Sunday Morning Links

News and notes for your weekend reading...

- I'm not sure that anybody much expected this fall's session of Parliament to accomplish much considering the results so far under the Cons. But Susan Delacourt's commentary as to the dangers of the House of Commons being shut out of any meaningful decision-making is otherwise right on target:

Parliamentary experts might argue over whether Senate abolition would be a wise move in the future. Their more pressing concern, however, might be whether the elected House of Commons — the one that's supposed to be the real, working half of Parliament — is already being abolished, bit by bit, day by day, in Harper's Ottawa.

The slaps to the Commons' authority are, after all, merely the latest in a series of direct challenges to the chamber in recent years.

This time last year, for instance, the Harper government decided to disregard a Commons resolution, duly passed by a majority of MPs, to produce all documents pertaining to the treatment of Afghan detainees handled by Canadian troops.

Then, on New Year's Eve, with only a cursory phone call to the governor general, Harper shut down Parliament until March.

That decision appeared to wake up Canadians to something amiss. Demonstrations were held in cities across Canada to protest against the prorogation — a word that probably wasn't in most Canadians' vocabulary until the past two years.

But the Commons' problems aren't just a case of open and closed doors. Nor can they simply be reduced to the now-familiar, though very real, worries about decorum and partisan antics in question period. If it's true that the Commons' actual power and authority are eroding, then all this bad behaviour looks more like the band playing while the Titanic goes down.

- And the Star Phoenix also unloads on the Cons' Senate abuses:

in a confused and chaotic display of petty politics and childish bickering, the Tories killed the bill in a snap vote before it even made it to a Senate committee for consideration -- the first time in more than seven decades such a thing has happened.

Marjory LeBreton, Government Leader in the Senate, blamed the Liberals while the Grits blamed the Tories.

It doesn't matter. The appointed senators should never have even contemplated summarily dismissing the will of a majority of elected MPs.

But to rub salt in the wound, the Conservatives weren't done yet. No sooner did the stink begin to rise from the actions of the senators than the government tried to force a long-stalled Senate reform bill through the Commons without having it debated in committee -- a further embarrassment to Parliament and an insult (to) Canadians.
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Mr. Harper, who advocated for an elected and responsible Senate, has appointed more senators in a shorter period of time than has any other Canadian prime minister and, as this debate illustrates, chosen for the job more blindly and irresponsibly partisan candidates.

To continue to declare that his government has any intention of making meaningful Senate reforms insults the intelligence of Canadians.

The first meaningful reform should be to have senators behave as thoughtful adults instead of farcical characters in a Saturday afternoon wrestling spectacle.

- Meanwhile, the Star also rightly notes that poverty looks to be at the top of the list of issues where the Cons have absolutely no interest in seeing anything accomplished.

- And finally, as the Cons try to make up numbers to explain their decision to pick a fight with the United Arab Emirates, let's ask the question: how many airline jobs would we be able to preserve and improve if we weren't flushing hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain?