News broke today that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is going to once again prorogue government for a few weeks this fall and will present a new throne speech. You may recall the last time the PM prorogued government during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, opposition MPs (led by Ignatieff) went bananas and decried the move as destroying our democracy, blah, blah, blah. This in turn inspired some college kid to start a Facebook page against prorogation, which tried to organize mass protests across the country (with plenty of promotion from the CBC) where attendance fell far short of expectations. A year later we had a new election and Stephen Harper won a majority government, proving this "grassroots movement" had died off, or never really existed.
Now the PM is proroguing again in 2013, and the same day this announcement was made, CBC blogger Kady O'Malley wrote a piece titled "3 reasons not to freak out over the upcoming prorogation" where she writes in her opening paragraph "let's all take a deep breath before hauling the anti-prorogation picket signs out of storage and hitting the barricades, shall we?" She then proceeds to outline why it is perfectly reasonable for the Prime Minister to prorogue parliament, in a perfectly rational article. Kady is not well known for writing articles favourable of Prime Minister Harper, where bloggers like me have long complained about her flagrant left wing bias as a CBC employee. Ironically if you scroll down to the comment section of her latest post, it seems as though her readers have turned on her (at least for this piece), all but accusing her of being a lap dog for the PMO. Here are some of the comments:
"Posted no doubt at the request of the PMO Commissar, to try to placate the masses."
-hughy294
"The headline itself is meant to sway your opinion."
-holyhannah
"This article courtesy of The Criminal Party of Canada."
-WatsonDatelli
"Kady O'Malley...is there a senate appointment upcoming for you that we don't know about?"
-rink rat
"Kady, when did you go on the PMO payroll? CBC isn't even under direct control yet but you sound like you're reading from a Harper script."
-garbal54
"Perhaps Kady has lost her spine now that the conservatives control the CBC. We don't want to speak badly about our bosses lest we find ourselves on the street"
-againstthewind
"If you seriously believe and or support anything that Stephen Harper says, you are in need of counselling."
-Citizen Joe
Wow, these are the type of comments generally reserved for Conservative writers, and I didn't even read them all! It feels like Kady almost deserves some credit for writing this piece, judging by the animosity coming from blowhards who normally agree with her. She was among the "CBC bloggers" who went bananas in 2010 and pushed the anti-prorogation agenda as hard as anyone in the national media. Now she believes it is reasonable to prorogue parliament, or at least when the PM has a majority government.
The times sure are a changing!
