Tragedy in the Commons (14 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Kindergarten on the Rideau

T
he House of Commons is the venue where MPs gather for one of the most important aspects of their job—discussing the governance of our country. The House, first opened in 1920 after a fire destroyed the previous building, forms an impressive architectural space in the Centre Block of Canada’s Houses of Parliament. The Chamber is dominated by Gothic Revival stone archways, stained glass and carved wood, and lit by majestic chandeliers. The ornately carved chair belonging to the Speaker, the presiding officer of the Commons, anchors the room. To the Speaker’s right are the seats usually designated for the party that forms the government. The prime minister sits in the middle of the first aisle, with the Cabinet in the front rows. On the other side of the House, appropriately, the opposition side, the remaining seats accommodate the non-governing opposition parties—and sometimes, if the government holds a large majority, some backbench government MPs as well.

Canada’s legislative assembly serves many functions. Foremost is its role as the public forum for debating the benefits and disadvantages of legislation, and for the passage or
dissolution of that legislation. In addition, through Members’ Statements, MPs have the opportunity to recognize the service of various Canadians and events of local significance in Parliament’s official record, Hansard. MPs in the House of Commons can register petitions. And the most observed part of the House is Question Period, the forty-five-minute daily session that allows MPs to pose questions to and gather information from the government.

That, at least, is what is
supposed
to happen in the House. But our interviews reflect that little substantive policy discussion actually does take place in those hallowed chambers. The debate that leads to productive legislative change more often happens in places that are less public and where MPs can speak to one another more frankly, such as in committees or in caucus.

In practice, the parties use the House for other functions. What stands out for anyone who watches the proceedings is the sniping and quibbling that occurs among the MPs of various parties. In addition to its nominal function as a legislative assembly, the House, and more specifically, Question Period, is usurped as a grand venue for MPs to insult one another, to attack one another’s platforms and to belittle opponents’ achievements—to score points against one another in front of the press. It’s where they engage in a form of extremely partisan, and, considering all the costs incurred to keep the House running, extremely expensive, form of political marketing.

Each party devotes considerable resources to orchestrating its MPs’ behaviour in the House of Commons. The House Leader, for example, oversees the journey of a bill into law, as well as the rehearsal of and responses to questions
expected to come from the opposition during Question Period. An Opposition House Leader does much the same thing but from the opposing point of view. Ranking slightly below the House Leaders are the whips, who make sure their party’s MPs show up and vote on tabled legislation according to the party’s preferences. Whips are MPs who also serve polling functions that see them act as conduits to the leader for MPs’ concerns about their party’s positions. Finally, the whip has a role in scheduling and the assignment of party MPs to various committees. The whip also has enormous influence in deciding which members speak during proceedings in the House of Commons, including Question Periods and Members’ Statements.

Few people in the country are more familiar with the way parties make use of their whips in the House of Commons than former Conservative MP for Prince George–Peace River Jay Hill. During his seventeen years as a Member of Parliament, Hill was chief whip for the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance and the Conservative Party of Canada, and he served that function both in government and in opposition. He was also his party’s House Leader in government and in opposition, and served twice as his party’s Question Period director, specifically responsible for orchestrating which questions are asked, and by whom. “I don’t think there was any MP from any party who was more involved in the day-to-day tactics and strategy of the House, of the Chamber, than I was,” said Hill, speaking of his last decade in the House of Commons, from 2000 until 2010.

Hill was blunt and refreshingly open when discussing the House of Commons with us. His was the story of a remarkable evolution—one of the most senior figures in his party,
who would come to sour on the tactics that parties employed in the House.

Hill did work to reduce the level of partisanship that the Conservatives employed. When he started work as Government House Leader after the October 2008 election, he realized there was an opportunity for a change from the practice of his predecessor, a man renowned for the opprobrium, überpartisanship and rhetorical flourishes he employed to criticize the opposition. In fact, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked Hill to become Government House Leader, Hill told the prime minister that he wouldn’t operate the way his predecessor had. “I am just not going to,” Hill recalls saying. “Sure, if it’s a partisan attack, answer in a partisan way—but if it is a legitimate question about defence spending or whatever, stand up and give them an answer.

“Look, I will try and do the job,” Hill reported telling the prime minister. It was the start of the Conservatives’ second minority government, so the stakes were high. “I am going to try and get some legislation, get something accomplished, not only for our government but for our country—but having said that, if I am going to be negotiating in some cases on a minute-by-minute, or certainly hour-by-hour, basis with the opposition parties to try and accomplish something, I can’t then for forty-five minutes of the day get up and deliver partisan attacks on them, and then half an hour later be sitting down with them trying to say how can we work through this and actually accomplish something.”

Soon after Hill became House Leader, he noticed MPs increasingly used their Members’ Statements to issue “extremely partisan personal attacks that really poisoned the atmosphere
of the Chamber.” Hill referred to these attacks, particularly targeted toward Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, as “partisan drivel,” and he became very uneasy about them. Time and again, in Members’ Statements, Conservative MPs would stand up and deliver withering sixty-second tirades against the Liberal leader, the exclusive purpose of which seemed to be to denigrate his character.

“Mr. Speaker,” began one classic example from the Conservative MP from Peace River, Chris Warkentin, on May 29, 2009, in the wake of Ignatieff’s criticizing the Conservatives for using without permission a nine-second C-SPAN clip of the Liberal leader. “The Liberal leader seems to be a fan of cover-ups. Perhaps he is just paranoid. The Liberal Party of Canada had its legions of lawyers attempt to stop the use of a video clip that its leader had during the time that he spent on C-SPAN … Clearly, the Liberals are trying to hide their leader’s statements when he called America his country. Is that because the only thing he missed while he was outside of our country was Algonquin Park?”

Soon after Warkentin’s invective came another broadside, this one by the MP for Beauport–Limoilou in Quebec, Sylvie Boucher: “Mr. Speaker, in recent days, we have watched as the Liberals have ramped up the worst sort of political partisanship.… This pernicious partisanship clearly shows that the policies of the Liberal Party are devoid of ideas and lack direction.”

Next up was Tom Lukiwski, MP for Regina–Lumsden–Lake Centre: “Mr. Speaker,” Lukiwski said. “Liberal hypocrisy is at an all-time high. On one hand, the Liberals are attacking the size of the deficit and, on the other hand, they are
demanding billions more in spending.” And soon after: “Mr. Speaker, when things do not go their way, the Liberals go running for cover,” said Saint Boniface MP Shelly Glover. “In fact, hypocrisy is at an all-time high with the Liberal Party.”

What made these partisan jabs all the more remarkable was their setting. Members’ Statements were more traditionally used by members for
nice
things. The day’s first statement, for example, featured Conservative Brent Rathgeber recognizing the volunteers who donated their time to help run the twenty-eighth annual International Children’s Festival in St. Albert. Liberal Keith Martin spoke about the Roots and Shoots program founded by primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, which encouraged children to help the environment. And the Bloc’s Nicolas Dufour recognized the Quebec country music legend Roger Miron, celebrating his eightieth birthday that week.

So Hill’s reluctance to allow this practice—also perpetuated by parties other than his own—was understandable, even if he wasn’t always able to contain it. “It really got over the top, way over the top. I was very uncomfortable with it,” Hill said. Many caucus members came to him to complain that things were getting out of hand. In response, Hill told his colleagues: “The only way we will ever get that to stop is [if] enough of you refuse. It’s
your
Members’ Statement. You are an individual Member of Parliament. I understand that the staff phones you, and they lean on you, and you understand it’s coming right from the boss, but if you refuse to stand in your place and deliver that statement—and some did, to their credit, quite a number did—but they would always find people who wanted to be up on television.”

————

IT HAS BEEN OBSERVED
before that the House of Commons public visitors’ gallery attracts schoolchildren from all over the country. These students come expecting to see our nation’s leaders debating the issues of the day with dignity and decorum, only to find these elected men and women conducting themselves like kids at the back of the school bus. (The precise number of teachers who bring their students from the far reaches of Canada to sit in the Commons visitors’ gallery is unknown, but many MPs mention the visits as a way to illustrate their disgust.) Across all our interviews, MPs claimed to be embarrassed by the public displays of acrimony and repeatedly stressed that these displays misrepresent how politics actually operates.

Again, MPs professed to be different from the typical politicians seen on TV. They worried whether the insulting rhetoric—perpetuated by their colleagues, they insisted—contributes to a growing sense of political disaffection among Canadians, hypothesizing that it causes viewing audiences to get turned off by politics. The conduct on display in the House is indeed beneath our MPs; and whereas vigorous, considered debate is welcome, partisan attacks and feigned outrage discourage people from paying attention, let alone engaging in politics. Party leaders and their professional staffs devote a lot of resources to engineering the histrionics of the House. These behaviours distract MPs from engaging in substantive policy debates—which may just suit the party leaders’ purposes. Perhaps MPs who think they are helping their party by point-scoring and insulting are less likely to realize how little they’re contributing to legislative policy.

“I found it quite difficult sometimes,” said NDP MP Catherine Bell. “The decorum in the House—there should be
stricter rules and the Speaker should be held to account because he has the last say.… When you stand up to make your statement, which is your right, and there are people yelling at you, it’s nasty. To me, it’s mean.… I have seen kindergartners act better.… What bothers me is that every day in Question Period, the gallery fills up with schoolchildren and that is what they see. They don’t see people debating in committees—they see people yelling at each other.”

The partisanship is overplayed, anyway, the MPs said. Several attributed it to an exaggeration of small differences intended by the professional political staff who work in the prime minister’s and opposition leaders’ offices to distinguish the parties and what they stand for, and to fire up their partisan bases (how many of these partisans are really listening, however, is perhaps a more important consideration). “The debate between the Liberals and the Conservatives on income tax is not whether there should be
no
income taxes, or 100 percent income taxes, it’s whether the rate should be 29 percent at the high end versus 25,” said Monte Solberg. “You know, the debate really is not very big at all, so it’s really quite disingenuous to characterize the other side as being bad or evil. It’s crazy to talk that way.… When the government’s way off base and you think it will affect a fundamental right, by all means go after them hard and make them pay the price. [But] most of the time, it’s not that. It’s degrees of difference.”

What needs to change in order to enhance the representative work of MPs and their parties on Parliament Hill so as to make it relevant to Canadians?

Let’s start where we just were—with Question Period itself. Tuning in to political news in Canada often means
watching, listening to or reading about these forty-five minutes a day. Intended as a forum for the opposition to hold the government to account by asking questions of its representatives, Question Period takes place every weekday that Parliament is in session, at 2:15 every afternoon except Friday, when it’s held at 11:15 in the morning. Since 1977 the proceedings have been televised and today CPAC, the parliamentary channel jointly owned by a consortium of Canadian cable broadcasters, airs the sessions live. All this makes Question Period the most publicized aspect of Parliament. And why not? With all the heckling and carrying on, it makes for great TV. It also serves to reinforce Canadians’ sense that MPs are wasting time in Ottawa. “The unfortunate thing is that Question Period is used as the barometer of what goes on in Ottawa,” said Liberal MP Roy Cullen. “It is really a zoo. It’s theatre.”

Liberal-turned-Green MP Blair Wilson recalled giving a disclaimer to tourists visiting from his constituency in British Columbia. “They’d come to Question Period and I would say the same speech every time. ‘What you are about to see is not what I do on a daily basis. This is forty-five minutes of entertainment on television. This is just to feed the [media] jackals.… These are kids in a sandbox.’