As Harper carries on with his threats and bluster about how Parliament isn’t working anymore and how a fixed date law won’t stop him from dissolving the House in order to force an election on his terms, shall we go back to Sept 2004 for a minute and look at how things were a tad different then? Back then, before there was a fixed date election law, then opposition leader Stephen Harper was writing a joint letter with Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton to then Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson admonishing her not to let Prime Minister Paul Martin dissolve the Parliament on a whim:
The leaders have also written a letter to Governor General Adrienne Clarkson requesting that they be consulted should the prime minister request a dissolution of Parliament to call an election.
In otherwards, they were asking the G-G to not automatically allow Martin to pick the time and choosing of his own defeat or dissolution of Parliament without talking to them first. Don’t let it be frivolous, Ms. Clarkson!
How times change, eh Harper?
UPDATE@4:40 pm: Steve over at his blog reads Hansard so you don’t have to, and picks out some quite moralistic stuff coming from Conservatives as they extol their fixed-term election law during Parliamentary debate and decry how the current system allows a Prime Minister to call an election at will. Unfortunately for them, Hansard debates aren’t erasable, so it’s easy to find stuff like this to throw back in their faces. I particularly love this quote by Conservative Jay Hill that Steve found during the debate over the Fixed Term Law in Parliament:
If a prime minister went against the spirit of this legislation and purely called an election because he or she felt the opportunity was ripe, that the situation for his or her particular political party was very advantageous to go to the polls, I suspect that person would quite likely be punished by the Canadian people in the subsequent election campaign.
Bravo Jay.. I hope your words are prophetic.. and it would be delicious irony, wouldn’t it?
Gee, you’d think the press might pick up on that little tidbit instead of perpetuating the myth that Harper is actually weighing a decision.
But then we’re talking ancient history, aren’t we . . . I see you had to go all the way back to 2004 to find that one ; ).
Good catch.