Parliament Prorogued

Today was the day that the no confidence motion was scheduled to take place in the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. However, Parliament has been “prorogued.” As it turns out PM Harper asked the Governor General of Canada (head of state of Canada and appointed by the Queen of England) for permission to prorogue the Parliament, which essentially means to adjourn it. He had three choices:

(1) face the no confidence vote; or
(2) ask the Governor General to dissolve the Parliament and call for new elections; or
(3) ask the Governor General to prorogue the Parliament.

Options 1 and 2 were not politically palatable to Harper. He would likely have lost under the first option and the Liberal/NDP coalition would have taken over as the majority government. Option 2 was not politically feasible as an election was just held on October 14th and Canada has had a number of federal elections in the past 4 years. So that left the third option and that was probably viewed by the Governor General as the least harmful option available.

So Parliament has been prorogued until January 27th. It appears that, at that time, two things will happen. One, there will be another no confidence scheduled by the Liberal/NDP/Bloc Quebecois coalition (assuming that it’s still together as of that time and that’s kind of iffy). The second thing is that the Conservatives will likely submit a budget that will attempt to address the major concern of the Liberal party members, i.e. a stimulus package to address the economy. The Conservatives hope to peel off enough votes to avoid a no confidence vote.

So there will be a fair bit of politicking between now and then. In the meantime, the stability of the Canadian Parliamentary system was called into question by an interesting article in the Economist. See this article:

Canadian Politics