I mentioned a couple days ago how Canada's Tory Prime Minister had managed to act with such hubris, economic stupidity and desire to castrate the political opposition that he'd manage to galvanize the three very disparate opposition parties into organizing what amounts to a constitutional coup against Harper's government.

How this works is that Harper got close to a majority in the recent election. But not quite. So he's running a minority government. So if the two parties of the center-left and left could team up with the Quebec secessionist party, they could boot Harper with a simple vote of no confidence in his government. And Harper had pushed things so far that that's precisely what was about to happen.

So now Harper has gone to Governor General Michaelle Jean (technically an appointee of Queen Elizabeth II, Canada's head of state) and received permission to suspend Parliament until January. In other words, he's just shut the legislature down so it can't do anything.