Like most Canadians, I was as happy as a clam to avoid political news over the holidays.

Apparently this was a big mistake because I missed hearing that Parliament would prorogue until after the Olympics, meaning the House and Senate wouldn't sit in February as scheduled. Apparently it's much worse than that. According to some media friends, it means that the prime minister has now established a dictatorship!

Sure the opposition parties can force an election as soon as the House returns, and yes the people of Canada can vote out the Conservatives if they choose, and no there aren't soldiers in the streets, and yes opposition MPs can still criticize the government, and yes the media can and do freely criticize the government, and yes the people still have free speech and all their rights, and yes all the rules of Parliament have been followed, so no it's not a dictatorship in the sense of usurping power and limiting freedom.

It's only a dictatorship in the sense that the democratically elected prime minister is operating within his constitutionally granted powers to take the country in a different direction than his unelected critics would like.

For instance, a big media priority is to get to the bottom of the allegations regarding Taliban prisoners. The government on the other hand believes it's a waste of time and money and a bizarre witch hunt of the very ministers and bureaucrats who, seeing deficiencies in the old prisoner transfer system, strengthened it. Whatever might have happened in an isolated case, the Conservatives argue that they dramatically improved the inadequate system inherited from the Liberals.

Senate is important

So we have a disagreement about how important this is and the government is content to let Canadians decide in the next election. In the meantime, the government's priorities include fighting a recession, prosecuting a war and setting sensible environmental policies, and that makes the Senate important.

In order for the soon to be new Conservative majority in the Senate to have control of the committees, the rules say Parliament must prorogue so that the committees can be reconstituted.

Without prorogation, the Liberals would still have a majority of committee seats in the Senate even though they would have fewer seats overall. That would be a terribly anti-democratic situation on at least two levels and should be an outrage to the media if saving democracy was their real concern. That's a big if, however.

Remember that this is the PM who has given up power to Parliament on vetting Supreme Court nominees and going to war. He has tried mightily to elect the Senate. Calling him a dictator is so embarrassingly over the top that it says more about his critics than it does him.

We get it, you don't like him, but that doesn't grant you licence to lump him together with Stalin in the dictator's club. Most likely this means the PM has committed the unpardonable sin of ignoring his press gallery critics except to wink at them as he speaks over their heads directly to Canadians while pulling Canada back to its conservative roots.