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And yet it is not. If the turn was not quite as remorseless, or as sudden, as under Harper — who on his first day in power appointed his campaign co-chair, Michael Fortier, both to the Senate and to cabinet, having earlier promised to appoint no unelected person to either, also appointing to cabinet David Emerson, who days earlier had campaigned as a Liberal — it has nevertheless been striking in its completeness.

The promises were the first to go. The promise to run deficits of less than $10 billion was revoked within weeks of taking power. The promise of electoral reform took a little longer, the government having first to go through the motions of consulting the country before concluding that, as the prime minister’s preferred reform option was not the country’s, no reform was possible.

More telling has been the government’s reversion to the mean on matters of democratic process, where what was required was, not to do things that no government had ever done before, but merely to refrain from doing things that every government had done before. Question period is the same insufferable series of non-answers, or answers to questions that were not asked, as it ever was. The Information Commissioner, in her last report, found that, notwithstanding Liberal promises of an “open by default” government, access to information had, if anything, worsened.

This government is an odd mix: obtusely fanatical, on matters of concern to its activists; blithely carefree, where the issue is more to do with the ethical or democratic standards others expect of it

The same tightening previously imposed on the party — the “open nominations” that were replaced by leadership appointees and protection for incumbents, the “free votes” that were replaced by whipped votes even on matters of conscience like abortion — has increasingly been applied to Parliament at large: witness the government’s two attempts, both rebuffed, to set broad rules limiting time for debate in the House, without the tiresome necessity of limiting debate one bill at a time.