Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Frances Russell laments Stephen Harper's determination to replace democracy with court rule:

Pierre Trudeau started it. Stephen Harper is finishing it off.

The "it" is the effective demise of parliamentary democracy and the installation of "court government" ruled by an all-powerful prime minister and his hand-picked, unelected, unaccountable "courtiers."

Fiercely partisan, these "courtiers," like their medieval predecessors, have only one purpose: to protect, advance and polish the image of the "king" -- the prime minister.

Not only are formal and traceable lines of policy-making and accountability gone, but parliamentary government has been turned on its head. The prime minister doesn't account to Parliament; Parliament accounts to -- serves -- the prime minister.
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There are other, more egregious examples: routine in-camera motions muzzling parliamentary committees and their opposition members, routine closure motions introduced simultaneously with all legislation.

But, Wiseman says, the prime minister's most dangerous undermining of Parliament to date was former governor general Michaëlle Jean's decision to grant Harper prorogation in December 2008 to stave off parliamentary defeat.

"Canada's Parliament," according to the director of the Constitution Unit at University College, London, "is more dysfunctional than any of the other Westminster parliaments," he continues. "No prime minister in any Commonwealth country with a governor general, until Harper, has ever sought prorogation to avoid a vote of confidence. Only in Canada has a government secured the prorogation of Parliament to save itself from political defeat and only in Canada has the governor general been party to it."

- Glen McGregor rightly asks whether the Cons will repay riding-level reimbursements affected by their in-and-out guilty plea. And it's hard to see how they could escape that consequence when - as I noted here - they've admitted as a party that the scheme resulted in riding associations claiming those expenses without ever paying a dime.

- Allen Thompson points out that the Cons' immigration clampdown is based on trying to set a reduced value on parents and grandparents. But the most striking change is the fact that the value of extended family has effectively been set at zero for the time being, thanks to the Cons' refusal to allow any new applications.

- Finally, Kim MacRael reports on the Cons' latest gratuitous dumb-on-crime posturing which figures to deliberately make Canada's criminal justice system less effective:

Prisoners who are placed in segregation as a form of punishment could also be denied visits from family and friends under the federal anti-crime bill, a measure the Canadian Bar Association calls “mean-spirited” and counterproductive.
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The bill proposes fundamental changes to the way inmates are treated behind prison walls, including the elimination of a rule requiring administrators to impose the least restrictive measures necessary on prisoners. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told the committee this fall the changes are based on recommendations from guards and would “modernize the system of discipline in federal penitentiaries.”

Under the legislation, administrators could limit visits to those being punished with solitary confinement for up to 30 days at a time.

Michael Jackson, a member of the Canadian Bar Association’s committee on imprisonment and release, said the plan runs counter to research on prisoner behaviour. “Segregation tends to ratchet up prisoners’ anger and makes them more difficult to control, [and] allowing visitors is one way of trying to alleviate it,” he said.

Mr. Jackson pointed to a 2008 study from Florida State University researchers that found prisoners who were visited by family and friends were less likely to reoffend. “To say we’re going to toughen up conditions by taking away visits is very mean-spirited and it doesn’t make correctional sense,” he said.