Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
December 6, 2008 

In times of economic fear, people are called upon more often to make moral decisions. Should they do the ethical thing they were hired to do? Or should they do that safe thing?

As much as I admire Governor General Michaelle Jean (and I still adore the woman personally), I think she took the easiest path last week when she let a prime minister prorogue the House of Commons for purely political reasons.

I don't blame her for it. There was a rock and then a hard place that suddenly became very hard indeed.

I am, in fact, falling over myself not to cast aspersions. Governors general are cardboard cutouts to begin with. Just like the Queen they work for. They run a caution festival and we expect no more.

But the day after Jean made her decision to accommodate Stephen Harper, we awoke to read that the jobless rate was continuing its climb. More than 70,000 jobs were lost in November, 66,000 of them in Ontario. The U.S. unemployment rate is at a 35-year high and that will undoubtedly hit branch-plant Canada hard.

Who speaks for those Canadians now? No one, it seems.

Parliament has shut down for a whopping seven weeks just when we needed it most.

No holiday for fear

It is called the House of Commons for a reason. It represents us. Not highly paid politicians with generous pensions, nor a Queen's representative who knows that the rest of her career will be comfortable. And now we are without a voice at a crucial time.

People are so frightened now. Fear won't take a seven-week Christmas holiday.

I'd like to see our parliamentarians debate handing over the $54-billion EI surplus right now to rebuild infrastructure. (I still resent calling it EI. I preferred the accuracy of the previous name, unemployment insurance, for the thing that people fear almost as much as cancer).

I'd like to hear the Bloc, the Liberals and the NDP arguing for pay equity as a basic human right.

On a more superficial level, I'd like two hours of my life back. Canadians across the country were forced to watch a door while their fate was being decided. We were reduced to judging the Christmas swags at Government House and then deploring officials who heated the Ottawa wasteland as the doors were kept open.

The easy road

Then Jean took the paved road, not the one with possible mudslides and uprooted trees.

I understand her reasons. After Harper's absurd attacks on the Bloc Quebecois, a group he courted before and now demonizes, and after his Americanization of our political landscape into polarized camps, the country is more cut up than ever.

If she had told him to go back to Parliament on Monday, there would have been rage among Conservatives. If she had sided with the Liberal-NDP coalition, with the Bloc backing, there would have been rage among everyone else.

If she had told him to call another election, there would have been universal disgust.

So she did what governors general are supposed to do, which is nothing. Jean is blameless; she behaved perfectly. My goodness, how dare I criticize this immaculate person?

Did she argue with Harper? Did he shout at her? We will never know; that's the nature of the office. We're only voters after all.

A moral question

Now we have no functioning government at one of the worst times in modern history and we have no way of expressing fury or despair.

Whether a government is Liberal or Conservative, it is simply wrong to suspend a democratically elected Parliament for what will inevitably be seven weeks of a renewed election campaign.

We just had an election that solved nothing. Now the campaign is actually going to continue and that's salt in the wound. We may even be faced with lawn signs and posters for the duration and we had hoped that was over.

Jean was not just being asked a constitutional question. In the nation's eyes, she was also being asked a moral question: is it democratic to silence the House of Commons for one-sided political power?

I'm not going to refer to Charles I, as others have. I'm directing the question to Jean: is it moral?

In the worst economic crisis since 1929, as Harper himself said, is it moral for multinationals to lay off hundreds of thousands of humans worldwide?

Was it moral for GM, Chrysler and Ford to wilfully disregard "peak oil," a concept known for decades and continue to churn out gas-guzzlers? Was it moral for unions to fail to prod automakers to look to the future as Japanese carmakers had wisely done?

Is it moral for a prime minister to egg on Canadians to hate each other?

All these things were easy to do. Canadians don't riot. In this country, a political autobiography would be called The Hope for Audacity.

Auto executives will continue to live well. So will union leaders. Harper will be fine.

It's not smart to attack the powerful, not in these times. A wise columnist should make a point of only afflicting the uncomfortable. But would that be moral?

I think about this a lot, but then I'm someone who is never comfortable with any choice; I argue with myself constantly, which is my function, I guess. (Or is it? Further argument ensues.)

These are hard times. It is up to every individual to decide whether to do the safe thing or the brave thing, especially when no one but you will ever know that you really did have a choice. Your children aren't going to find out. It's just you and your conscience, all alone.