Restoring Dignity and Utility to Question Period

My dad and I both watched question period online today. There wasn’t much news; the Liberals spent most of their time attacking the government on the Afghan detainee issue, the NDP focused on Labour Minister Blackburn’s hidden travel expenses and the Bloc, as is usually the case, harped on about minor Quebec regions and sectors which were being shamelessly attacked by the evil anti-francophone Canadian government.

Papa had been looking forward to watching with me, and seemed curious to discover how question period had evolved since he had seen, as a young university student, P.E.T. call Joe Clark “the Honourable Blockhead”.

Well apparently, it hasn’t changed much, and though I haven’t been around long enough to watch it evolve, I must say that it would have been difficult for the quality of the debate to drop any lower.

Today, for instance, Jack Layton asked Minister Blackburn a simple question relating to his travel expenses, only to have Government House Leader Peter van Loan rise and start musing about the NDP leader’s frequent limousine use while serving on Toronto City Council. A few minutes later, Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon answered Gilles Duceppe’s question related to government funding for St-Hubert airport by informing the House that PM Harper had spoken on the phone with newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy. It went on like that for the rest of the hour.

Sometimes, I just can’t help thinking of the taxpayer dollars being wasted on running this useless comedy show. Couldn’t we scrap it and donate the saved funds to UNICEF.

NO, that would definitely be a premature plan, because Question Period CAN work, and SHOULD work. Indeed, the local equivalents in the British, Australian and New-Zealand parliaments are all very productive sessions which give the Prime-Minister an opportunity to answer questions from across the floor and give the government’s response. Why not in Canada?

The main problem is the absence of clear and enforceable rules and regulations. With the current system, there is nothing preventing agitated House members from deliberately breaking the rules or engaging in shameful conduct. This needs to change if we are to have the slightest chance of restoring dignity to the house.

We need to introduce a much stricter set of rules and regulations and give the Speaker the necessary powers to enforce them. Among those new rules, we should include provisions such as:

-A system of “two strikes and you’re out”, meaning that a member who violates parliamentary rules more than once in a single week would be ejected by the speaker from the current debate and suspended from the next. This would stop rogue ministers such as John Baird from violating 3 rules in one single answer.

-The possibility of aiming questions at particular ministers, giving them a binding obligation to answer. This would prevent ridiculous scenes such as the recent muzzling of Defence Minister O’Connor, who had questions aimed at him answered by ministers like Stockwell Day and Peter van Loan, neither of whom had any connection to the Ministy of Defence.

These are just ideas and by no means miracle solutions, but I am convinced that we will need to go down that tougher path if we are to succeed in restoring dignity and utility to Question Period. If all parliamentarians were like Ed Broadbent, it wouldn't be necessary, but, unfortunately, that's simply not the case.