As Parliament resumes for its final sitting before the election, one immediately wonders just how populated the Commons is going to be for the next five months. After all, we are often told that MPs feel better when they're out engaging with "real Canadians" as opposed to the fake ones in Ottawa, one presumes. This goes doubly so for the party leaders, whose presence is becoming increasingly fleeting.
Since Harper became prime minister in 2006, he quickly established a pattern that he would almost never attend Question Period on a Monday, except for instances where he was travelling later in the week and wanted to at least put in a token appearance. As time went on, Thursdays also became no-shows, and Friday attendance never was to begin with. With the increasing number of foreign junkets that Harper has been undertaking, we can go weeks without seeing him in the Commons, which is less than ideal for a system that is predicated on the Prime Minister and cabinet being available daily to answer questions and to be held to account by the Commons as a whole.
Thomas Mulcair finds himself in a different situation, where he does show up more often, but it doesn't seem to matter. For the first year of his leadership, he was almost a non-entity as he read lines from atop his mini-lectern, and his performance eclipsed daily by then-interim Liberal leader, Bob Rae. Mulcair was able to get some traction following Rae's retirement and the explosion of the allegations against Senator Mike Duffy, and he was suddenly given the moniker of the "best performer in Parliament" as a result of two days of questions an unfair label if you ask me because his performance is inconsistent at best. That said, despite the praise that pundits who don't watch QP on a regular basis lavished up on him, Mulcair has been unable to get much traction and remains largely an unknown figure to many Canadians. His solution? To go on the road more often, despite spending the past year boasting that he's in QP more often than the other two major leaders.
Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, has made it a point of pride to be largely absent from the Commons as he seeks to re-engage the Liberal grassroots in advance of the election something the party does need. And while that may sound like a worthwhile goal, it comes at the expense of his role in Parliament, which you would think that someone seeking the top job would actually be conscious of. In fact, people often deride Trudeau as being one of the weakest leaders in terms of performance, but rather than improving on that and he does have his moments Trudeau has left the heavy lifting to others. This is especially true with some of the other major debates that have happened in the past few months, such as the deployment of our forces in Iraq. While foreign and defence policy may not be his forte, there is something to be said for at least staking out his party's position as the leader (and since it's a speech and not actual debate, it seems all the more unusual that he couldn't deliver it).
The diminution of the role of Parliament as the place where the most important things get discussed has been accelerating under the current government, whether it's delivering the fall economic update at business lunches, or making major policy announcements at remote locations with a slogan on a vinyl banner rather than during the allotted time during the daily Routine Proceedings in the Commons. The desire for greater control over optics has made it more appealing to do away with the backdrop of the centre of our democracy in favour of other faked scenes that apparently play better to the cameras.
Part of the problem is that it's a populist race to the bottom, where Parliament is derided as the bubble of unreality with no ability to deal with "real Canadians," never mind the myriad of ways that Canadians could engage if they actually wanted to. This then becomes a vicious circle of diminishing the role of Parliament in favour of this affected "grassroots" engagement, which is frequently anything but, which then further diminishes the prestige of Parliament in the eyes of the public, which makes it even more incumbent for MPs and leaders to be seen to be out of Ottawa, which diminishes Parliament even further, and on it goes. And while the Liberals and NDP have tried to make an issue of Harper's contempt for Parliament in the past, they don't seem to be doing much to counter that in any tangible way.
The closer we get to the election, the more likely it is that we're going to see the Commons emptying out for the majority of the week, as MPs try to shore up their electoral chances by being "on the ground" in the various regions of the country that aren't Ottawa, and the leaders start crossing the country in the pre-campaign before the writ actually drops. (Thanks, fixed election dates!) My fear is that the only day we'll actually see MPs and leaders around will be Wednesdays, and only because it's caucus day.
If we want Parliament to matter and most MPs seem to at least pay lip service to that notion at some point or another then they need to actually be seen to be here, and to be doing something to make a difference. Of course, that would likely mean actually doing their jobs, rather than just reading speeches into the record like they've become adept at, but we need to start somewhere. We need more policy speeches in the Commons, we need more actual debate where ideas get exchanged, and we need leaders to show that they belong in the Chamber, leading those national conversations. But if things don't change, it will soon be a chamber of phantoms, phoning in the occasional performance to the detriment of our democracy.
