Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision on December 30th, 2009 to prorogue the government was not overly surprising. Rumours about prorogation circled Parliament Hill when Conservative Senators on the Parliamentary Committee investigating allegations that Canadian Military personnel were turning over their captives to the Afghan authorities to be tortured stopped attending.

Typically the government takes a recess over the holidays. Instead Harper has decided to shut down the government for almost three months. Upon prorogation all government bills in process die, and all senate committees are dissolved. This means that most of the government’s pieces of legislation (37 of 64) that were still being worked on at either the upper or lower house were thrown out with the weekly garbage.

Mr. Harper proroguing parliament for the second time in a year speaks not only to his highly partisan character, but also to his arrogance to use the powers of the office of Prime Minister to evade public accountability, again. Remember when Stephen Harper and the Conservatives came to power in 2006? They ran on a platform of returning accountability to Ottawa after the Liberal Party was still feeling the public’s ire over the Sponsorship Scandal.

Most media pundits and Harper’s team of political strategists predicted that the proroguing of parliament would go virtually unnoticed by the public. Before they decided to prorogue, the party’s poll numbers were in double digits above the Liberal party. The Conservatives were ready to capitalize upon Olympic flag waving and perhaps even use this advantage to precipitate an election. This could have potentially given Stephen Harper the opportunity to claim the prize he has been yearning for since he came to power: a majority government. The Conservatives did not expect prorogation to potentially be the proverbial Black Swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swan Theory” refers to a rare event that can have large, unpredictable side effects, especially in its role in history. Thus, the recent prorogation becomes the Black Swan if it proves to be Harper’s undoing.

Harper’s strategists seem to have underestimated the power of the people. Since Canadians have never federally voted a government out of office for prorogation in the past, the assumption is they will not do so in the future. They wrote Canadians off as apathetic and ignorant to sucha parliamentary maneuver, assuming Canadians would not pay attention to Harpers latest attempt to avoid accountabilty. Canadians however are paying attention and do not like what they see.

According to a recent ECOS poll 63% of Canadians favoured the statement, "The elected house of Parliament is the proper place to conduct the business of the nation, and suspending Parliament is antidemocratic." On January 13th, a poll by the Strategic Council found that support for the Conservatives dropped from 41% to 31% since October, now virtually tied with the opposition Liberals.

On January 23, a non-partisan rally was held in Gore Park in Hamilton to protest the Harper government’s decision to prorogue government. These 250 people stood on a cold Saturday afternoon in solidarity with 60 other protests held in cities across Canada, including Toronto, where as many as 7,000 people attended. The message from these and the over 210,000 Canadians who joined the Facebook group against prorogation is clear, “Go back to work!”.

As the prorogation of parliament has ended the current parliamentary session, scrapping everything the government was working on, it is estimated that between $50-$130 million have been wasted.

In a recession we all have to watch our spending a little more closely. Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, reported in mid January that the Government of Canada is now in a position of a structural deficit. This means government budgets will continue to be about $20 billion annually in the red unless taxes are raised or services are cut. Given the track record of the federal Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty, buckle up service cuts are coming.

Many in the public see this recent example of prorogation as part of a wider pattern of the government avoiding accountability. In the past few months Harper has: fired Linda Keen, former head of the National Nuclear Safety Commission, for refusing to re-staff the Chalk River reactor since it was unsafe; publicly attacked Richard Colvin, a public servant who gave testimony regarding the Afghanistan detainees; refused to reappoint Paul Kennedy, head of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, for his harsh report on the RCMP’s conduct towards Robert Dziekanski; and refused to reappoint Peter Tinsley, chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, who was conducting an investigation into what the government knew about the treatment of Afghan detainees.

Not only this, the government’s conduct at the climate change talks in Copenhagen last year was embarrassing. Canada attempted to block any binding commitments on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and earned Canada “Fossil of the Year” award for the third consecutive year.

If opposition parties can capitalize on Harper’s under estimation of the average voter, they may be able to at least prevent Harper from governing as though he had a majority government. This however is a pretty big “if” considering the performance of opposition parties to date. Futhermore, many voters have become disenchanted by politics, as demonstrated in the last federal election which had the lowest voter turn out in Canadian history – only 59%. However, given the anger that Canadians are currently feeling towards prorogation, Harper should watch his step come Election Day. The 40% of Canadians that felt it was not worth voting in the last election may change their minds if they feel that a change is needed.

The New Democratic Party is currently drafting legislation to limit the use of prorogation in the House of Commons. While the decision to prorogue is ultimately the decision of the Governor General, in modern history Governor General only does so from a request by the Prime Minister. The proposed bill, if passed, would limit the ability of the Prime Minister to request prorogation unless they win a vote in the House of Commons.

Over 200 university professors, political philosophers, constitutional lawyers, and political science professors have signed an open letter to Stephen Harper. In this letter they say:

“Given the short-term, tactical, and partisan purposes served by prorogation, and given the absence of any plausible public purpose served by it, we conclude that the Prime Minister has violated the trust of Parliament and of the Canadian people […] The Prime Minister’s actions risk setting a precedent that weakens an important condition of democratic government – the ability of the people, acting through their elected representatives, to hold the government accountable for its actions.”

It has yet to be seen whether this recent example of prorogation will be Harper’s Black Swan, or not. However, this clearly is an issue that resonates with Canadians. For the opposition, opportunity knocks. It is time for them to make their case and inform Canadians what they would do differently if elected.