Do your damned job, Mr. Prime Minister

I can’t believe that for the second year in a row, Stephen Harper is apparently choosing to run from his problems by proroguing Parliament. What a sad excuse for leadership.

This isn’t what elected officials are supposed to do. They’re not supposed to deal with widespread domestic and global criticism by shutting down the government for a couple of months, killing a number of bills in the process and grinding the government to a halt until after they can take full PR advantage of the Olympics. They’re not supposed to take the ball and go home when things aren’t going their way. And they’re certainly not supposed to do it every year!

This guy has got to go. And I’m not just putting down the Conservatives as a leftist, either. A lot of them know as well as the rest of us that their party deserves a real leader. Our democracy deserves a real leader, not someone that shuts down the kitchen for a couple of months because he can’t stand the heat.

People will claim that since he won the election, we don’t have any right to say he doesn’t deserve the job. I would counter that since the election, he’s shown nothing but contempt for the voters and the democratic process that got him elected. People will claim that the alternative of a coalition government is unconstitutional, but that notion is simply not true. The fact that Harper tried to convince Canadians it was, back when his job and credibility were on the line in 2008, doesn’t make it any truer; it just makes our supposed leader look all the more despicable.

I would love to see Harper stand up and offer a plausible defense of this move as anything other than a flight from his duty to the people. But he won’t, because he’s always felt that it’s beneath him to explain himself, or to show any sort of respect for our democracy and his sworn duty to it.

That is why Stephen Harper doesn’t deserve to lead this country. That, more than the Afghan torture issue or our embarrassing climate change policies, or anything else he’d rather run away from than deal with like an adult, much less a federal leader. We deserve better than Harper, and if we really want to work together as a country to get things done, we need to get him out as soon as possible.

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