If that’s true, what’s to be done about it? Some reformers call for updating how Canadians elect their representatives. But various electoral-reform ideas were rejected by voters in referendums held in British Columbia, Ontario and Prince Edward Island in recent years. Those bitter setbacks have left some advocates of change favouring more modest steps. White says he hopes his Facebook group doesn’t shift attention from prorogation to bigger ideas, such as proportional representation, that failed to pass in those provincial votes. Manning, who now heads his own Manning Centre for Building Democracy, sees little chance of progress toward what he regards as the most fundamental reform—MPs freed to vote as they choose. “There’s nobody,” he said, “who’s going to champion that.”
After seeming slow off the mark on the prorogation debate, Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals are trying to come to grips with the issue. Veteran MP Ralph Goodale, Ignatieff’s House leader, told Maclean’s that Liberals will spend the next three weeks discussing what to do with experts. “We don’t think prorogation should be used in the deceitful way that it has been,” Goodale said. He said the party is looking at three possible new rules: require that a session of Parliament run at least, say, a year before it can be prorogued; limit how long prorogations could last, perhaps to as little as two or three weeks; or require that a prime minister give notice to the House and Senate, with reasons, before going to the governor general to ask for prorogation.
Put like that, the solutions all seem a bit dry. They aren’t the stuff of big headlines, let alone populist revolts. Maybe that’s fine. “We don’t rely on being on the front page,” White says of his anti-prorogation group. They’d better not: some Conservative strategists are hinting that Harper’s fast, fulsome response to the Haitian earthquake is already burying the prorogation fuss. Experienced advocates of democratic reform, who’ve seen momentum fizzle out before, know it might be so again.
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