Episode 45 - Perogy or Prorogue?

There is a word that is making its way into the vocabularies of Canadians. Many jokes are being made about perogies because the word sounds a little like perogies and perogies are more familiar to most people. Perogies are savoury dumplings that come from Eastern European countries. However, the word I am talking about is prorogue. Prorogue is an unfamiliar word because it is the word that means to stop or suspend the work of the government in parliament. And it rarely happens. Canada is a parliamentary democracy. Our system of government is like the one used in Britain. When we elect a government, we elect members who will each have a seat and a vote in Parliament. There are 309 seats in Parliament and the leader of the political party which has the largest number of seats in Parliament becomes the Prime Minister of Canada. When governments are elected they may have a majority or a minority of the seats. If the people give the Prime Minister and his or her party a majority, that means that they have a strong mandate to govern because they do not need the support or votes of the opposition parties to pass legislation. However, when the government is a minority government, it cannot govern without the support of the other parties. This means that the government must have enough votes from other parties to run the government. The situation in Canada is very serious right now. We recently had a federal election in which the minority Conservative government was elected. Within weeks of being elected, the government issued a financial statement which did not deal with the financial crisis and in which the governing party attempted to take away rights of unionized workers, pay equity for women and funding for political parties during elections. The opposition parties got together and formed a coalition, a united group, to bring a non-confidence vote to Parliament. When this happens, the governing party must step down and a new election may be called or the coalition can govern the country. However, to prevent his minority government from falling, the Prime Minister asked the Governor General to prorogue or suspend Parliament. So our Parliament has been suspended until January 27th. We live in interesting times.