In the midst of a blog posting on whether or not Parliament has actually been prorogued yet or not (it has to do with when the PM actually makes the official request to the GG, whose approval is generally a given), Macleans.ca’s Kady O’Malley makes an interesting and as yet otherwise overlooked observation about another potential motivation: killing potentially embarrassing committee hearings.
… the House Public Accounts Committee…is supposed to hold two days of hearings on the RCMP pension scandal later this week.
If Parliament is prorogued, those meetings are cancelled, since at that point, the committee no longer officially exists. But if it doesn't happen until next week, when the PM is back in town, it's full speed ahead for all concerned...
Makes the timing of the proroguing rather interesting, doesn’t it? If Parliament has indeed been officially prorogued, which as Kady writes is a bit unclear at the moment, then these pesky hearings that the Cons would rather not have happening would magically disappear since this committee, like all others, will go poof.
No unsavory headlines generated. Among those scheduled to testify this week are/were Stockwell Day and new RCMP Commissioner William Elliot. Harper can stop it all with one phone-call to Madame Jean he could make at any minute.
The Cons won’t even need their pesky how to disrupt committee meetings manual for some time. If will be quite awhile before the Defence committee can look into the cover-up of Afghan detainee documents, for example, among other troubling issues the Cons would rather not have committees shine lights on.
And Duffy thought it had something to do with the
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