The past week has seen the debate over how exactly MPs should return to the House of Commons during the current global pandemic to ensure that we still have a functioning parliament while still maintaining good practices like physical distancing, and most of that debate has been ridiculous. The dance between the Conservatives insisting on a greater number of in-person sittings in a skeleton parliament and MPs from other parties presuming that somehow virtual sittings will be the solution that everyone is looking for has not exactly been illuminating, particularly as accusations fly back and forth that this is simply about political theatre and partisanship, or that other parties are trying to cover for the prime minister ducking public accountability.
The demand for virtual sittings rests on the assumption of both their feasibility and desirability. These calls are bolstered online by ranks of meathead partisans and overconfident tech bros, where their argument consists of "Surely in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand-and-Twenty we can teach MPs to use Zoom," simultaneously believing that virtual sittings will be paragons of civility, while also fomenting conspiracy theories that the Conservatives only want in-person sittings in a skeleton parliament for the sole purpose of dropping a surprise non-confidence motion while they sneakily fill the Chamber with their own MPs after everyone else kept theirs to a minimum.
Rest assured that no surprise non-confidence motions can happen under the rules of parliamentary procedure this isn't The Phantom Menace. And while outgoing Conservative leader Andrew Scheer may alternate between being a smirking doofus and a braying doofus, unable to read a room with any hint of political judgment, he's also not politically suicidal. Nobody is going to force an election in the middle of a global pandemic, especially as it would mean they would be decimated at the polls for being so nakedly opportunistic.
As for virtual sittings akin to the kind of "hybrid" ones being piloted in Westminster, they remain something of a pipe dream at present technological capacity is challenged by our need for simultaneous interpretation, while many parts of the country have spotty internet that would make connection difficult, leading to immediate questions of privilege regarding the ability for MPs to participate. And if you've seen what kind of a gong show a teleconference with a dozen people can turn into, multiply that to nearly three hundred MPs at once. And then, realize that any ability for virtual proceedings made now will be demanded to be continued after this crisis is over, which will lead to the eventual depopulation of Parliament as MPs prefer to stay in their ridings and dial in. This will be the demise of our Parliament.
If we will get some in-person sittings in the weeks to come, as has been agreed to, what about the looming spectre of political theatre that these "accountability sessions" will entail? While they won't include Question Period the sessions are to be treated as a kind of special committee rather than a regular sitting I would argue that some political theatre is still necessary, even in serious times like these. Why? Because they give voice to some of the sentiment that is in the public mood, whether that's the naiveté of demands that the government simply cut cheques for the nation, the more toxic need to find a villain for the pandemic, or the frustrations of people who want to re-open the economy. It becomes incumbent upon the government at that point to deftly communicate why those positions are wrong and we know that this government's inability to communicate is their Achilles' Heel.
Some pundits, like Susan Delacourt, decry this need for theatre, and seem to believe that there is such a thing as an apolitical democracy. She points to the daily teleconferences that MPs have with government officials, as described by Elizabeth May and Pierre Poilievre during the emergency sitting to pass Bill C-15, as what is needed right now.
"This sounds an awful lot like democracy and accountability — all managed without theatrics and tiresome political potshots," Delacourt wrote, apparently forgetting that these calls are not public, and that we have no transparency as to what these MPs are bringing forward to the government, or how responsive the government is. But hey, they're done without theatre.
"As long as anyone is talking about Question Period as an essential service, with the parties locked in their same old ways, we can assume that we're going to be stuck with polarized politics long after the pandemic is over," Delacourt concludes.
I get that her lament is that the golden age of accountability in QP is gone, but thus far, we have actually seen these "polarized" parties rise to the occasion in the current situation. During Monday's skeleton QP, done without applause or heckling, we saw some actual substantive question-and-response exchanges (mostly), including the odd definitive rebuttal to some of the concern trolling that the Conservatives have been engaged in when it comes to issues like the shipments of that personal protective equipment to China when the global effort was centred around trying to contain the virus in Wuhan. This was the kind of QP that most people dream about, but it is dismissed out of hand as "non-essential."
Politics needs to be seen to be believed and to be held to account. That's going to mean theatre, even if Canadian MPs are terrible at it. Would that we could have witty, self-deprecating repartee like they do in Westminster, however we lost that ability because of decades of perverse incentives. Regardless, relying on MPs to work things out behind the scenes because it avoids the louder, shoutier bits, is the first step in losing accountability. Witness PEI, where the leader of the opposition has been cutting backroom deals with the government in the name of "civility," but insists that he's still holding them to account but you just can't see it. That's not how democracy works, and we should beware those who lament the exercise of accountability, even if some of the people exercising it are braying doofuses.
Photo Credit: CBC News