If Harper were simply extending Parliament’s current recess, “I could live with that . . . but this is not a recess, it’s an end” to all the work Parliament has been doing since early 2009, Valeriote said Monday.

Harper’s announcement last Wednesday that he is proroguing Parliament and will have a new Speech from the Throne ready for delivery on March 3 shows “complete contempt for democracy and the will of the people expressed in Parliament,” Valeriote said.

It’s Harper’s way of silencing dissent and avoiding criticism over Canada’s handling of Afghan detainees, as well as over environmental and economic issues, Valeriote said in a phone interview from his constituency office in Guelph.

In December, Parliament passed a resolution calling for the government to produce all of the documents related to Canada’s handling of Afghan detainees that it has on file from 2006 and 2007 in their “unabridged, unedited version,” he said, but Harper “did not want to talk about the torture of Afghan detainees anymore.”

The proroguing of Parliament kills this and other resolutions, as well as a large amount of legislation that hadn’t been finalized, Valeriote said. It also brings to an end the work of parliamentary committees, such as the one that was looking into the Afghan detainee issue.

“Every committee has to be reconstituted when you go back” after Parliament is prorogued, “and you start from scratch.”

Valeriote said this also ends the work of the agriculture committee of which he has been a member, which has spent millions of dollars since last spring examining the plight of Canadian farmers, including hearing from a wide range of witnesses. The committee was finalizing a report on the issue, but its work is now “out the window,” he said.

And while MPs can keep busy in their home ridings on constituency work, the unexpected delay before Parliament resumes is a “huge waste” of money spent on salaries of MPs’ support staff in Ottawa, he said.

It all adds up to a great deal of money “thrown away on the whim of one person who wants to retain his credibility, or what little is left of it, by silencing those who disagree with him,” Valeriote said.

He said there is no legitimate explanation for the proroguing, except that Harper is trying to “silence dissent and, frankly, hoping that his popularity will increase during the Olympics.”

Harper “will be putting himself front and centre” during the Winter Olympics in Vancouver from Feb. 12-28, and what he is doing “is all by careful marketing design,” Valeriote said.

While many Canadians “don’t understand the seriousness” of the announcement Harper made during the Christmas holiday period when people generally weren’t paying attention, “there are a lot of people who are very, very annoyed,” Valeriote said.

He said he’s met with recent immigrants in his constituency office since Harper’s announcement last Wednesday who have “said to me that this is the kind of government they fled –this arbitrary, despotic approach to government.”

Liberal MPs will gather in Ottawa for a caucus and strategy session on Jan. 19, and there is some talk among Liberals of staging a “symbolic” protest by showing up at Parliament on the original Jan. 25 date set for Parliament to resume, Valeriote said. They are investigating whether or not Liberal MPs could actually get into the Parliament building on that date if they were to show up.