Canada

Prime Minister suspends parliament to avoid censure

Article published on the 2008-12-05 Latest update 2008-12-05 15:09 TU

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
(Photo: Reuters)

The Canadian Parliament was shut down Thursday after an unprecedented request by Prime Minister Stephen Harper allowed him to avoid a vote that would have surely toppled his government.

Harper had scheduled a confidence vote on several budget proposals for next Monday, but once the opposition Liberal and New Democratic Party (NDP) released a public agreement to bring the government down and form a coalition to replace it, Harper asked the Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, to prorogue Parliament until January.

Opposition leaders cried foul, saying the Prime Minister’s request was an overt attempt to save his own job.

"We must realise the enormity of what has happened here today. For the first time in the history of Canada, the Prime Minister of Canada is running away from the Parliament of Canada," said Liberal leader Stéphane Dion after the suspension was made official.

NDP Leader Jack Layton said the coalition will not be abandoning its deal over the next seven weeks while parliament is shut down.

"I cannot have confidence in a Prime Minister who would throw the locks on the door of this place, knowing that he's about to lose a vote in the House of Commons," Mr. Layton said. "That's denying about as fundamental a right as one has in a democracy."

During his closed-door meeting with Jean, Harper presumably reiterated the arguments he made in public against the opposition coup: Canada needs stability going into an economic recession and voters will not tolerate another election after having just voted six weeks ago.

It’s unclear whether Jean imposed any conditions on the suspension of Parliament, such as restricting the government’s powers to appoint or make any major expenditures, as her discussion with the Prime Minister was strictly confidential.

The episode started last week when Harper proposed cutting public funding to political parties and banning public service strikes. Both measures sent opposition parties into a fury, and despite the fact that Harper quickly withdrew both initiatives, they publically committed to bringing the government down.

Harper proposed “rolling back wages for public sector unions and denying them the right to strike over the next three years and eliminating public spending to support democratic parties… by providing a certain amount to the party for every vote received in the election…[These are] measures that had nothing to do with the crisis and were widely seen as plain mean-spirited,” Armine Yalz Nizian of the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa told RFI.

To avoid another election so quickly after Harper’s Conservative Party won a strengthened minority, the Liberal and New Democratic Party leaders sent a letter to the Governor General informing her they were ready to form an alternative government with the support of the separatist Bloc Québecois Party.