Canada: Rightist maneuvers to suspend Parliament

Facing the loss of a confidence vote in the Canadian Parliament, which would have led to his government’s dismissal, Prime Minister Stephen Harper in early December asked Gov. General Michaëlle Jean to suspend the country’s legislature for eight weeks. Jean is the representative of the Queen of England, who is also Canada’s head of state. She agreed, so through this maneuver Harper stays in power another two months.

This type of suspension, called a prorogation, has never been employed before in Canada to avoid a no-confidence vote. In fact, some bloggers in Canada (nowpublic.com/world) claim it has never been used this way in any other constitutional monarchy in the world.

This desperate attempt to hold on to power by any means available reflects Canada’s unstable economy and politics. It is comparable to when the U.S. Supreme Court threw Florida’s vote to George W. Bush in 2000. Its implications for Canada’s bourgeois democracy are just as grave as Bush’s victory was in the U.S.

Harper’s Conservative Party has a minority in Parliament. In elections held this past October, it failed to gain any additional seats in Quebec because of its disparaging cuts in federal funds that promote Quebec’s culture.

In Quebec, which contains close to one quarter of Canada’s people, almost 85 percent speak French as their first language. Among them are large French-speaking Haitian and North African communities. The party that represents 49 out of Quebec’s 75 parliamentary districts (called “ridings”) is the Bloc Quebecois.

The BQ came out of the separatist movement in Quebec, but its current program is directed toward defending Quebec’s interests as a province inside Canada.

The Harper administration had presented a budget that was headed for defeat. It included suspending the right of federal employees to strike and bargain collectively; cutting unemployment benefits and works programs; and abolishing subsidies to the political parties based on how many votes they get. Harper, who represents the oil-rich province of Alberta, was pushing for an austerity budget at a time when Canada’s economy is in a period of rapid decline.

Canada didn’t go through a subprime mortgage mess and doesn’t have an equivalent to U.S. agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which promoted unrestrained speculation in housing. However, the Canadian and U.S. economies are so intertwined that Canada cannot escape the effects of the financial meltdown in its southern neighbor. Many of its public pension systems are now facing a shortfall of 15 to 20 percent. (The Montreal Gazette, Nov. 14)

One figure reveals the economic network between these two countries: the flow of trade. Both incoming and outgoing, it amounts to $300 billion a year, the largest flow between any two countries in the world.

The Liberal Party and the more progressive New Democratic Party hold 76 and 37 seats, respectively, in Parliament. Once they announced that they had formed a coalition, and that the BQ with 49 seats would support them, Harper and his Conservative Party unleashed a torrent of chauvinist diatribes against “the Liberals uniting with the socialists” with the support of “the separatists.” As of Dec. 5, according to La Presse, one of the main newspapers in Quebec, these diatribes had appeared solely in English.

The struggle over the budget and the suspension of Parliament is not over. The weekend of Dec. 6-7 saw small but nationwide demonstrations. Those in Quebec were filled with union banners and the fleur-de-lis, the national flag of Quebec.