rig the bidding process for the contract to deliver a massive student jobs program as an additional element of economic stimulus during the pandemic. Essentially, there wasn’t even any bidding.
Craig and Marc Kielburger have long-standing professional relationships with the Liberal Party, especially since Justin Trudeau became its leader. Trudeau has for years endorsed and participated in WE Charity events and communications. WE Charity’s initiatives in schools and universities around Canada are a central recruiting pipeline for Young Liberal clubs.
Speaking in strictly PR terms, their relationship is a perfect fit. The natural ideology of the Liberal Party speaks perfectly to people of good conscience among the comfortable classes who are unaware, unable, or unwilling to believe that more systematic economic and political change is required to fight global injustice than some pleasant voluntourism.
But the entire WE organization has been facing serious financial difficulties, and even a small amount of digging was easily able to uncover many improper relationships and communications between the Kielburger brothers, federal cabinet ministers, and high-ranking civil servants. Their main chain of handshakes to peddle influence seems to have run through now-former Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s office, social network, and family.
When Your Boss From Hell Is Canada’s Head-of-State
WE Charity’s bid rigging isn’t the only scandal of petulant self-entitlement rocking public faith in Trudeau’s government. Remember that during Prorogation 2008: Screw You I’m Not Leaving!, a key enabler of Stephen Harper’s undemocratic prorogation was the legal and constitutional incompetence of the Governor-General.
An election system that tends to produce artificial parliamentary majorities also produced complacency that reduced the office of Canada’s head-of-state to a ceremonial and public relations position. Having a considerable education in Canada’s constitution, Harper must have felt a lot of pain when dealing with Governor-General Michaëlle Jean’s legal ignorance. The result was one of the few of Harper’s decisions with which progressives should agree: the Governor-General should be highly educated in Canadian constitutional law. I had hoped that his appointment of David Johnston, one of the country’s leading legal theorists, would create a helpful precedent.
Justin Trudeau utterly ignored this precedent of making competence in constitutional law a requirement for the position of Canada’s chief constitutional referee. Instead, he returned to the old tradition of the Governor-General being the Prime Minister’s chief cheerleader.
Julie Payette is a legendary astronaut and popular scientist who has been CEO of the Montréal Science Centre and a board of directors member of several education charities, crown corporations, banks, and International Olympics Committee organizations. That is very nice, but has nothing to do with constitutional law, which ill-prepares her for handling constitutional problematics like proroguing parliament to avoid a confidence vote spearheaded by an ethnic nationalist opposition party.
As recent leaks have revealed, Payette also habitually abuses her power as a boss in the office of Governor-General, as recent leaks have revealed how cruel she is to her staff, frequently losing her temper in fits of raging anger. Also, Trudeau did not mention in his glowing words on Payette’s appointment, that she was charged with assaulting her husband in 2011. Shortly after this violent incident, they divorced, and after becoming Governor-General she tried to stop paying him child support.
Payette also abuses the perks of her position for ostentatious privileges, like flying a government jet back and forth between her Montréal house and her Laurentian cottage all summer, to avoid the 90 minute drive. All of this is humiliating to Trudeau, who has helped promote Payette’s public image as a smiling Canadian patriot.
One Cannot Be a Cheapskate During an Apocalypse
Of course, we can never forget that all this was going on while human civilization has begun crumbling from the stress of a deadly and debilitating viral pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 spreads catastrophically fast and virulently, as humans have no natural immunity to this genuinely new virus, we spend much of our working lives indoors breathing recycled air and our personal lives at parties or festivals in close contact with dozens or hundreds of strangers. This is why so many have not been able to go to work or social events. Ordinary economic life would cause an unchecked catastrophe of contagion, as we can see in the United States.
Morneau’s resignation this 17 August has begun to reveal serious conflict between himself and the Prime Minister over how much financial support working and middle class people should receive during the unemployment crisis of the pandemic. Morneau appears to have been a deficit hawk whose approach to stimulus spending would have fit in well among Conservatives.
It seems that Morneau opposed basic income payments that were actually big enough to keep people out of poverty, because of the neoliberal myth that unemployment benefits sufficient for a dignified life discourage people from seeking work. But Trudeau looked at how popular more generous relief programs like CERB and CESB would be, and overruled his Finance Minister. Rumours are that Trudeau has been seeking economic and policy advice from former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney.
With the emergency pandemic benefit programs, Trudeau has done a good thing (using a basic income plan to support a population through a pandemic-enabled economic depression) for a poor reason (it polls better than letting people lose their homes and starve). But it looks as though Morneau did not even support right reason.
One Must Not Become a Habitual Line-Stepper
This is more likely the reason for Morneau’s abrupt resignation and exit from elected office (not that Morneau or his staff ever put much effort into being an actual Member of Parliament representing a territory of actual people to the federal government). It better fits the pattern of high-profile resignations from the Trudeau cabinet: far from the “return of government by cabinet,” as he promised in 2015, Trudeau clearly has no tolerance for dissent or critique in his government past some threshold.
Former Justice Minister and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould opposed Trudeau’s orders that she drop bribery charges over SNC-Lavalin’s relationship with Muammar Gaddafi’s totalitarian Libyan government. Celina Caesar-Chavannes was Trudeau’s parliamentary secretary, who revealed his harsh style of treating those he outranked. Now Bill Morneau has resigned after crossing the Prime Minister one too many times over his neoliberal ideology being more important to him than serving Trudeau’s eye on public opinion.
Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet has called for a confidence vote unless Morneau and Trudeau resign, and pundits have pointed to this as the reason for the prorogation, a sacrifice to quell a threat to his prime ministership. But if we pay attention to Trudeau’s established pattern of ejecting cabinet officials when he comes to consider their friendly criticism disobedience, then we see how Morneau’s ouster stemmed from his dissent in opposing a family-focussed stimulus program.
Prorogation 2020: Justin Trudeau’s National Embarrassment
Harper’s anti-democratic precedent was a simple matter. His minority government was under threat by a coalition of the parliamentary majority, and prorogation was a desperate ploy to stall the coalition’s momentum and break their accord. Prorogation 2008: Screw You I’m Not Leaving! expressed an authoritarian tendency among modern conservatives that their ideology is the only legitimate program for a Western government. If a democratic institution or tradition threatens their power, its political possibility must be eliminated.
Trudeau’s prorogation is surrounded by so much scandal and instability throughout his cabinet that it appears less as a power grab and more as the last act of a desperate man to prevent the collapse of his legacy. The pandemic threw the government’s economic plans and policies into chaos and pit the Finance Minister’s neoliberal ideology against the Prime Minister’s need to follow hot polling numbers.
At the same time, the scandals of the Governor-General’s toxic and abusive workplace culture, and WE Charity’s influence peddling and bid rigging reveal a corruption more insidious and pathetic than moved Harper’s shenanigans. The Liberal Party’s corruption under Trudeau, and really for most of its history, reduces politics to the self-interested brokerage of power and money.
That so many of us Canadians think these are the only two alternatives to steer our federal government and represent our country to the rest of that world; that should be our embarrassment.
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