Parliament prorogued until October
While on tour of the North, PM discusses ground work for fifth election campaign
“We think there is much more to be done to secure Canada’s economic potential and economic future.” STEPHEN HARPER PRIME MINISTER
WHITEHORSE— Vowing to lead his Conservative party through the next election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper began setting the stage for that campaign this week, more than two years before a vote.
Harper announced during his eighth tour of the North that he intends to suspend the current session of Parliament and summon back MPs in October to enact a new economy-focused agenda.
Speaking in Yukon, he said he will once again ask the Governor General to “prorogue” Parliament — a procedural tool that effectively ends one parliamentary session and kills the legislative bills before it — and return with a throne speech — a new blueprint for governing — in the fall. The Commons was scheduled to return for the fall sitting weeks earlier, Sept. 16.
Harper declared he fully intends to remain as leader into the next election, scheduled by law for October 2015, quipping he was “actually disappointed” a reporter even felt the need to ask the question.
However, it was the prime minister who the night before told supporters he’d fulfilled 84 per cent of his campaign promises, and appeared to race through a partisan speech delivered to a quiet tent of about 100 supporters.
The “tentative timing” for an October return of Parliament suggests Harper will have already crafted the major themes of his governing plans well before the Conservative party’s policy convention Nov. 1-2.
It’s all part of an effort to press a big re-set button for government in mid-majority mandate doldrums, reflected in stalled polls. Three months ago he shuffled cabinet, and he is in the midst of a major makeover of his senior staff in a bid to lay ground for his fifth election campaign as leader.
This time, Harper faces newly invigorated opposition parties in the New Democrats and the Liberals, who have new leaders in Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau, as has the Bloc Québécois in Quebec, where Conservative fortunes are dim.
Harper will have the advantage of incumbency and experience: he won three of his past four campaigns, increasing the Conservative party’s share of the popular vote each time out.
He is already citing his steering of the country’s economy as his strong suit, con- trasting his record with what he repeatedly calls the “dangerous ideas and vacuous thinking” of the other two leaders.
Jobs and the economy, Harper said Monday, will remain the government’s priority in the next two years.
“While we are overall pleased with progress the Canadian economy has made since the recession, we remain in a very difficult fragile and competitive global marketplace and we think there is much more to be done to secure Canada’s economic potential and economic future.”
Prorogation of Parliament is a means for governments to put a halt to the business of one session of government. It kills legislative bills under study at the time, but they may be brought back in a following session. It used to be to be a fairly mundane procedural tool used to relaunch a tired government seeking to use athrone speech as a re-branding exercise.
But it gained notoriety after Harper used it 2008 to avoid a non-confidence vote over political party subsidies, and again in 2009 to avoid scrutiny of Canada’s role in the treatment of Afghan detainees.
Now, as he looks to inject new life into his government, it is also clear Harper’s hands are tied to a certain degree by his promise to balance the federal budget in 2015.
It leaves him trying to craft a governing vision that relies less on spending, more on government regulating power, rhetoric and messaging.
His eighth visit to the North finds Harper not in a position to announce new money for massive projects, but fleshing out already allocated funds, even as he proclaims Conservatives’ “passion” for the North, which he called key to Canada’s “greatness.”
With an eye on boosting the mining industry and training northerners for jobs, Harper toured a metal works facility in Whitehorse that makes high-quality diamond drilling equipment that is shipped around the world.
He pegged $5.6 million over four years to construct a Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining at Yukon College, money allocated from the 2013 budget.
The idea is to provide specialized skills training for local workers at the college, as well as through a mobile trades school that would deliver smaller communities and at operating mine sites, starting next year.