OTTAWA — Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean says she was taking time to reflect on the gravity of proroguing Parliament in late 2008 when she made Prime Minister Stephen Harper — who faced being toppled by an opposition coalition — wait for two hours for an answer.

“The idea wasn’t to create artificial suspense,” Jean told The Canadian Press Tuesday. “The idea was to send a message — and for people to understand that this warranted reflection.”

The largely popular Jean — set to step aside Friday as Canada’s 27th viceregal — has had no shortage of controversy during her five-year reign. She chomped down on a piece of seal heart while touring the Arctic, dressed in spotlight-stealing military garb for Ottawa’s 2009 Remembrance Day and drew a quick reprimand from the Prime Minister’s Office after she twice described herself as Head of State during a speech at a UNESCO meeting in Paris.

But the Governor General has remained tight-lipped about that cold Dec. 4, 2008 morning at Rideau Hall, which some have suggested was a power move by Jean to show her interests were different than that of the PMO.

“In those hours, all of a sudden, people were frozen, time was frozen and everyone was wondering, ‘Hey, what might happen here? And why are they taking so long?’” Jean recalled. “History will decide . . . but I believe that, collectively, we participated together in something that will take us a step forward, maybe, in the necessity of understanding our institutional realities . . . and our political system.”

Jean declined to tell the news agency the specifics of what she and Harper discussed, citing constitutional sacrosanctity, but her decision to grant the prime minister his request to prorogue Parliament fended off both a Liberal-NDP coalition and a possible federal election at a time when the government was trying to focus on rebuilding a recession-era economy.

Jean, 53, will next serve as a UNESCO envoy to her native Haiti and “remain engaged” with Canadians through her recently launched charity, the Michaelle Jean Foundation.