Against Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament
I’m no political scientist, but I do know a few things about media literacy. When I hear breathless exhortations my idiot detectors spring into action. Reading the description for the recently popular Facebook group “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” I got that tingly feeling again—-worse still, why is this gro…up so popular, especially among my friends? Could I be missing out? Alana tells me that the parliament gets prorogued regularly, but I’ll be damned if I’ll listen to a Canadian political science PhD student without looking deeper (this proroguing of late made me initially suspicious too, I even commented publicly about it, but I held my opinion). Of course, deeper is one Google search query away when you are brilliantly lazy like me. What did this Google search query tell me? Indeed, we all need to stop slavishly supposing that every action Harper does is out to ruin Canada and kill children. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like Harper any more than the next lower-middle-class, educated, white 18-34 year old, but some things just ARE. Not evil, just regular ‘ol institutional inertia, going on with frequency for quite some time. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s a nice graph: 
Sure, proroguing can be used as a political weapon (it might have been the first time), but let’s not jump to the conclusion that this is anything that peculiar.
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