Wasn’t it gratifying, during the recent hijinks on Parliament Hill, to notice how often the past was invoked to explain, speculate and clarify? It was as if the whole country was attending an introductory history seminar, learning the difference between prorogation and dissolution, how to parse the governor general’s every option and, most importantly, how to compare today’s events with similar parliamentary episodes in the past.

The historical analogies went from the useful to the ridiculous. King-Byng, which, as I learned, was the only time that the party in power in Ottawa has changed without losing an election, was the most frequently cited precedent, but there were many others. I myself contributed a short piece on the Coalition government that held power in British Columbia from 1941-1952, (see www.knowbc.com). Others reminded us about Ontario in the 1980s and Saskatchewan more recently. In high school history, most of us slept through the pre-Confederation period. Now the Great Coalition of 1864 actually seemed to have something to tell us (though exactly what wasn’t always clear).

And in a letter to The Globe -- this is the ridiculous part -- the writer Ronald Wright, in a high dudgeon, cited the English Civil War and compared the shutting down of parliament by King Charles I to our own Governor General. “We no longer behead people in Canada,” Wright seemed to regret, before going on to compare Harper’s visit to the GG as a coup d’etat. (All sides of the debate liked to invoke the idea of a coup d’etat; in my local paper a columnist opined that the coalition was attempting a “quasi-Fascist coup”. Huh?)

In the Toronto Star on December 6, Thomas Walkom summarized the experience with coalitions in Canada and concluded that history shows 1. that coalitions are not as unusual as people seem to think; and 2. that coalitions can work, i.e. deliver effective government, if they are seen as legitimate, which, Walkom argued, the present Liberal/NDP one is not.

So often these days it seems that history is only good for airing grievances and assigning blame. It is a nice change that on this occasion it seems to have a social benefit: lending useful information and perspective to a contemporary event. The sky is not falling, history tells us; things have been this way before and likely will again. In the immortal words of the Montreal cartoonist Aislin, everyone take a valium.