HUBERT BAUCH, The Gazette

Yesterday’s rally to protest against the prime minister’s year-end move to shut down Parliament until March went peacefully, even as it gave Stephen Harper a sound hammering.

“Harper arrogant!” and “Harper you lie!” was the chant in French as the 300-odd demonstrators who turned out marched from Émilie Gamelin Park to Phillips Square. In English it was, “Hey hey, ho ho, Stephen Harper has to go,” and “Harper out!”

“Harper wanted for crimes against democracy,” read one placard. “Parliament belongs to us, not Harper,” read another. “Stand up to Harper,” read others.

At Phillips Square, they gathered under the statue of King Edward VII to hear protest organizers and opposition politicians in attendance denounce Harper’s move as an affront to democracy, an abuse of power ruthlessly invoked to avoid hard questions in Parliament, notably on Afghan prisoner abuse that was being probed by a Commons committee that the prorogation shut down.

The Montreal rally was part of a national anti-prorogation campaign, first launched as a Facebook initiative to which more than 200,000 had signed on by the weekend. It was one of dozens such rallies scheduled across the country for yesterday.

It was a multi-partisan event if not altogether non-partisan, given the heavy anti-Harper overtone.

All mainstream opposition parties were represented and Raging Grannies protested alongside Marxist-Leninists. In the front rank of the Montreal parade, Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe marched with federal Liberal Quebec lieutenant Marc Garneau and Outremont MP Tom Mulcair of the NDP.

Various other local MPs also turned out, including Papineau’s Justin Trudeau, pushing his young son Xavier in a stroller.

Garneau, among others, maintained the widespread protest movement against prorogation shows Harper badly miscalculated when he assumed Canadians would generally not care much about the parliamentary shutdown, even though done for blatantly self-serving reasons.

“Mr. Harper thought he could get away with something when he invoked prorogation between the turkey and the plum pudding at New Year’s,” he said. “Your being here shows Canadians care about their democratic institutions.”

Mulcair touted his party’s proposal for legislation to make prorogation subject to approval by a Commons vote, not just the governor-general as is now the practice. “From now on, no more prorogation without Parliament.”

Duceppe accused Harper of trampling democratic principle with his ruthless partisanship.

“His attitude is that if you’re not for me you’re an enemy, and if you’re an enemy you’re a Taliban.”

But while they marched shoulder-to-shoulder with Mulcair, neither Duceppe nor Garneau were prepared to endorse the NDP majority-vote proposal.

Garneau said the Liberals will consider it, though leader Michael Ignatieff is on record as saying the PM’s prorogation power should remain intact, though he would never use it to get himself out of a tight spot if elected to govern. Duceppe said something should be done, but that for now the matter needs some study.”

One of the rally’s lead organizers, Matthew Angelus, a Université de Montréal law student, declared the event a success as the crowd dispersed. “We filled the square today and I’d say we got our message across. We had anglophones, francophones, men, women, the young and the not-so-young here. It’s a good cross-section of Canadians.”