Politics and Press

Prorogue – what the hell does that mean?

Canadians woke up this morning to the sound of a verb they had never heard before – to prorogue – which in parliamentary lingo means to stop parliament from meeting for awhile and in street talk means to screw the electorate. The Queen of England’s representative in Canada, Governor-General Michelle Jean, an excellent woman with great experience in the entertainment industry and none in parliamentary procedures, returned early from a tour of somewhere or other to agree to Prime Minister Harper’s request to close down parliament for almost two months so that he could avoid a vote of non-confidence on Monday. That certainly would have occurred only 6 weeks after his party set up a minority government after having won only 33% of the vote in a federal election.
Canadians do not elect a Prime Minister, as Amurcans do a President, but rather members of parliament, who in turn elect party leaders, the strongest of which becomes Prime Minister, either by leading a party holding a majority of the seats or by getting together a group of parties which agree to work together under his or her leadership. This is the case, for instance, in Germany today, where a very close race for seats between the two largest parties led to a coalition government, in which the Prime Minister position belongs to the leader of the party with the most seats, and the next most important ministry – foreign affairs – belongs to the leader of the second ranked party. In the current Canadian situation, the leader of the party with the most seats, who never considered seeking such a German solution – a coalition government with another party – asked the Queen of England’s representative to stop the vote from happening so that the other parties could not coalesce with enough votes to run the government. But this vote will still have to happen, but now not until February, leaving the country without a functioning government until then. This will certainly be terrible for the economy in perilous time and give the separatistes in Quebec good reason to press their cause all the more confidently.