Canada held hostage

While I don't share the concern others have with Peter Russell's revelation that Michaelle Jean decided to grant Stephen Harper's 2008 prorogation request only after securing key promises from Harper, today's news about some of the other considerations taken into account looks to be downright scary:

In fact, though, Jean did believe there was a Plan B and that it did involve going over the head of the governor general — not to the Queen, but to the Canadian people, as loyal Harper cabinet minister John Baird had warned in a CBC-TV interview. Plan B, Jean and her constitutional advisers believed, would involve a direct, public-relations assault on the legitimacy of the governor general and her decision. That, and not an appeal to the Queen, was far more concerning to Jean on Dec. 4, 2008.

Peter Russell, the distinguished constitutional scholar at the University of Toronto, was one of the experts summoned to Rideau Hall that day and one of the rare ones to say publicly that he was there.

In the back of his cab, coming from the airport to Rideau Hall, Russell only needed to look out the window to see Plan B in action. Demonstrators, holding signs denouncing the coalition, had amassed outside Jean's residence while she was meeting with Harper.

“You can imagine how that would have escalated,” Russell said in an interview this week. “It would have embroiled the country in a constitutional crisis” — one that would have tested Canadians' faith in the entire system of government, including the institution of governor general. The Conservatives' use of the term “coup d'état” was especially worrying, Russell said.

Russell said this wasn't the only consideration in Jean's decision to grant Harper's request, but it was an important part of the context — one that hasn't been discussed publicly so far in the wake of the prorogation.

Now, it would be problematic enough if the small number of paid Con staffers who showed up to "protest" at the GG's residence were able to exert any meaningful influence on a determination as to whether or not Canada's elected representatives would be permitted to carry out a confidence vote. But from Russell's current take, it sounds like the fears went far beyond that, with Jean making her decision in order to avoid an assault on her own position as well as the Cons' promises of chaos if they didn't get their way.

Which might be defensible if the fears were based on any outcry actually originating in the general public, rather than the Cons' strategy of whipping up as much of a frenzy as possible. But as events played out, a party which lied to Canadians about the nature of their democratic system and threatened to make the country unliveable if it faced a democratic vote in the House of Commons was ultimately rewarded for its willingness to tear Canada apart. And it's hard to see how the temporary conflict avoidance achieved by Harper's prorogation - whether framed in terms of the role of the GG alone or the wider threat of party-based protest - is worth the long-term cost of a precedent that a governing party which lacks legitimacy can cling to power by threatening to torch the country.