Thread: So Canada is now under Dictatorship?

Friends,

I can't find it now, but did I see something in the rush of news last week where Canada's Prime Minister, Harper, sent the Canadian Parliament home or shut them down?

W

Canadian Prime Minister shuts down Parliament to avoid no-confidence vote

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has won a bid to shut down Parliament in an unprecedented attempt to stay in power by avoiding a no-confidence vote.

Last Updated: 1:12AM GMT 05 Dec 2008

Less than two months after being re-elected, Harper successfully asked the unelected representative of the head of state for the power to close down Parliament until January 26.

He hopes it will give him and his Conservative government enough time to develop a stimulus package that could prop up the economy.

Mr Harper said: "The opposition's criticism is that we have to focus on the economy immediately and today's decision will give us an opportunity - I'm talking about all the parties - to focus on the economy and work together,"

He said a budget will be the first order of business when Parliament resumes.

Three opposition parties have united against Harper, accusing him of failing to protect Canada from the global financial crisis. The credit crisis and a global sell off of commodities have slowed Canada's resource-rich economy, and the finance minister said last week he expects a recession.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion said the opposition would seek to oust Harper unless he makes a "monumental change" in dealing with the economy and other parties.

"For the first time in the history of Canada the prime minister is running away from the Parliament of Canada," Dion said.

The opposition was also outraged by a government proposal to scrap public subsidies for political parties, something the opposition groups rely on more than the Conservatives.

Although that proposal was withdrawn, the opposition has continued to seek Harper's ouster, saying he has lost the trust and confidence of parliament.

Governor General Michaelle Jean, who represents Britain's Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, had the power to grant the unusual request to suspend parliament. Had she refused, Harper would have had two choices: step down or face a no-confidence vote he was sure to lose.

Harper would not offer details on their a two-and-a-half hour long conversation, citing constitutional tradition.

Opposition politicians blasted Harper's methods.

"I have friends calling me from other countries saying 'Oh well, don't worry, we've seen this happen in third world countries before, we've seen Parliament's get suspended, and people pull fast tricks in order to not face the will of Parliament,' but in Canada?," Liberal Bob Rae said. "I frankly don't regard his government as legitimate any more. His government is there because he avoided the will of Parliament."

Opposition New Democrat leader Jack Layton called it a sad day.

"He's trying to lock the door of Parliament so that the elected people cannot speak,» Layto said. «He's trying to save his job."

Layton said the shut down only delays Harper's inevitable defeat.

Analysts said a governor general has never been asked to suspend parliament to delay an ouster vote when it was clear the government didn't have the confidence of a majority of legislators.

Nelson Wiseman, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, said Jean's decision strengthened the office of the prime minister at the expense of the popularly elected Parliament.

"It's not a good day for parliamentary democracy," Wiseman said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -vote.html

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces, during a snowstorm, that AP – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces, during a snowstorm, that Governor General Michaelle …

OTTAWA – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down Parliament on Thursday in an unprecedented attempt to keep his government in power, fending off a no-confidence vote he was all but certain to lose.

Less than two months after winning re-election, Harper successfully asked the unelected representative of the head of state for the power to close down Parliament until Jan. 26, hoping to buy enough time to develop a stimulus package that could prop up the economy.

"Today's decision will give us an opportunity — I'm talking about all the parties — to focus on the economy and work together," Harper said after the private meeting.

Governor General Michaelle Jean, who represents Britain's Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, granted the unusual request to suspend parliament. Had she refused, Harper would have had two choices: step down or face a no-confidence vote Monday he was sure to lose.

Harper would not offer details on their conversation.

Three opposition parties united against Harper, charging he has failed to insulate Canada from the global financial crisis. The credit crisis and a global sell off of commodities have slowed Canada's resource-rich economy, and the finance minister said last week he expects a recession.

"For the first time in the history of Canada the prime minister is running away from the parliament of Canada," said Liberal leader Stephane Dion, who headed up the opposition movement against Harper.

He said the coalition would seek to oust Harper unless he makes a "monumental change" in dealing with the economy and the opposition.

The opposition was also outraged by a government proposal to scrap public subsidies for political parties, something the opposition groups rely on more than the Conservatives. Although that proposal was withdrawn, the opposition has continued to seek Harper's ouster, saying he has lost the trust and confidence of parliament.

Opposition New Democrat leader Jack Layton called it a sad day.

"He's trying to lock the door of Parliament so that the elected people cannot speak," Layton said. "He's trying to save his job."

Layton said the shutdown only delays Harper's inevitable defeat.

Harper's Conservative Party was re-elected Oct. 14 with a strengthened minority government, but still must rely on the opposition to pass legislation.

The Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois, which together control a majority of parliament's 308 seats, signed a pact agreeing to vote this coming Monday to oust Harper and setting the structure for their proposed coalition government.

Analysts said a governor general has never been asked to suspend parliament to delay an ouster vote when it was clear the government didn't have the confidence of a majority of legislators.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081204/ap_ ... cal_crisis



By Randall Palmer and David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper won a rare suspension of Parliament on Thursday, managing to avoid being ousted by opposition parties angry over the minority Conservative government's economic plans and an attempt to cut off party financing.

Governor General Michaelle Jean -- the representative of Queen Elizabeth, Canada's head of state -- agreed to Harper's request to shut down Parliament until Jan 26. Parliament was reconvened just weeks ago after the October 14 election.

Harper's request for suspension was unprecedented. No prime minister had asked for Parliament to be suspended to avoid a confidence vote in the House of Commons.

Such a vote had been set for Monday and the Conservatives almost certainly would have lost it, and faced the possibility of being replaced by a coalition of opposition parties.

After a two-hour meeting with the governor general, Harper reaffirmed his promise to present a budget on Jan 27 and called on the opposition to work with the government over the next few weeks to tackle the effects of the global financial crisis.

"Today's decision will give us an opportunity -- and I'm talking about all the parties -- to focus on the economy and to work together," he told reporters.

The opposition Liberals, New Democrats and the separatist Bloc Quebecois -- all to the left of the Conservatives -- had signed a deal to defeat the Conservatives and put forward a Liberal-New Democrat coalition to form a new government.

The Bloc, which wants to take French-speaking Quebec out of Canada, pledged to back the coalition's budgets and general policy direction.

The governor general's role in government, as representative of the Crown, is largely ceremonial, though she has the final word on constitutional matters. Should the government be defeated in a confidence vote, she would decide whether to call a new election or allow the opposition to form a coalition government.

CONSTITUTIONAL BATTLE

Harper's gambit was the latest development in a constitutional battle that erupted last week after he tried to eliminate direct subsidies of political parties, a move that would have hit the opposition particularly hard.

He backed down on that, but the opposition parties also say they are upset that the government has not dealt adequately with the economic crisis and said it had lost the confidence of the House of Commons.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion, who would have become prime minister under the opposition's coalition plan, said nothing he heard from Harper on Thursday had changed his mind about trying to bring down the government.

However, he did appear to open the door a crack to not proceeding with such a plan.

"This is about replacing Stephen Harper unless he made a monumental change," he told a news conference. "It means a recovery plan, a real recovery plan."

The New Democrats and Bloc maintained their insistence that Harper could not be trusted and must be removed, as did some members of Dion's Liberal caucus.

"You can run but you can't hide," said Bob Rae, who is looking to become Liberal leader when Dion steps down early in May. He predicted the opposition would topple Harper early next year.

However the front-runner in the Liberal leadership race, Michael Ignatieff, said he imagined Jean may have told Harper "to have a think" and that would be good advice for all politicians on both sides of the dispute.

Liberal legislator Keith Martin told reporters after a caucus meeting that bringing the Conservatives down was "not at all" a done deal.

In the back of their minds may be the fact that in much of the country the idea of a formal agreement with the separatists did not go down well.

An Ekos opinion poll taken as the crisis reached its peak showed the Conservatives had shot up in popularity to 44 percent, enough to get a parliamentary majority if an election were held today, up from the 37.6 percent they received in the October 14 vote.

Liberal support dropped to 24.1 percent from 26.2 percent, the New Democrats fell to 14.5 percent from 18.2 percent and the Bloc edged down to 9.2 percent from 10.0 percent.

The poll, released late on Thursday by CBC television, covered 2,536 respondents from December 2-3 and carried a 1.9 point margin of error, 19 times out of 20.

(Additional reporting by Louise Egan, editing by Peter Galloway)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNew ... 04?sp=true

This is what I found W. There's more out there though.


Editorial: Prorogue Parliament


Jana Chytilova for National PostParliament Hill, Dec. 3, 2008.
Prorogue Parliament. Send all our politicians home for a month or longer, and give them -- and the rest of us -- time to contemplate what they have done and how they are going to get us out of the mess they have created.

Indeed, by the time you read this, the current parliamentary session may already have been dissolved. But if Governor-General Michaelle Jean has not by Thursday morning made up her mind to grant Prime Minister Stephen Harper his request to have the House of Commons rise a week early for its Christmas recess, she should. A brief pause for sober reflection is a reasonable accommodation before changing the national government and overturning the results of an election not yet two months old.

It is true that Mr. Harper precipitated this crisis by his mean-spirited attempt last week to cut off all parties' -- his own and the opposition's -- public operating subsidies. But it is equally true that the punishment being proposed by the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois is out of all proportion to Mr. Harper's crime.

Opposition MPs insist the real reason they are eager to take down the government is lack of economic stimulus in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's recent fiscal update. But their words and actions belie this.

In response to an angry letter from a constituent opposed to a coalition government, Ontario Liberal MP John McKay made not a single reference to the lack of stimulus from the Tories, claiming instead that a new government was necessary because "it has become abundantly clear that the Prime Minister was not only not interested in working with the opposition, but in a stunning lack of respect for democracy, wanted to silence all opposition."

Mr. McKay's response is typical of other candid outbursts we have seen from coalition defenders -- including NDP leader Jack Layton's admission in a conference call last weekend that he had begun coalition talks with the Bloc long before Mr. Harper's capricious attempt to cut party grants.

Coalition leaders' lack of belief in their own statements about economic policy is also apparent in the Liberal and NDP admissions that they will keep the $50-billion in corporate tax cuts scheduled by the Tories to come into effect in the New Year. During the recent federal election, the NDP styled the cuts as favours for Toryfriendly businesses that would require middle-class program cuts. Meanwhile, the Liberals, when asked last week what proof they had that the Tories were making no effort to prime the economic pump, claimed the tax cuts didn't count -- they weren't stimulus, but rather a foolish move that would undermine the fine fiscal health in which the Liberals had left the country's finances.

The coalition itself, meanwhile, has no ready-at-hand stimulus plan. When can they deliver one? They don't know. Can they produce one sooner than the Tories? Maybe not. What will be in the package other than a lot of money? And to whom will the money go? They don't have answers.

All signs point to this being a trap the three losers of October's election have been concocting for weeks, and merely decided to spring now under the pretext of an economic crisis.

The reason we side with the Prime Minister's solution -- prorogation -- rather than the opposition's -- coalition -- is simple: Mr. Harper's plan does not give the power of life and death over Canada's government to separatists who would tear this country apart if given the chance.

Stephane Dion can stand in the Commons all he wants and insist every MP there, including Bloc MPs, was elected to do what is best for Canada, but that is simply untrue. The claim is so ridiculous, in fact, that it's an insult to Canada's collective intelligence. If Mr. Dion believes it, he is more delusional than we ever imagined.

Even the usually sober-minded Michael Ignatieff -- rumoured by many to be uneasy about striking a deal with the BQ -- said in an e-mail to supporters on Tuesday that the coalition was the only way to "ensure national unity." How on earth can making a pact with separatists ensure Canada's unity? The logical contortions required to make such a claim boggle the mind.

Now is not the time for another election. So let's send our politicians home for a few weeks. Then, when they come back in January, the Tories should introduce a stimulus budget. If the House supports it, Mr. Harper can get on with the task of trying to end Parliament's dysfunctionality and govern effectively. If the budget fails, we can go back to the polls. Either way, the G-G should not say yes to a cobbled-together group of sore losers dependent for their survival on avowed separatists.


www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=1029185 - 101k -

Bushier than BushCanada's Stephen Harper has got a little time out to cobble together a slightly less objectionable budget

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... /05/canada


Harper's Coup; Power grab in Ottawa

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=11295


Canadian Prime Minister shuts down Parliament to avoid no-confidence vote

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -vote.html

HAS THE ENTIRE WORLD GONE MAD???????

these are all NEOCONS trying to push they're will on Free People all over the Globe

Less than two months after winning re-election, Harper successfully asked the unelected representative of the head of state for the power to close down Parliament until Jan. 26, hoping to buy enough time to develop a stimulus package that could prop up the economy.

Unelected representative of head of state? Asking permission from this being to shut down parliament?
Why does an elected official that represents the will of the people who voted him into office need to first: ask permission of some character not representing the people by election; second: why does Harper have the power to close parliament, which is supposedly representative of the people, in essence, cutting off the voice of various constituencies because his political butt is in trouble?
Watching CSPAN a few days ago, I was surprises that the Canadian parliament translates everything into French and English. I was also surprised that this body boos or cheers the speakers as they present.
Let's see, Mexico is losing control to drug cartels, and Canada suspends the will of the people by asking permission from some character, and these are going to be our partners in the great North American Union?

Originally Posted by vortex

Less than two months after winning re-election, Harper successfully asked the unelected representative of the head of state for the power to close down Parliament until Jan. 26, hoping to buy enough time to develop a stimulus package that could prop up the economy.

Unelected representative of head of state? Asking permission from this being to shut down parliament?
Why does an elected official that represents the will of the people who voted him into office need to first: ask permission of some character not representing the people by election; second: why does Harper have the power to close parliament, which is supposedly representative of the people, in essence, cutting off the voice of various constituencies because his political butt is in trouble?
Watching CSPAN a few days ago, I was surprises that the Canadian parliament translates everything into French and English. I was also surprised that this body boos or cheers the speakers as they present.
Let's see, Mexico is losing control to drug cartels, and Canada suspends the will of the people by asking permission from some character, and these are going to be our partners in the great North American Union?

And the sheeple of the US say baa baa baa. We elect our government by how much charisma and Hollywood appeal they have. Funny, I bet Hitler would have won by a landslide, I understand he had a lot of charisma. The future is looking more uncertain than the economy.

A President could declare marshal law any time he wants to, he just has to have some reason for doing it. What might some of those reasons be? How about urban riots? That happened under Johnson. Or maybe another terror attack that he could have prevented leads to a complete break down like the Mumbai attack but on a larger scale? Maybe the economy collapses? But guys like Harper are no help. And there is no way Canada and Mexico are going to help us. It's the US that will have to help them with money etc. That's why they want the North American Union so they can say we're all just one big happy country.