This week, the Toronto Star released a package of stories on Question Period, which was an inch-deep analysis backed up by statistics that were largely meaningless.  Why?  Because unless you look at the context of the changes that have happened over the years occurred, you're just enforcing a narrative that QP is generally horrible without explaining how or why it came to be that way.  If we want to look at why Parliament is the way it is right now and come up with constructive solutions for how to restore it to something more resembling a useful exercise, then we need to actually dig a little deeper than just counting how many time certain talking points get deployed.

Let's get a few things out of the way first yes, Question Period is an important exercise in holding the government to account, regardless of whether you think there are useful questions asked or answers given.  The only thing worse than having QP is not having QP.  We also need to put on the table that yes, there is a big element of political theatre to the exercise, but we also need to reinforce that it's not a bad thing for there to be some political theatre.  I mean, if anyone bothers to watch the proceedings of the House of Commons for the rest of the day, you would be in serious danger of developing narcolepsy.  Political theatre can mean being partisan, but it shouldn't mean being demeaning or insulting, but unfortunately, we don't have much of a culture of self-deprecating wit in this country, and people resort to nastiness instead.  It's unfortunate, but it's not an excuse to turn QP into a monastic exercise.

We also cannot dismiss the obvious influence that television media has had on way in which QP has evolved over the past four decades.  What started out as playing for the cameras turned into delivering a buffet of media clips for the evening news.  This became almost codified in the ways in which parties would ask the same questions in both English and French, regardless of what the answer provided was, in order to have that clip available to media in both official languages.  It's partly why the flow of debate became so fragmented that, and the imposition of speaking lists that were designed to be fairer to a Commons that suddenly included a lot more parties in 1993, but it was also because the calculation changed from it being a debate for the people in the room than it was to provide those clips.  In the past couple of years, this has evolved further so that they are bypassing even the traditional media and going right to social media, which means generating clips of as many MPs as possible repeating the same angry points so that they can broadcast it over their various channels to targeted audiences.  This has changed the way in which debate has happened dramatically in the past two parliaments and has only accelerated since Andrew Scheer became Conservative leader.

The centralization of messaging in QP and in debate writ large is another endemic problem, but it's one that we can't separate from the broken way in which we choose party leaders in this country.  The more emphasis we place on leadership contests that produce leaders who feel they have the democratic legitimacy to lord their presence over their parties, and the more we hollow out parties to become the personality cults of those leaders, the more we've taken away their agency within debate and QP.  By reinforcing that the party is all about the leader and their brand as opposed to the MPs themselves, it is no longer about hearing what they have to say, but rather about their delivering the party line.  And this cannot be minimized when we look at the health of our democratic systems so long as they are given their talking points and so long as the parties all "strategize" how they're going to handle debate or QP, the more the theatre of it all becomes an exercise in stage management as opposed to passion or intelligence.

This is why we can't just tweak the standing orders around QP and hope that it'll fix things.  Eliminating heckling certainly won't do anything about the substantive problems that are at the root of the problems within our system.  Yes, the way in which the rules have been brought in over the years have helped to exacerbate problems the 35-second rules for QP has stultified debate and in many cases has made the scripting of ministers worse because they don't want to go over that clock.  If you need proof of what eliminating that ticking clock does for answers, then one should look no further than ministerial Senate QP, where the vast majority of ministers perform better and give more substantive responses because they have the time to do so.  (Note: Some ministers abuse this and meander around in their responses, but it's still generally better than what we get in 35 seconds).  The mere fact that we now allow scripts into the Commons is a rule change that needs to be rolled back and force MPs to speak extemporaneously.  It may not solve the talking point problem entirely, but it might at least force a bit of variety in what gets asked rather than verbatim repetition.  And eliminating the speaking lists will allow for more free-flowing debate and frustrate the ability of parties to "strategize."  That can only be an improvement.

But so long as we continue to fetishize party leadership through these quasi-presidential leadership contests, and marginalize the individual MPs by doing so, then there is no incentive for MPs to actually debate.  If they know that they are forced to simply read the lines prepared for them by the House Leader's office, then why bother?  And I've heard this from MPs themselves there is no incentive for them to do better.  And that's a sad indictment of how far the system has fallen.  But QP is but a symptom of the deeper rot, which starts at the leadership selection system.  Reform that, and the system as a whole will recover.