My last blog reflected an immediate reaction to the events going on in Canadian politics right now. On further reflection I have come to a personal position that the concept of the coalition government taking over would have been a democratic move under the Canadian Parliamentary system. Earlier today, however, Governor General Michaëlle Jean, after consulting with Prime Minister Harper, decided to accept Harper’s request to prorogue parliament. Proroguing parliament is a suspension of parliament without dissolution.
Errol Mendes, a constitutional scholar at the U of Ottawa, views the decision by Mrs. Jean as troublesome saying that “this [prorogation of parliament] is a major constitutional precedent and that worries me more than anything else.” Dr. Mendes goes on further to say that the decision to prorogue parliament essentially means that “any time that the prime minister wants to evade the confidence of the House now he can use this precedent to do so.” Mendes says parliament can avoid future prorogations of parliament by “passing legislation to prevent future prime ministers from seeking prorogation … [to limit] what a future prime minister can do.”
This, to me, is extremely interesting, especially if Harper is the one to pass such legislation.
Slavoj Zizek, Philosopher and cultural critic, elucidates a concept called the constitutive exception which was brought to my mind by the current situation in Canadian parliament.
The constitutive exception, to make it easy, is an act that establishes an order (creation, law etc.) but at the same time forbids that constitutive act from ever being repeated. A good example of this would be the constitutive establishment of monotheism out of polytheism. When the Jewish people declared that YHWH alone is to be worshipped they were saying that to declare any other God worthy of worship was a contravention of the law; to get the law, however, they had to commit an act that could never again be repeated because that act of establishing YHWH worship was the constitutive act that retroactively prohibited the ability to ever declare any other single God, besides YHWH, worthy of worship (sounds hypocritical, but it’s not, really).
So, to me, the decision by Governor General Michaelle Jean is not a bad decision if this act of prorogation is the first and only act of prorogation allowed in Canadian parliament. It has set a precedent, indeed, but, hopefully, a precedent that will not be allowed to ever be acted upon again.
