In the wake of some recent fact-checking done on statements made by Andrew Scheer of late, the backlash from his partisans has come fast and fierce, and even when faced with proof that Scheer and his MPs have been wilfully disingenuous in their presentation of facts and figures, his supporters have either dismissed it as "fake news," or excused it by insisting that spinning things in such a way is just providing what "feels true" to the narrative they're trying to build that Justin Trudeau is a spendthrift, or that he's too busy virtue-signalling to get the job done of sealing the deal with NAFTA or the TPP, or any number of torqued suppositions.  Rebuttals of either sort have a very particular aspect to them, however that the defenders must be vocal in pushing back against any suggestion that their side is being less than honest, because they need to be seen to be vocal.

Political theatre is nothing new and is not in and of itself a bad thing.  But where this starts to take a dark turn is where all outrage becomes performative, and where all issues are blown up or conflated in such a way that erodes the truth in order to make a point.  This is why I've grown increasingly concerned with the way that Question Period is being used to further the performative outrage for the sake of gathering clips for social media channels.  But it's not just Question Period that is where the performative politicking happens, and it's slowly infecting all aspects of our political discourse, whether it's regular legislative "debate," or at committee.

Part of this is an outgrowth of there being cameras in the room, and we've seen aspects of this happen in various forms before, but rarely to the extent that we're seeing it now.  The advent of the ability to easily clip those videos was first mostly used benignly, uploading them to YouTube in order to put them on their webpages to show their constituents how hard they're working in Ottawa, and they would usually feature the MP in question mentioning the hard-working people of [insert riding name here] as the awkward shout-out in their speech or introduction to their committee intervention.  It didn't really become problematic until certain partisan bad actors would start to creatively trim the videos to show their opponents in a bad light, particularly in questions and answers at committee.  Witness the allegation that Bill Morneau called Lisa Raitt a "Neanderthal" at Finance committee when he actually didn't not that you'd know it from the carefully edited video that Conservative surrogates circulated.  And we're only going to see more of this kind of thing going forward.

It's not that this shouldn't be about holding the government to account either that is, after all, the point of parliament.  But it needs to be done on a basis that is grounded in reality.  Making angry accusations on the basis of made-up number or with disingenuous questions that don't have real answers only insinuations is not accountability.  And this is what we're seeing more of.  It's performative, and part of the problem is that the Liberals are very bad at responding to it.  We get canned pabulum responses that only vaguely resemble answers.  And when Liberals do push back, the performance tends to border on sanctimony rather than a rebuttal.

It doesn't just happen in the Commons we're seeing strains of this in the Senate as well, where there is a very vocal double-standard that often comes out whenever debate happens.  If senators from partisan caucuses disagree with something based on a principle or shared belief, they're dismissed as being partisan, but when Independent senators disagree with something based on principle or shared belief, it's because they're principled, and more to the point, they'll congratulate themselves for it.  I've listened to a number of debates where this happened, where partisanship and "independence" are both being performed for an audience, only for one that won't vote for them but will act as proxies in the broader political battle between Liberals and Conservatives.

All of this comes down to a broader question can we actually have political debate any longer when everything has gone from being about the substance of issues, to performing for their respective bases?  Can debate actually be used to persuade any longer, or is it simply about playing to their base by means of social media clips?  Now, there are still moments that happen where persuasion based on debate happens the most recent example was when Senator Diane Griffin laid out the case for why there was unfairness for rail users in the Maritime provinces in the government's omnibus transport bill, and it persuaded enough senators to vote to send the amendments in question back to the House of Commons for a second time (where they weren't debated but shut down unceremoniously by the government), but it's a rare example.  I'm not sure that it actually happened with the assisted dying bill earlier this session, despite the marathon hours of debate around it, because in the end, most MPs who got up to speak all hewed to the same points about how difficult an issue it was, and how they had to balance conscience rights.  While there were some impassioned speeches on all sides, the vast majority were simply performative, ticking off the boxes that they felt needed to be ticked.

And if this is what political "debate" is being reduced to, the bigger question remains can we do anything about it?  It's a fraught question because it relies to a certain extent on the parties being good-faith actors, and there's nothing you can do to legislate or regulate that.  Yes, changes to the Standing Orders to ban prepared speeches and speaking lists will help, but only to frustrate some of the centralized coordination, which parties would adapt to in their own ways.  Ultimately it would rely on their audience telling them that they don't find it acceptable, but if this performance simply encourages further performance from their adherents, can that be an effective check on the behaviour?  I'm not sure, and it's why I'm very worried about the direction we're headed in.