There’s an old saying that people who live in tin houses shouldn’t toss can openers. Enter Bob Rae, Toronto Liberal MP and former NDP premier of Ontario.

Ever since Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued the Commons until after the Olympics - in effect, missing only a few weeks of the Parliament Hill circus - Rae has been front and center in attempting to drum up public outrage over it.

More on Rae in a moment. You know doubt read and/or saw on the weekend the rallies in various cities along with the accompanying headlines that “thousands” attended to protest. (Actually, most of the rallies drew only a few hundred. In Toronto, the largest, it was about 3,000. Whoopdeedoo!)

Still, when your correspondent was watching this festival of indignation on CBC Newsworld, the cameras never once that I saw panned to the “crowd,” opting instead to do tighter shots of the speakers, an old media trick if there ever was one.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff - apparently forgetting that former Liberal prime minister prorogued the Commons several times, and even did it once to shut down a judicial inquiry - told the relatively small crowd on parliament Hill that the “demonstration shows that Canadians understand their democracy, care for their democracy, and if necessary will fight for their democracy...”

Perhaps. But if they really do “understand their democracy” they will know that proroguing the Commons - or the Legislature - is a legitimate and notuncommon tactic and, like it or not, a perfectly legal and democratic action.

Which, of course, brings us back to Rae, the ultimate hypocrite.

In her Toronto Sun column on the weekend, longtime Queen’s Park observer Christina Blizzard pointed out that it it Rae, not Harper, who is “King of proroguing.”

We take you back to Sept. 6, 1990, when, for the first time (and, thanks to his terrible performance, perhaps the last) Ontario voted in an NDP government.

On Dec. 19, 1991, Rae prorogued the Legislature. Just like that. And the MPPs stayed out of the place until April 6, 1992, almost four months. It gets better. Or worse. Because on Dec. 10, 1992 - after just eight months of sitting - Rae again prorogued the Legislature, and again, the MPPs didn’t return until April 13, a little more than four months later.

Even so, Rae wasn’t finished. He prorogued the Legislature for the third time on Dec. 9, 1994, turning out the lights in the Chamber - and not even bringing in a budget that year (which is just as well, since he doubled Ontario’s debt in just four years in office). Then, four and-a-half months later, he dissolved the Legislature.

Where were all the champions of democracy then? And how can Rae, given his own record - and Ignatieff, given Chretien’s record - actually expect to be taken seriously over this media-fuelled “outrage?”

Another point, when you see Ignatieff, NDP Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe, all out there pretending to be champions of democracy, you may want to cast your minds back to early December, 2008 - just a few weeks after the federal election - when Layton, Duceppe and then Liberal leader Stephane Dion (in a deal signed onto by Ignatieff) cared so little about the election outcome that they agreed to a “coalition government.

Talk about undemocratic. Just weeks after the Canadian public demonstrated beyond any doubt that it did not want Dion as prime minister, this deal would have given the finger to Canadians and put him in the chair.

Unlike proroguing, which is used regularly by pretty well every political leader, this obscene coalition would not only have given the NDP six cabinet seats - something the electorate clearly did not want or imagine - and the Liberals 18 cabinet seats, but - here’s the very worst part - it would give the separatist Bloc a virtual veto over the government.

Once again, Rae was at the forefront of this unholy alliance, and while Ignatieff, it is true, muttered publicly he was “not wild” about the idea of forming a government propped up by the separatist Bloc, when push came to shove he willingly signed on.

The outcome of this disaster, for the Liberals, was to eliminate their ongoing leadership race, bump Dion from his position, and deposit Ignatieff as leader without any input whatsoever from the party workers. Now that’s democracy in action, isn’t it?

As for Layton, who had the gall to preach against proroguing the Commons, he had not the slightest hesitation in jumping at the chance to be part of cabinet - which would have been the first NDP ministers in Canadian history - with absolutely no regard for the election which had just occurred a few weeks earlier. Where was his love of democracy then?

It’s amazing these people can look at themselves in the mirror without throwing up.