OTTAWA – MPs who were worried that the prorogation of Parliament would send Canadian democracy grinding to a halt can’t believe how much they’re getting done.
“Freed from Question Period,” Liberal leader Justin Trudeau proclaimed “we can actually hold this government to account. Outside of Parliament, nobody remembers that we’re the third party so we can go back to behaving like we have power.”
Mylène Freeman, the NDP MP for Argenteuil-Papineu-Mirabel, spent the last week learning how the senate works. “For the first time since I got here, I feel like a real MP,” she exclaimed. “It’s like the one reading week I had before getting elected.”
No party has been more grateful for the time off than the Bloc Québécois. Last week, Daniel Paillé, one of the Bloc’s three remaining MPs, sent Stephen Harper a letter thanking him for “giving us the requisite time to rid ourselves of MPs that represent Montreal, women and visible minorities – even if that was all the same person. Without this generous prorogation, we would be falling behind in our self-destruction timetable.”
Stephen Harper, who has had time to write 46 new young-offender laws during the prorogation, admitted to feeling vindicated by the increased productivity. “As I’ve always said,” he boasted, “ours would be a functioning democracy if it weren’t for Parliament.”
