We've finished two weeks of Question Period in the new House of Commons chamber in the West Block, but if you think that the new surroundings meant a better tone, well, you'd be kidding yourself. While the tone of the first week back was completely lacklustre, it was in the second week back that we saw the usual ways in which QP has become so degenerate as a parliamentary exercise, and is instead a vehicle for gathering clips for social media and worse yet, the government has largely played into the opposition's hands.
Using QP as a vehicle for media clips has a history as old as the introduction of cameras into the House of Commons, which created particular rhythms of exchanges, where the party leaders would save their most devastating zingers for the last volley of exchanges in order to give themselves the last word, as it were. In the recent past, the desire to provide clips to both English and French media channels saw exchanges repeat in the other official language than first posed in order to ensure that those clips would be there something which stultified debate, and as one long-time political operative would say, Question Period is not a feast, but a buffet. There were no actual back-and-forth exchanges, just scripted talking points used for clips. The advent of social media, with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, those clips no longer needed to be tailored for the six o'clock news they could now be distributed immediately to their followers in order to drive home their message. And instead of just a singular repeated exchange in English and French, you soon had as many MPs as possible repeating the same questions in order to share across their social media channels.
There were two notable items in this past week that showcase how the pervasive need to create social media content has become. More to the point, it has sharpened to the point that it's not just creating social media content it's driving toward creating shitposts that they think will drive their message home to their base.
The first of these was a verbal gaffe that Justin Trudeau made on Tuesday under questions about taxes, and the Conservatives' misleading questions about the cancellation of boutique tax credits as "tax hikes," no matter that those credits were replaced with the non-taxable Canada Child Benefit.
"Yet again, Mr. Speaker, we see proof that the Conservatives simply do not understand that low-income families do not benefit from tax breaks because they do not pay taxes," Trudeau said. After loud heckles and the Speaker called to order, Trudeau corrected himself.
"Mr. Speaker, non-refundable tax breaks do not benefit low-income families. That is why we changed the Conservatives' way of sending tax breaks to millionaire families and instead giving the money directly to families that needed it."
It was too late by this point the damage had been done. Scheer got up later in QP to read from the Blues (the unofficial and uncorrected transcripts) to repeat Trudeau's first line as part of his ongoing line of attack that Trudeau was so wealthy and out of touch that he didn't think poor people pay taxes. (Note: This ongoing line of attack includes the lie that Trudeau was so wealthy that he didn't need to even manage his own family fortune. The reality is that Trudeau put his trust fund into a blind trust, per ethics rules, and in 2013, he disclosed that the total sum of said trust fund was $1.2 million, and netted him about $20,000 annually which isn't nothing, but it's certainly not what the Conservative attack line has been portraying).
By the next day, this gaffe, no matter that it was quickly corrected, was the subject of a series of Conservative shitposts that treated it as a gospel statement coming from the PM. It bears noting that Trudeau has been far less reliant on scripts since Parliament returned than he has been, but this reinforces why our politicians have become so scripted in the Commons because any gaffe becomes a point of attack.
Which leads us to the second incident, where the revelations in the Globe and Mail that someone in the PMO may have attempted to pressure former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to direct the Public Prosecution Service to drop the criminal proceedings against SNC-Lavalin in favour of a deferred prosecution agreement. Because Trudeau wasn't in the House, it was up to new justice minister David Lametti to repeat carefully crafted statements in response to the repeated and somewhat misleading questions from the Conservatives. More damning was on Friday, when Lametti's parliamentary secretary, Arif Virani, simply read the same script over and over again in response to more "simple yes or no" questions that were based on a premise that Virani could not answer.
What resulted, of course, was another series of shitposts from the Conservatives that played those clips of Virani reading the same statement to all of those "simple yes or no" questions from the Conservatives. And it was a self-inflicted wound for the Liberals because it didn't have to be like this.
Both Lametti and Virani could have varied their responses. They could have called out the Conservatives for asking a question that they could not have an answer to because they weren't omniscient. They could have called out the fact that the Conservatives simply repeated said misleading question over and over again. They could have used humour or wit to show the Conservatives were looking silly doing so, or to call out that they were trying to engineer the social media clips in order to mislead Canadians. There were so many things they could have done to keep QP from degenerating into the farce that it was. But this happens over and over, day after day. Parties find rewards in the tactics they employ, and it's why the degeneration has been allowed to continue as it has. This is why we can't have nice things in Parliament, and all Canadians lose as a result.
