And From Those Eating Crow

On January 20th David Akin reported that a miserable 35 people turned up to dog PMS* when he showed up in Toronto and suggested they were all Liberal or NDP staffers and not members of CAPP, expressing doubt that the Facebook group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament [CAPP]would be able to put their members out on the street on Saturday.

From David Akin on Saturday evening:

Based on initial reports, some from independent sources, some from partisan sources, it would be difficult to call this day of rallies a failed test.  [more]

But he would if he could.

Before rally day, from John Moore who writes for, er, ahem:

Grassroots fury? Thousands of people in the streets, switchboard’s browning out with indignant calls and a tsunami of e-mails might be considered a grassroots fury. Facebook groups, on the other hand, amount to a kind of ephemeral eruption that usually passes like a hot flash or the urge to vote for the Green party.

And in response to a letter from freelance writer James DiFiore, Moore had this to say, in part:

I will absolutely eat my words if anything comes of the movement outside of the usual gang of professional protesters but if you honestly think that a bunch of people clicking a button and joining a Facebook group that they will never return to is political action then perhaps it’s the younguns these days who need a good lesson in media and action. Rosa Parks did not launch the civil rights movement by Twittering “this bus thing totally sucks”. Barack Obama was not elected by social networking. It was a means of connecting people so they could actually do the grunt work of old fashioned politics: door to door, meetings, and phone calls. Digital yakity yak is not action.

I’d recommend you take a quick look at today’s Toronto Star for an idea of how Facebook translates into action. 32 thousand signed up at Facebook to protest a possible strike by Ontario college teachers. One showed up for the protest. I know it’s a popular talking point that “old media” don’t get “new media” but as long as new media rings together a bunch of ernest do-nothings old media will continue to recognize it as a pooling of people who are all talk and no action.

Um, John?  Old media doesn’t get new media.  Really.

Yesterday, John tried to cover his ass with this post:

But as Rick Mercer has pointed out the push in the last ten days to actually deliver on the whole Facebook thing is drawing considerably upon the fact that it was originally shrugged off. So who is turning out to genuinely follow through on their button pushing and who is turning out to teach the crusty old media wretches a lesson?  [some more]

Right John.  Tens of thousands of people rallied across Canada to teach your crusty ass a lesson.  I doubt that anyone cares if you figure it out or not honey.  Come along for the ride, or don’t.

* PMS = Prime Minister Steve and he’s about as welcome to me as that.

UPDATE:  Speaking of PMS, a P.S. to John Moore – Ain’t nuthin’ ephemeral about a hot flash buddy.

UPPER-DATE:  Can’t leave out Michael Geist, who knew what was happening before the rallies  -

The new year is less than three weeks old, but the Canadian Internet story of 2010 may have already taken place. Ridiculed by political parties and analysts, the growth of the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group, which now has more than 200,000 members, provides the clearest indicator yet of how poorly the Canadian political community understands social media and digital advocacy.  [lots more]

UPPITY-DATE:  As Antonia Zerbisias would say.  And how could I leave this irrepressible activist, Toronto Star columnist and blogger out?  The day before the rallies, Ms Zerbisias had this to say -

Still, Canadians will show up.

Trouble is, they will be spread out from Antigonish to Victoria to Yellowknife, mostly in towns abandoned by our corporate, concentrated media who plead poverty when it comes to local news, but can pony up millions and millions for U.S. series already piped in by cable.

So a true measure will never be taken, at least not by the national media ministries of truth, especially not on a weekend when newsrooms are bare-bones operations.

But tune into Facebook and Twitter and you’ll see the big picture.

I plan to help paint it.

On that, you can count.  [oh, there's more - count on it!]

FINAL UPDATE:  Finally, John Moore responds.  Not worth the wait but here it is anyway -

Well it looks like I wont be eating crow for dinner after all. Dan Cook went through the numbers for me city by city and three thousand people in Ottawa and Toronto, 300 in Montreal, 250 in Edmonton and 2000 in Vancouver doesn’t really amount to much.

It’s a numbers game. That’s why politicians monitor e-mail, protests and phone calls. And three thousand people in the streets of Toronto just doesn’t do the trick. Is it fair? yes as a matter of fact. I covered federalist and separatist rallies and protests for years in Montreal and you knew when people were fighting mad. That’s when fifty to a hundred thousand hit the streets. When it was just another “We Hate Ottawa” or “God save Canada” gathering they would muster a few thousand and it didn’t mean a thing.

I’m not celebrating this outcome. My record on this PM is long and clear. But my method as a columnist and radio host has always been to try to offer as accurate a pulse on what people are saying and thinking at the moment. It doesn’t matter how much I don’t like Stephen Harper’s pettiness. What matters is whether or not a significant percentage of the population is fed up enough to do something about it.

Of course John’s not close to correct on the numbers.  Even MacLean’s doesn’t have it right, though they’re certainly closer.  No matter how many Canadians had been on the street I think it’s a safe bet that Moore wouldn’t have eaten any crows – he made up his mind beforehand and forgot to leave himself a way out.  As well his job is to create fake controversy so really his statement on the rallies is functional for him – it’s what he gets paid for.  I guess.

But we can talk numbers forever; contary to what Moore says, there’s more going on here than what the tally does or does not say.  Many many many people are involved in this protest on Facebook, on Twitter, on the group’s website and on so many blogs that collecting links is hard work.  Large numbers of those people got themselves out onto the streets in cities, towns and communities across the country on Saturday and many of those people are committed to continue working to affect HarperCON policies or to defeat the government entirely.  These people have dominated the national conversation for days and even weeks.  If we never hear another peep from them collectively, a great deal has been learned and some people have taken an interest in their country’s politicians and political structure for the first time.  That’s the least of what has been accomplished.  Time will tell us a great deal more about what this movement of people has meant.

Hey John Moore, if it’s so unimportant, how come you can’t stop talking about it?  Now, here’s your punishment.  Keep your promise.

By Pale from A Creative Revolution

Bits of Boland

From an interview with Eavan Boland at Caffeine Destiny:

The title “Against Love Poetry” recalls in some ways the title of one of your other books, “Outside History”. Do you see part of the poets work to write about things that happen outside of recorded culture?

It certainly feels to me that it’s on the margins, at the edges that a poet can make one kind of eco-system. Not the only one, of course. Poets have written at the center, in courts, at the seat of power. But that’s one kind of poetry. The idea of a poetry which can fathom silences, follow the outsider’s trail – that draws me in. In a country like Ireland it was possible to see the difference between the past and history – how one was official and articulate and the other was silent and fugitive. I suppose I was drawn to the past, rather than to history.  [more interview]

A poem from Against Love Poetry:

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Eavan Boland on the poem and the book, from the same interview:

It was a series of separate poems. I didn’t consciously connect them. They began to be connected as they accumulated, as I saw the same images and ideas coming back again. These are marriage poems – I’ve been married thirty-two years. They’re also poems that are in an argument with traditional or conventional love poetry. It was hard to manage the different strands. But there’s a poem in the sequence of marriage poems in the book – there’s eleven of them in all – called “Quarantine”. And that was a shaping poem for me. It’s about an incident in Ireland in the nineteenth century: A man and a woman left the workhouse at the time of the 1847 famine. It was in Carrigstyra in West Cork. Those were very desperate times -there was famine fever and starvation. This incident must have been like hundreds of others and would probably have been forgotten but it was left as an anecdote by a man writing sixty years later. The man and woman walked north, back to their cabin. They died that night. In the morning when they were found, her feet were against his chest. He had tried to warm them as she died – as they both did. When I thought of that account, when it came into the poem in the sequence, it was no longer a local, Irish incident. It had become a dark love story, and an exemplary one. And that tied together things for me. All the things I wanted to get at – the stoicism of dailyness, the failure of conventional love poetry- all came together there.

From an interview with Elizabeth Schmidt at American Poet:

Schmidt: You mentioned the lyric is the lingua franca of Irish poetry. To what extent do you feel, if at all, that your ideas about feminism–the way those ideas have infused your work–have created a transnational poetics, a sort of lingua franca that addresses, for example, the domestic visions that women of a certain class everywhere can share?

Boland: I’m a feminist. I’m not a feminist poet. I’ve said somewhere else that I think feminism has real power and authority as an ethic, but none at all as an aesthetic. My poetry begins for me where certainty ends. I think the imagination is an ambiguous and untidy place, and its frontiers are not accessible to the logic of feminism for that reason. So I don’t really think it’s created that poetics you speak of, in exactly that way. Where feminism has influenced and anchored my view of things is in the making of a critique. And it’s one of the things I’m most uneasy about, looking back: that so much women’s poetry pre-existed that critique. I think it needs a critique. Feminism is certainly a part of a book like Object Lessons.  [more]

From In a Time of Violence:

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me. 
                              It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry.I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

From Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public:

When Yeats wrote his essay “The Galway Plains,” he said, “There is still in truth upon these level plains a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions.” If the poet can stay close to the idea of those imaginative possessions, then undoubtedly he or she can represent their loss. The problem is that poetry has, for almost a hundred years, shown suspicion of those very “imaginative possessions.” It has—at least in some quarters—guarded the rights to the private imagination fiercely, and resisted the obligations of the public one. There are reasons for that. 20th-century poetry, in the aftermath of the modernist initiative, was committed to new idioms of experiment and increasingly skeptical of the popular reader. Was that a mistake? Does the cultivation of the private imagination now seem too willful, too insular?  [all of it]

A final poem, from Domestic Violence:

Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

You can listen to an interview with Eavan Boland here

Project: unknown

Reality, what can we do with it? Where is it in words?
Just as it flickers, it vanishes. Innumerable lives
unremembered. Cities on maps only,
without that face in the window, on the first floor, by the market,
without those two in the bushes near the gas plant.
Returning seasons, mountain snows, oceans
& the blue ball of the earth rotates
- Czesław Miłosz
Lecture IV
sam&sara motel

via whiskey river

Heart Like a Wheel

It was with shock and great sadness that I read of Kate McGarrigle’s death this morning.  Hers was the music of my life.  From Things That Go Pop at CBC:

The descriptors “Canadian icon” and “national treasure” are often used as lazy shorthand to refer to those artists who’ve made some sort of impact on our country’s music scene. But Kate McGarrigle was one of the awe-inspiring few who truly deserved those epithets — and then some. McGarrigle, who passed away Monday after a drawn-out battle with clear cell sarcoma (she was diagnosed with the rare form of cancer in 2006), was one of Canada’s legendary voices, a woman who celebrated and elevated the rich history of our country’s musical traditions throughout a career that spanned more than three decades.

Though Kate and sister Anna McGarrigle may have viewed themselves as “accidental” recording artists, it was clear from the outset that the pair were unique talents. Raised in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains, the McGarrigles were originally introduced to French cabaret chansons, French-Canadian folk music and jazzy standards as children — their family was given to cozy group singalongs around the piano. Kate and Anna honed their own piano skills at the elbows of nuns; later, they would make a career out of performing a fresh variation on the homey, honest music of their youth in folk clubs and on recordings.

Shortly after she gave birth to son Rufus Wainwright (one of two children she had with singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III), Kate and her sister were recruited to contribute backing vocals to a version of Anna McGarrigle’s Cool River that was being covered by another folk artist (Maria Muldaur). By some twist of fate, the right set of ears heard magic in those McGarrigle harmonies and offered the pair a record deal. And in 1976, Kate and Anna McGarrigle released their self-titled debut album, an enchanting collection of old-fashioned folk songs. It was immediately lauded by fans and critics. The New York Times and the music magazine Melody Maker named Kate and Anna McGarrigle one of the year’s best albums.

The album even included one tune, the arch Complainte pour Ste. Catherine, in which the two neatly encapsulated the sighs of a ’70s-era Montrealer in wry Québecois French:

“Moi, j’me promene sur Ste Catherine / J’profite d’la chaleur du métro / J’ne regarde pas dans les vitrines / Quand il fait trente en d’ssous d’zero.” (“Me, I walk along St. Catherine [street] / Getting the warmth from the Metro / I don’t look in shop windows / When it’s 30 below zero.”)

That these two unassuming sisters from Quebec could bring such an idiosyncratic tune to the largely Anglophone masses (the late English singer Kirsty MacColl even covered Complainte in 1989) is a testament to the great gifts of Kate (and Anna) McGarrigle.

Kate used her music to share her appreciation for Acadian culture and the understated beauty of folk songs, but she also instilled those same values in her children. Both Rufus and Martha Wainwright have paid tribute to their mother in their own songs. It’s not uncommon for listeners to be privy to the intimate family portraits that appear in the work of sharp songwriters who draw inspiration from their own lives, but it’s rare that we are familiar with the parties depicted in song.  [more]

“Shall I nevermore behold you?/ Never hear thy laughing voice again.”

A bit more:

From Anna McGarrigle:

Sadly our sweet Kate had to leave us last night. She departed in a haze of song and love surrounded by family and good friends. She is irreplaceable and we are broken-hearted. Til we meet again dear sister. ♡

Update:  From Rufus -

When inevitably I read today in the papers that my mother lost her battle with cancer last night, I am filled with an immense desire to add that this battle, though lost, was tremendously fruitful during these last three and a half years of her life. She witnessed her daughter’s marriage, the creation of my first opera, the birth of her first grandchild Arcangelo, and gave the greatest performance of her life to a packed crowd at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Not to mention traveling to some of the world’s most incredible places with both my sister, her husband Brad, my boyfriend Jorn and myself. Yes, it was all too brief, but as I was saying to her sister Anna last night while sitting by her body after the struggle had ceased, there is never enough time and she, my amazing mother with whom everyone fell in love, went out there and bloody did it.  I will miss you mother, my sweet and valiant explorer, lebwohl and addio. X

Disaster Capitalism in Haiti

From Ashley Smith at Counterpunch:

Aid in Haiti has always been used to further imperial interests. This is obvious when you look at how the U.S. and Canada treated the Aristide government in contrast to the coup regime. The U.S. and Canada starved Aristide of almost all aid. But then after the coup, they opened a floodgate of money to back some of the most reactionary forces in Haitian society.

We should therefore agitate against any attempt by the U.S. and other powers to use this crisis to further impose their program on a prostrate country.

We should also be wary of the role of international NGOs. While many NGOs are trying to address the crisis, the U.S. and other governments are funneling aid to them in order to undermine Haitians’ democratic right to self-determination. The international NGOs are unaccountable to either the Haitian state or Haitian population. So the aid funneled through them further weakens what little hold Haitians have on their own society.  [there's more]

Naomi Klein:

Readers of the The Shock Doctrine know that the Heritage Foundation has been one of the leading advocates of exploiting disasters to push through their unpopular pro-corporate policies. From this document, they’re at it again, not even waiting one day to use the devastating earthquake in Haiti to push for their so-called reforms. The following quote was hastily yanked by the Heritage Foundation and replaced with a more diplomatic quote, but their first instinct is revealing:

 

“In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.”

To make donations for earthquake relief in Haiti and ongoing development, check MADRE, an organization that’s been working in Haiti for years and combines its struggle for resources with a rights-based philosophy to advance social justice.

 

UPDATE:  From Chris Floyd at Information Clearing House -

Yes, there will now be a great outpouring of immediate aid, as there always is after any spectacular disaster. And of course, this is laudable, and I encourage anyone who can to contribute what they can to these efforts. But unless there is a sea-change in American policy, unless there finally comes an end to the curse that has been laid on Haiti — not by God, or by the Devil, but by the hard hearts of elites following blindly in the cruel traditions of their predecessors — then this flurry of caring and attention will soon give way again, as it has always done, to callous disregard, brutal repression and inhumane exploitation.

The tale of these cruel traditions — and the “continuity” with them that Obama has already displayed — does not augur well for such a change. But as that wise man, Edsel Floyd, always says, we live in hope and die in despair. And such a hope for Haiti is worth holding onto, and working toward.

At the same time, hope must not be blind; you have to acknowledge the grim realities in order to know just what you’re up against. So let’s take a long, hard look.  [more]

Try Partners in Health for donations to Haiti

UPDATE II:  And the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund

The Harper Agenda

Murray Dobbin points out that the Harper Agenda on the economic front is likely even more important than the prorogation:

It is gratifying to see such widespread opposition to Harper’s assault on Parliament and democracy — from almost every major political columnist, newspaper editorials, over a hundred political scientists, and constitutional experts — including a significant number of unusual suspects. It is a clear sign that Harper has overreached yet again — a character flaw that has saved the country from disaster more than once. Harper now sits at 33 percent in the latest Ekos poll, and if the movement continues to grow, Harper’s plan to force an election over his March budget will have to be put on hold. That might have the effect of postponing the worst cuts.

But the sudden support for democracy by parts of the Canadian elite will not extend to defending the legacy of public services, wealth redistribution and government intervention in the economy. Those are the things that are in Stephen Harper’s crosshairs, and progressives will have to fight the campaign to stop him on their own.  [more of this must read]

Amidst the excitement of the movement against Harper’s prorogation of Parliament, it’s not only important to keep this in mind, it’s important to strategize about effective responses.  Progressives will likely be back on their own at that point.

Stephen Harper on Democracy & Capital

In an interview with Business News Network, the Prime Minister flatly rejected the notion that proroguing Parliament has left the country open to criticism it is not a stable democracy.

In fact, it is Parliament in a minority situation that is perceived by markets as unstable, said Harper.

“The games begin when Parliament returns,” he explained. “The government can take our time now to do the important work to prepare the economic agenda ahead.

“That said, as soon as Parliament comes back . . . the first thing that happens is a vote of confidence and there’ll be votes of confidence and election speculation for every single week after that for the rest of the year. That’s the kind of instability markets are actually worried about.”  [The Star]

The sad thing is, Stephen Harper is correct.  He’s not right, but he’s correct.  It’s about corporate capitalism stupid.

Anti-Rogue Right Over the Edge

I’ve been waiting for so long for Canadians to wake up, pay attention, get pissed off, get politicized and boot Harper’s tush out of Ottawa.  For what now seems like  a very brief time in December of 2008 Canadians did wake up  but the lack of leadership, primarily in the Liberal Party, and ignorance about the meaning of a coalition between the Liberals, New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois took the wind out of the sails all too soon.

Since then I’ve been watching and waiting.  Not entirely passively.  I watch the news, the blogs, the independent web reporting sites, the mags, online and off.  I’ve alerted people to good material and hoped they read it.  I expressed my outrage on Twitter, Facebook and occasionally on this blog.  I wrote letters to newspapers, MPs, opposition leaders and the PM.  But mostly I waited.  Many of us waited.  Sometimes I lost hope that anyone in this country was ever going to care.  Care about the war on Gaza and Canada’s blind support of Israel.  Care about Canada’s part in the war in Afghanistan.  Care about the growing number of Canadians locked up in prisons for stupid reasons.  Care about the arrogance and autocracy of Stephen Harper and his effect on our democratic institutions.  Care about people like Omar Khader, Hassan Almrei,  Suaad Hagi Mohamud, Abousfian Abdelrazik and others whose names and skin colour were not kindred to Stephen Harper.  Care about the introduction of a mandatory minimum sentences bill that would put more Canadians in prison for more stupid reasons and the possible abolition of Canada’s long gun registry that actually seems to be making a difference in preventing or responding effectively to violence against women in domestic situations, the funding of the Status of Women, pay equity, the Court Challenges Programme . . . well, much more than all that believe it or not, but for now and most recently, the treatment of Canada’s Afghan detainees.

So many people lost faith that Canadians were ever going to care that when it began to appear that the frozen giant had awoken from its long slumber, when rumblings of revolt were heard on Facebook in the group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament  – well, many were afraid to believe it.  I wasn’t one of them.  I don’t know why.  But my intuition is that I spend so much time on the web reading, listening, learning, chatting and “networking” that I felt the pulse right away.  If you’re not there you don’t know, you don’t feel it, you can’t see it.  I was a member of that group early on and I sent links to the group to everyone I knew.  I tweeted about the group over and over.  I spread the news in other groups.  I believed it was going to go.  And it did.  Lots of other people believed it too or it wouldn’t have happened.

What’s the difference between last year’s momentary excitement about the possibility of a coalition government that could topple the Conservatives and this year’s moment?  Last year we were dependent upon the potential parties to the coalition to keep it going when Harper prorogued.  The moment was easily brought to an end through a combination of Harper’s willingness to impose his will on Parliament and the country and the appalling and depressing weakness of the opposition.  This year, Harper’s still there, behaving like an autocrat; the opposition has gained no strength.  But the success of the awakening depends upon the people participating.  Stephen Harper can’t shut it down.  The opposition parties are barely able to respond well never mind take leadership roles in the movement.  Its success depends solely upon the will of the people involved.

That might well be the only way it was ever going to work.  Pass it on.

Best Chance for Progressives in a LONG TIME

I am in agreement with Murray Dobbin, in full rah rah mode:

This may well be the best chance progressives have had in the four years of Harper government to deal him a decisive blow and frame him and his government as unfit to run the country. He has clearly been hurt by this but Harper will not go away quietly and if we do not take advantage of this moment and take the next two months to press the issue of democracy (and the Afghan detainee issue which prompted Harper’s move) we can count on Harper to recover – especially given the current weakness of both the Liberals and the NDP.

It’s Time to Join the Democracy Movement !

Write your MP and if you’ve already written your MP, write again.  Write to the PM, to local newspapers cc’ed to national media and to leaders of the opposition.  Demonstrate with members of Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament on January 23rd.  If we let up we’ll get the democracy we deserve.

Tory Teachable Moments

Tory MP Brent Rathgeber’s civics lesson for the day:

“Democracy and Parliament are not being sidestepped — they are only being suspended.”  [there's no more thank gawd]

So don’t worry y’all, democracy is safely on holiday with the HarperCONs and will return when they decide they’re up for it.

Then there’s Tory MP Gary Schellenberger who’s off to the Olympics during the suspension of democracy.  [here]

There’s something to be said for Rathgeber and Schellenberger.  They’re more honest than their fearless leader.

The Facebook movement to stop the Tories in their plot to supercede the will of the people is here.  If you’re on Facebook join us.  If not it’s worth getting an account just to join us!  95,306 members and counting as of 9:41 p.m EST with rallies planned across the country for January 23rd.  I can’t wait to hit the streets, I really can’t.

If it takes a prorogation to get Canadians on the move and paying attention to the our decaying democracy then I’m glad Harper did it.

UPDATE:  Jack Layton and NDP MPs won’t accept any free tickets for the Tory Olympic holiday.  [here]

UPDATE FROM MP RATHGEBER: 

must clarify—Parliament is being suspended–democracy is much larger and much broader and of course continues everyday in Canada.

Whew!  *wipesweatfrombrow*