The right to be heard

So it's apparently official: the Cons have bought themselves a couple of months to try to bully, smear, bribe and fearmonger their way out of impending defeat in the House of Commons. While others have pointed out some of the substantive problems with the decision, I'll focus for now on the process followed by Michaelle Jean in making it.

Based on the length of the meeting with Harper, it seems glaringly clear that Jean didn't simply assume that she had to accept his advice without question. Instead, there presumably must have been some justifiable doubt in her mind as to whether or not Harper's request ought to be granted. And given that Harper seems to have acquired everything he asked for, there's every reason to think that his arguments had at least some effect on the outcome.

Which raises a massive red flag: particularly where an action is being questioned precisely based on a reasonable dispute as to whether or not the Prime Minister has lost the necessary legitimacy to make a request, how can the Governor-General hear only from the Prime Minister's side (bolstered by publicly-funded research from the Privy Council Office and Justice Department) before making a decision?

Now, this isn't to say that there's any likelihood of Jean's decision being successfully appealed to any court based on her failure to give the coalition a chance to make its case to deny (or set conditions on) prorogation. And indeed I'm not sure I'd want to see the courts dragged into what Harper has already turned into a constitutional quagmire.

Likewise, it doesn't mean that I'd want to see every action of the GG made subject to representations from all sides: so long as a government's confidence in the House of Commons isn't seriously in question, there wouldn't be any reason to change the usual rule that the GG takes her advice solely from the sitting prime minister.

But faced with a serious issue of whether or not Harper effectively had standing to make a request for prorogation, it seems awfully troubling that Jean seems to have not only deferred to Harper's opinion, but also concluded that nobody else should be allowed to make their case. And particularly if Harper himself decides to push the boundaries of executive power vis-a-vis the GG as he's already done in so many other areas, it's that combination - not just the precedent of prorogation itself - which may prove to be the most damaging result of all.