Think Prime Minister Stephen Harper is doing something a bit untoward by proroguing Parliament? Well, according to the helpful backgrounder provided by Harper's staff today, these prorogation periods and throne speeches have been pretty much run-of-the-mill things ever since Confederation. According to the numbers crunched by the PMO:
Average number of Throne Speeches per Parliament: 3.6
Number of Throne Speeches for 40th Parliament (after March 3 speech): 3
Average number of days of a Parliamentary session: 211
40th Parliament, 2nd Session: 338 days
Average sittings of the House of Commons per session: 109
Number of times Commons sat during the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session: 128
Average interval between Sessions of Same Parliament, in days: 151
Interval between 2nd and 3rd sessions of 40th Parliament: 63
(Note: The Parliament elected in October, 2008 is the 40th Parliament of Canada. That Parliament's 1st session was short, running until the coalition threatened to kill the government. The 2nd session of the 40th Parliament began with last January's throne speech and budget)
Just to add to the backgrounder, and since the MSM apparently can't be bothered to do any research for themselves this is from the Library of Parliament:
26th Parliament Trudeau 1963/12/21,1965/4/3
27th Parliament Trudeau 1967/5/8
28th Parliament Trudeau 1969/10/22,1970/10/7,1972/2/16
29th Parliament Trudeau 1974/2/26
30th Parliament Trudeau 1976/10/12,1977/10/17,1978/10/10,1983/11/30
33rd Parliament Mulroney 1986/8/28
34th Parliament 1989/2/28,1991/5/12
35th Parliament Chretien 1996/2/2
36th Parliament 1999/9/18
37th Parliament 2002/9/16,2003/11/12
39th Parliament Harper 2007/9/14
40th Parliament 2008/12/4
If I recall back to my PoliSci 101 days (admitedly its been a while) I believe that in ealier times a session was the equivalent of a sitting. For example a government would have a Spring and Fall session each year and would have a throne speech at the begining of each. Sometimes the replies to these throne speeches went on for two weeks which is partly why the tradition was dropped in lieu of having a single throne speech at the start of a longer sesssion. I'm not saying the PMO points aren't true. Just that they're comparing apples to oranges by including early parliaments when throne speeches were required just to start a sitting, not only a session.
Wasn't Lester B. Pearson PM during the 26th Parliament?