Canada's sleeping parliament; or the little country that won't

In art and argument, a general distinction can be made between form and content. Form refers to the techniques and methods, the skeleton and hanging rack upon which the content, the nitty gritty particularities and split-hair details get hung, dressed, painted or built. Too much emphasis on either can result in a wobbly unnatural thing. The scholastic logicians of the medieval period refused to accept any view if it failed to adhere to the strict templates of formal argument passed down through generations. That way meaning was achieved via a tidy, Lego-like process. It was simple, if your words failed to follow a well-known pattern you spoke nonsense. The dadaists in the first part of the last century reflect the opposite extreme. They frantically undermined any and all conventions - forms -, and idealized instead the pure freedom of human expression, the incoherence and nonsense that we human beings (Can a chicken fail to understand another in its brood?) appear uniquely capable of achieving. For the dadaists, attempting to make sense was a sure sign of supreme self-delusion and deceit.

This brief and cheesy summary of vastly complex categories leads me to my main point which is that the Canadian government is filled with closeted medievalists. The suspension of parliament last week was carried out by protocols far removed from the wills of thinking people. At one time these protocols might have been very close to thinking people. It's likely that smart people worked out their tedious details with earnest concentration and with the best intentions. Indeed, the protocols for proroguing parliament have the effect of conferring these same good intentions onto Stephen Harper's Conservatives and Governor General Michaelle Jean. "They're simply following parliamentary procedures," one could say, maybe even claiming, "They had no choice." And maybe Harper, and even more so Jean, really did have no choice. If a vote of confidence were held and the opposition parties' marvelously ephemeral coalition carried out their plan to vote against Harper's government, then it is reasonable that he would seek to close parliament's doors so to stave off this probable failure.

That's the cunning trick of such entrenched procedures, and arguments for that matter. They convey an impression of reason and certainty, I mean if it wasn't best to do things this way, why are things done this way? We are safe within the logic of constitutions and protocols, no one has a choice and no one is responsible. All this may be true but it leaves us with a closed parliament, and this pisses me off. Our politicians will be paid for this 7-week vacation, and while no doubt they will be working hard for their debut in 2009, what makes this preparation any different from rehearsals for the theater? All sides will return to offer some burlesque romp about "protecting hard-working Canadians' jobs and pensions," with each believing their own portrayal of empathy and competence will convince an audience. And as Canada bends even lower to gape more closely at its own naval, our leaders bow for an intermission. Best leave things for another time our leaders tell us. Problems plague the world (nothing new) and our politicians dash off to change their costumes. But really, they had no choice right?