Leadership on more than one issue: Limiting Prorogation

I'm not sure why you feel the need to apologize, especially if this issue is an important one for you, as it is for many Canadians.  Yes, it became a partisan cause celebre for the NDP, because it was an easy matter to oppose: it didn't cost anything, it got their name and pictures in the paper, and there really wasn't anything they could do about it.  Others have looked at the whole matter of prorogation, and shrugged it off, suggesting that it's just a tool of government, one used before and one which will be used again.  Since it's legal, what's the problem? 

The problem is, of course, Harper's use of this legal tool has been in order to 1) preserve his own government from a non-confidence vote, and 2) to prevent having to answer very difficult questions in the House.  By using this tool in this way, he has taken Canadian democracy down an increasingly dangerous road.

Note that the NDP don't want to get rid of the prorogation tool altogether.  Note also that they've not been discussing how we might address in a realistic way the issues of democratic deficit.  Rather than talk about electoral reform, the NDP takes the easy way out and sticks to villifying prorogation, but even then only to an extent.

The problem here isn't one of leadership.  The whole prorogation issue has fallen victim to slick partisan politicking and game playing, and although Elizabeth May was correctly out in front on criticizing Harper's decision to prorogue parliament, I'm glad that we haven't been caught up irrationally in this partisan game.  Instead, our party continues to offer up an excellent method of addressing the real issue here, that being the democratic deficity.  We'd do so by changing our electoral system so that parliament would be made up of a truer expression of voter intentions. 

We can't be about game playing.  Instead, we must be about ideas.  The limited scope of NDP and Liberal "ideas" on addressing the democratic deficit is very telling of whether this is a priority issue for those parties.  The recent prorogation crisis has turned into a diversion to actually taking action to address the democratic deficit.  The Libs and NDP want to be seen to taking action, but really their proposal, while good for what it is, just scratches the surface, and certainly doesn't get anywhere near the heart of the matter.

If you want real leadership on addressing the crisis in democracy we Canadians are facing, you need look no further than Elizabeth May and the Green Party.  She's written the book on this issue.  Quite literally.