The LEAST They Could Do

Two headlines today: Four Canadian soldiers and a civilian reporter dead in Afghanistan. And the Prime Minister has prorogued Parliament again.

You may recall that a prorogue was also in the news and in this blog last year at this time. It's sometimes described in the news as "hitting the pause button" or "taking a time-out."

The thing is, it's more like hitting the reset button or taking a do-over. Everything on the table -- like an investigation into what Canadian officials knew about how Afghan war detainees were treated -- is now hey presto! off the table.

But wait, there's more: although Parliament won't be in session until early March, after the Olympics, the Prime Minister can continue to act. One of the things he'll do is appoint five more senators, which will mean that there's a Conservative majority in the senate for the first time in decades. So when things do come back and legislation wends its way back onto the table, the Senate will more or less approve whatever the PM wants.

Is this really democracy in action? Or is it something similar to what China did during the most recent summer Olympics, when it pretended the ethnic uprisings and milk scandal weren't going on, la la la, look over here at this digitally enhanced ceremony with a lip-synching beautiful girl pretending to sing like the more normal-looking one??

And let's just set aside Prime Minister Harper's known distaste for what he once thought of as the un-democratic practice of appointing senators, since that seems to have vanished once he got to be PM.

I'm left shaking my head. And I'm just a bystander in all this.

What must the Canadian Forces be thinking? They don't get a reprieve from the dirty business of doing their job. They're out there trying to figure out who they're supposed to be fighting, and they're dying in the process.

The LEAST Canada's politicians could do, seems like, is keep working while soldiers are risking their lives (and the economy is wacky, and the public health system could use a good de-briefing over H1N1, and maybe something could be done about the environment -- I mean, if they need an agenda, people can come up with one for them).

But that would require actual leadership from a statesman interested in EARNING a majority government instead of machinations from a petty politician obsessed with GRABBING a majority government. Sorry for the CAPs; I'm getting wound up.

I know I said yesterday that the end of the year is just a rather arbitrary date and all that -- but honestly, is this bad behaviour any way to end 2009?

Actually, I'm ending 2009 with a trip to the grocery store, impossible though that seems after last weekend's eat-stravagannnnza.

My life is returning to a post-holiday normal. Would that were true for the troops.