Parliament is not a happy place. If anything, it has gotten worse since when I wrote Losing Confidence.
This week I have been in Ottawa, for the Speaker’s ruling and other events. Going to Question Period every day has been a sad experience. So far this week, only one question on the climate crisis – raised by the Bloc Quebecois critic, the superb Bernard Bigras. Important issues are cast aside for the latest whiff of scandal.
And the tone of the place is more zoo-like than I remembered. I wrote in my last book that the Bloc tended not to heckle. Scratch that. They now heckle with the best (or worst) of them. Of course, a few individuals have nothing to do with the boorish behaviour. I never see Conservative Michael Chong, Liberal Glen Pearson or NDPers, Linda Duncan, Denise Savoie or Finn Donnelly shout insults. There are likely a few others who refuse to be rude, but they are sadly, a minority.
What used to pass for questions in the House is increasingly choreographed messaging. It was the Conservatives who introduced the idea of having every member end a statement or answer a question with the same tag line. The Liberals have now picked up on this idea. Where the Conservatives in Opposition used to attack the Liberals for having a “culture of entitlement,” the Liberals now, with systematic and planned repetition, attack the Conservative Government for having a “culture of deceit.”
The Conservatives’ new attack line for Ignatieff is that he is “in it for himself.” This has replaced the previous attack of “just visiting.” The Conservatives use heckling in the House to pre-test messages that later appear in TV ads. Constant repetition in the House is tiresome and childish, but you can never accuse them of going “off-message.” John Baird manages to parrot the same attack repeatedly in five minute intervals in hopes just one time it will be a clip on the nightly news. This week his theme is to berate the Liberals for the Sponsorship Scandal.
The Jaffer-Guergis affair fuels much of the furor in the House. It does not merit the intensity of the feeding frenzy. It points up what proponents of democracy and open government had long said: the Accountability Act left too many loopholes. (See Democracy Watch website for full details.) Members of the government have no obligation to report meetings with lobbyists. The reporting requirements are all on the lobbyists. So, an unregistered lobbyist, like Rahim Jaffer, doesn’t report, and despite his obvious attempts over more than a year to influence decisions, no member of government thought it prudent to tell him to stop, to report him to the Ethics Commissioner or to take any action against him.
The refusal of MPs to allow the Auditor General to review Parliamentary expenses and individual MP’s budgets is worrying. It does not suggest open government. Far from it.
It comes down to this. It is not so much that the Conservatives disliked the “culture of entitlement.” More accurately, they hated the “culture of Liberal entitlement.” A culture of Conservative entitlement is altogether different from their point of view. The Liberals may hate what the Prime Minister has done to discourse in the House, but they are too busy mimicking his methods to make a credible case that they would be different in government.
This has to change before Canadians give up on citizen engagement altogether.