Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Frances Russell discusses how the Harper Cons have capitalized on the general public’s lack of familiarity with how our parliamentary system is supposed to work – and the conventional checks and balances which have been overridden at every turn by a governing party which isn’t interested in preserving a functional system of accountability: Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manitoba, calls the debasement of Canada’s Parliament under the Harper Conservatives “stark.” He cites such recent developments as: the government forcing committees to meet in secret and muzzling opposition

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