Prorogation, what is that?   Something tells me that most Canadians don’t care about it.  Certainly count me in on that one.  When Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided to prorogue Parliament I wasn’t very surprised.  Stephen Harper is a political animal and he learned much of that from being on the receiving end from former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

I certainly miss former Prime Minister Jean Chretien.  I miss him because he took several political risks during his long career in Ottawa.  He certainly didn’t have it easy coming out of Quebec as a unilingual French Quebecer.  He was knocked around for a long time only to get to be Prime Minister in 1993.

At the end of his career he had a bit of a stroke of luck.  In 1993 he found his political opposition splintered into the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservative party.  The electoral math of such a split meant that the Chretien Liberals would get 100 seats out of vote rich Ontario before they even got out of the gate.  In other words they only needed about 45 or 50 seats in the rest of Canada to get a majority government.  They did that three times before the right wing of this country got their act together.

The election that I remember the most for political risks was in the year 2000. Jean Chretien called the election only three years into his mandate.  At the time many MPs and his Liberal party were nervous that he’d done something very very wrong.  However, Chretien was confident, having looked at the political math with the opposition still splintered.  When the last election results came in he had increased his majority in the House of Commons to 172 seats.  And he did it with the wind at his back.

Fast forward 10 years and you have a somewhat similar situation with quite unusual political circumstances.  You have a prime minister in Stephen Harper that was schooled by Jean Chretien on political instincts.  His problem is he has had two straight minority governments and with the Bloc Québecois representing such a large part of the Canadian public it makes it hard for anybody to get a majority.  This political circumstance in my mind has made Stephen Harper act with a bit of a sense of recklessness.

I say that because there is not much chance of things changing especially with the Liberal party of Canada still in a bit of disarray.   Stephen Harper decided to prorogue parliament until March 3rd probably for a lot of reasons but one of them being political.  If he can be seen and his ministers can be seen with Canadian medal winners at the Vancouver Olympics, that’s a lot better than answering questions in Parliament.  It would certainly be better for the poll numbers.  And you can also bet that Mr. Harper did his polling on this subject before he even thought about doing it.  So we are prorogued until March 3rd.

Across the country there has been a bit of a dustup regarding it.  Needless to say I think most of it has been among media types stirred up by Harper’s political opposition.  I think most Canadians have grown so cynical about Canadian politics that they don’t think it makes a bit of difference who is in Ottawa, Liberal, and Conservatives, whatever.  So in many ways I tend to believe Stephen Harper when he says the prorogation of Parliament isn’t much of a concern to Canadians.

I think the bigger issue might be something that Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson referred to in his recent column, “Few Countries Can Claim Such a Pathetic Parliament.”  In his column Mr. Ibbitson says the Canadian Parliament has become the most dysfunctional in the English-speaking world, weaker and more irrelevant than the U.S. Congress or the Parliaments of Britain, Australia or New Zealand.  Mr. Ibbitson documents several examples in his column about how those other legislatures get more work done and are more responsible to their constituents.

He makes a compelling argument and I think he is very right.  He says that British and Australian MPs can slap down party leaders but here in Canada it’s the reverse.  I would argue it’s getting worse.  Whether it is a liberal or conservative in the prime minister’s chair they seem to be much more concerned about concentrating power versus being responsible to the constituents who sent them there.

How this situation would change in the future I don’t know.  It would take a Prime Minister with a majority government who was willing to change things forever.  However, that goes against the political instincts such a scenario would present.   In lieu of that Canadians will have to depend on a time honored Canadian tradition.  That is political change, which from time to time comes along to transfer power to the other party.  It’ll happen one of these days, like it always does.  Politicians will stand up and say things are going to change.   It’s about all we can hope for.