Will There Be a Populist Revolt ... in Canada?

Of all the possible issues to trip him up—the deficit, stubbornly high unemployment, Afghan detainees—who would have predicted that a four-syllable term for a parliamentary procedure would send Stephen Harper’s poll numbers tumbling? Yet prorogation, the antique-sounding word for suspending Parliament, has done it. Harper’s Dec. 30 decision to send MPs on an unscheduled break until March 3 galvanized dismay over both his leadership style and the state of a democracy in which the Prime Minister feels free to wield such unchecked power. “It’s solidifying a very deep sense that there’s something wrong with the way we govern ourselves,” says Rick Anderson, a long-time advocate for democratic reform who, like Harper, worked for Preston Manning back when Manning’s Reform party embodied a grassroots desire for politics less dominated by prime ministerial power.