Waiting for the end

Andrew Coyne writes in yesterday's National Post

I had thought the feeling of nausea that washed over me at the news was one of disgust. I now realize it was vertigo. The bottom has fallen out of Canadian politics. There are, quite literally, no rules any more, no boundaries, no limits. We are staring into an abyss, where everything is permissible.

Further

Is it a constitutional crisis if no one understands it is? A government without the support of a majority of Parliament has spent billions it has no legal authority to spend and dangled offices that are not in its power to bestow, in hopes of recovering that majority.

Mark Steyn:

Unlike King/Byng or Sir John Kerr firing Gough Whitlam, what makes this a constitutional crisis is that there’s no crisis: Parliament votes, and Martin shrugs; Martin fiddles the math, and Canada shrugs. And the chaps at The Ottawa Citizen think the big question now is: “Is there room for moderate, urban conservatives in the new Conservative Party?”

And our current Governor General shrugs too.

All we are left with is the hope for one or two honourable MPs to do the right thing and put this dicatorship out of our misery. What do we have? Several MPs falling ill over the last 24 hours. And an MP who is polling his constituents as to whether they want an election. As if that were the issue.

The damage to the Canadian polity has been done. The door has been opened, and, if Paul Martin doesn't walk through it, someone in the future surely will. If the government falls today, some hope remains for repair. Especially if they are soundly defeated at the next election. Let them win today, or at the election, and Canadians, happily bribed with their own money, will have to settle for a perpetual Liberal dictatorship.

UPDATE: From David Warren, after the vote:

At the end of a second week of disgrace in Parliament, I can find no upside.

The Canadian constitution was overthrow.

But as a people, we have proved incapable of connecting the dots between our national decline, and the bottomless corruption of our legal and political order.

I will leave it there. For what point can there be in a writer continuing to bemoan something that is simply lost? The dignity and decency of Canadian life had been leeching away, for so long, that we are now past writing any “lament for a nation”. The Canada of which I was once so proud now sleeps with the worms.