Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- With prorogation looking like it's bound to be back on the table fairly shortly, Lori Turnbull offers a worthwhile suggestion to end the Cons' abuses:

The 2012 prorogation would be substantively different. First, there is no obvious political land mine to avoid. Second, the Conservatives have demonstrated how majority status confers an immunity of sorts from even the most scathing criticism from the opposition benches. These factors make a potential upcoming prorogation less necessary from a political standpoint, but the fact remains: We live in a country where a prime minister can shut down the House, the pre-eminent institution of our parliamentary democracy, on a whim, for no particular reason.

In our new book, Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government, we argue that prorogations should occur only with the consent of a two-thirds majority of the House. This would place the balance of power in the hands of elected representatives, where it belongs. The House would have to consent to turning the lights off. If we allow the prime minister to unilaterally decide whether and when the House can perform its scrutiny function, we reverse the basic logic of responsible government, which dictates that the government must be accountable to the House. The two-thirds majority threshold is high enough to nearly always necessitate multiparty support.

A simple majority, as suggested by the Liberals and the NDP, would still allow a majority government prime minister to get his way just by whipping the votes of his own caucus. We argue that where prorogation is routine, the supermajority threshold should be reached easily. But, if adopted, our proposal would enable the House of Commons to protect itself against a prime minister who is motivated to avoid it. We seem to be living in an era where elected representatives have to stand up for their right to do their jobs; this reform would change that.

- Meanwhile, it shouldn't come as much surprise that the Cons plan to formally declare that they see no problem tearing up international climate change agreements. But the more remarkable part of Roger Smith's revelation that they plan to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol is that the Cons' plan was to wait until after the next major round of negotiations - at a point when global reaction will likely determine whether it's possible to make progress despite the Cons' constant obstruction on behalf of the tar sands - to repudiate the work that's been done in the past.

- And the Cons' spirit of openness and honesty can also be found in their systematic deception about the cost of renovating the Nortel campus for the Department of Defence.

- Finally, pogge chronicles the birth of a zombie lie (which we can expect to hear repeated ad nauseum as the Cons attempt to distract from the appalling conditions facing Canada's First Nations by attacking their leaders).