What the papers are saying about Harper's prorogue of parliament ..

Daniel Casey in Mediascout comments

HARPER STARTS ANEW
La Presse fronts while The National, CTV News, the Globe, the Post, the Star and the Citizen go inside with Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament until October 16. This doesn’t merely push back the opening of the session, as some terminology implies; to prorogue means to use government privilege to cut short the current session of Parliament, which means that bills before the House die on the order paper and must be reintroduced. The Post and the Globe point out that these include mandatory minimums for gun crimes, eliminating the long-gun registry, raising the age of consent to sixteen from fourteen and two Senate reform measures, among others. The biggest of these is Bill C-30, the government’s Clean Air Act; previously, the opposition parties had managed to extract an agreement with the Conservatives that forced the bill back into committee so that it could be rewritten by the pro-Kyoto parties. Point to Harper, who now doesn’t even have to offer the revised bill to the House for a potentially embarrassing vote.

The most obvious reasons for Harper to do this are his recent cabinet shuffle and the oft-mentioned “relaunch” of his minority government. Yesterday’s announcement used the currently favoured Conservative language, which emphasizes how much the government has accomplished during its time in office, and that a Throne Speech in October would “launch the next phase of our mandate.” A Throne Speech is always a confidence measure, so Harper is effectively daring the opposition to vote down his new agenda, and particularly the exact formulation of the recent promise to withdraw from Afghanistan at the end of the current mission in 2009. The Star’s Chantal Hébert calls this a “calculated risk,” noting that the government has to lay out a more thorough governing agenda than the brief list of promises on which it was elected, but that a detailed program of legislation will give the opposition more points with which to bring the government down. The media apparently consider the word “prorogue” to be a bit rich for our blood, or at least for their headlines. The Star doesn’t even use the word in the body of its report, and uses the expression “end session of Parliament” in its headline, while the Post describes Parliament as “on hold” and the Globe’s editors go with the zippy “reboot.” Only the Citizen dares use the full term in its headline.