Still waiting for the other shoe to drop

The Prime Minister was to meet with the Governor General this morning at 9:30. At 11:30, the Toronto Star was reporting that the meeting was still going on.

News, when news occurs . . .

Update: . . . which it does 20 minutes later. The Governor General has accepted Stephen Harper's request to prorogue parliament until January:

Governor General Michaelle Jean has allowed Prime Minister Stephen Harper to suspend or prorogue Parliament until January, which avoids as non-confidence vote on Monday which would have brought down the government.

Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean met with with Prime Minister Stephen Harper who asked her to suspend or prorogue Parliament until the new year. They met in Rideau Hall on Thursday morning.

The Opposition coalition leaders had already presented their positions to the governor general via a letter.

Under the circumstances, probably the best of a bad lot of choices. This may merely postpone the constitutional crisis to 2009, or it may allow enough voters to make their wishes known to their elected representatives (even a lot of Liberal voters are uncomfortable with the coalition, while western voters are incandescent). On the down-side, it means a lot of political hot air will be produced over the Christmas holidays . . .

Update, the second: It's hard not to agree with this National Post editorial headline: "Send MPs home for a month, until they learn to behave":

Prorogue Parliament. Send all our politicians home for a month or longer, and give them — and the rest of us — time to contemplate what they have done and how they are going to get us out of the mess they have created.

Indeed, by the time you read this, the current parliamentary session may already have been dissolved. But if Governor-General Michaëlle Jean has not by Thursday morning made up her mind to grant Prime Minister Stephen Harper his request to have the House of Commons rise a week early for its Christmas recess, she should. A brief pause for sober reflection is a reasonable accommodation before changing the national government and overturning the results of an election not yet two months old.

It is true that Mr. Harper precipitated this crisis by his mean-spirited attempt last week to cut off all parties' — his own and the opposition's — public operating subsidies. But it is equally true that the punishment being proposed by the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois is out of all proportion to Mr. Harper's crime.