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But that is hardly praise. This was the government, remember, that came to office to change all that. These were the inheritors of the Reform Party, founded in part to make government more accountable to Parliament and the people. And indeed, it was the Harper government that, in its early days, passed the Accountability Act, banning corporate and union donations, tightening lobbying and conflict-of-interest rules, and establishing such formal checks on arbitrary rule as the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO).

How long ago that seems. The record since then has been, quite frankly, abysmal. While there is little suggestion of corruption, in the sense of personal enrichment (the padding of Senators’ expense accounts, while not to be taken lightly, ranks relatively low on the corruption scale, and in any case has proved to be bipartisan), examples of abuse of power abound.

In the minority government years, some Conservative supporters might have been inclined to excuse its excesses in the name of survival. For example, the prime minister’s decision to prorogue Parliament in 2008, in the face a confidence vote he seemed sure to lose, might conceivably find favour with historians: though it put the governor general in a position she should never have found herself in, it spared her having to decide whether to hand power to the bizarre and unwieldy coalition that had notionally agreed to support Stéphane Dion.

But the second prorogation a year later, invoked for no purpose but to shut down tough questioning in the Afghan prisoners’ affair, lacked even that slim defence. Still worse was the government’s sustained misrepresentation of the costs of the F-35 fighter jet, backed by its refusal to release the documents Parliament had demanded that would have shown this: the proximate cause of the formal finding of contempt of Parliament in 2011, and of the election that resulted.