Harper Lies About the Constitution

Shame on Mr. Harper. Last night, at his specially constructed and pseudo-Presidential podium in the foyer of the House of Commons (does he really think he is too good to go to the Press Gallery as every PM before him has done?), Steveo lied to the people of Canada.

He got up on his hind legs and started spewing nonsense about how the opposition could not form a coalition and govern without an election. This is bullshit, and what is worse I'm sure he knows it.

The King-Byng affair, as well as numerous precedents in both the provincial legislatures and the British Parliament, affirms that the Queen or her representative has every right in a situation where the government loses the confidence of the House during the first sitting of the Parliament to ask an opposition party leader to try to assemble a government that can gain the confidence of the House. This is the whole point of our parliamentary system, and it is why the opposition is known as both "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" and the "government-in-waiting."

Steveo has unleashed his con-bots across the Internet, all screeching the same lines about a coalition government being anti-democratic and even anti-constitutional. This is part of a coordinated attempt to politically undermine the coming coalition government, but it is being done by lying to the people of Canada.

Part of the reason for the ferocity, and mendacity, of this response to the looming collapse of the government is surely fear. The Conservatives very likely cooked the books in the financial statement if not before, and they are deadly afraid of the opposition getting into the Ministry of Finance and finding the documents to prove it. The Conservatives have, in their three years in control of the government, surely lied and covered up multitudinous sins. Once the opposition gets in there, they are all coming out, and the Conservatives know that it will be doled out piecemeal, and they will be completely sunk in the next election. And so they are afraid.

And the result of that fear is the lies being spouted to the Canadian public by Conservatives from Steveo on down. This government lies to the public, and if for no other reason it thereby renders itself unfit to govern.

Update: The Con-bots now have their talking points for call-in shows. The CPC has a whole site set up for their partisans who are apparently either too stupid to think what to say for themselves or too untrustworthy to be allowed to come up with their own lines. You can find the CPC talking-points site here. I got their talking-points for the coalition negotiations (yes I was bad and put in a fake postal code), and here they are:

Opposition lacks mandate to take power

• Is anyone else outraged by what the Opposition Parties are doing in Ottawa?

• We’re not even two months removed from the last election, and a group of backroom politicians are going to pick who the Prime Minister is. Canadians didn’t vote for this person. We don’t even know who this person will be.

• Not a single voter voted for a Liberal-NDP coalition. Certainly not a single voter voted for the Liberals to form a coalition with the separatists in the Bloc.

• Add – what’s worse the Liberals even promised that there wouldn’t be a coalition with the NDP – this is all about power, all about money and they don’t even want to face the voters

• This is what bothers me the most. The Conservatives won the election. The Opposition keeps saying that the Conservatives have to respect the will of the voters that this is a minority and so on. …how about Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE”.
  

• And what’s this going to do to the economy. I’m sorry, I don’t care how desperate the Liberals are – giving socialists (Jack Layton) and separatists (Gilles Duceppe) a veto over every decision in government – that is a recipe for total economic disaster.

• Here is what is bothering me about all of this backroom opposition coalition talk.

• Sure it bothers me that parties Canadian rejected are trying to seize power through the back door.

• But how more phony could these guys be? I mean, I follow the news, virtually every single day you have Harper or Flaherty out there telegraphing exactly what they plan to do with the economy. And not once did you hear the Liberals, NDP or separatists talking about toppling the government in response.

• No – do you know what set this off. When Flaherty said he was going to take taxpayer-funded subsidies away from the opposition. Now there is a reason to try and overturn an election– because the Conservatives the audacity to say “Hey, it’s a recession, maybe you should take your nose out of the trough.”

• And I wish the media would be more clear on this point – the opposition aren’t being singled out by this fact the Conservatives stand to lose the most money of all. The only difference is that Canadians are voluntarily giving money the Conservatives, so they don’t need taxpayer handouts. The only reason the opposition would be hurt more is because nobody wants to donate to them. They should be putting their efforts towards fixing that problem.

• I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy.

Not only is it stupid and inane, it is full of lies.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 52