Prime Minister Stephen Harper is not a true representative of the people. Neither an academic nor an average Canadian, Harper is, first and foremost, a political tactician. In 2006 he managed to reach Parliament Hill and the position of Prime Minister together with a minority government and has since used all means necessary to maintain it, always struggling to obtain a majority, which was finally achieved in the spring of 2011. However , in 2008 Harper was at the origin of a prorogation crisis, in which, for fear of losing the confidence of the House and giving up his role to an unstable coalition government, he asked then Governor General Michaelle Jean that Parliament be extended. in an effort to alienate the coalition and create a fiscal update that will be acceptable to the House. Through this request and Jean's subsequent approval, Harper and Jean were accused of weakening the Constitution and creating a democratic deficit in Canada. The debate over the 2008 prorogation crisis calls into question numerous issues such as the legitimacy of the Governor General, the nature of constitutional conventions, and the freedoms and leniency afforded to the Governor General on executive decisions. Furthermore, it could be argued that any extension decision made by the Governor General is of a catch-22 nature; essentially, if the request had been rejected, in Harper's case in 2008, his government would have been defeated in a confidence vote and a questionable, probably unstable, coalition led by Liberal leader Stephane Dion would have come to power. However, when the request was approved, it allowed Harper, for lack of a better term, to shirk his duties as Prime Minister of Canada and to prolong the level of co...... of discretion on ministerial advice, all decisions made by them are generally of a catch-22 nature. There will always be a negative consequence, or a large group of Canadians who feel like there was a better alternative. However, the Governor General takes this into account, as Michaelle Jean did in 2008. Jean also let Stephen Harper know that it was “not a rubber stamp for his call to shut down Parliament… [and] that it was within his power constitutional discretion. to reject it" (Franci 35). Nonetheless, Jean ultimately believed that the best course of action for Canada would be to keep Harper in power and avoid the confidence vote by granting an extension – if Canadians truly did not want Harper in power, it could be argued that the the election results of just a month earlier should have better reflected this.