The continued decline of our Parliament from a once serious and proud institution to a deeply unserious clown show accelerated at an alarming rate over the fall sitting, particularly in the House of Commons, thought the Senate has not been immune. As the world becomes an increasingly dangerous place, with the climate emergency now in full swing, the international rules-based order under assault by Russia and its allies, liberal democracy in the West under siege from far-right actors and the likes of Viktor Orbán as he tries to position himself as a leader in post-liberal politics, Canada is on a precipice. This should be a moment where our political class wakes up and realizes that we have a lot of challenges staring us in the face, and we should be serious adults in trying to address them. That is not what is happening, and the incentives are no longer there politically for this to happen.
Things began in late summer with a Cabinet shuffle and a Liberal caucus retreat that was about the party expressing their frustration in a leader who is getting long in the tooth, and whose staff have been creating problems for the caucus as a whole. It wound up with Trudeau surviving the day, and his caucus more or less coming together, but promised action on the housing crisis, which the federal government had finally woken up to, was still some weeks away. Meanwhile, trying to remind the government about their previous “deliverology” philosophy seemed to fall on deaf ears as they convinced themselves their plunging poll numbers was simply a matter of not communicating enough, rather than of not showing results.
Things seemed to pick up in late September when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Ottawa, and gave a speech to a joint session of Parliament, but the high of that event was quickly shattered in the days that followed when it became clear that the Speaker, Anthony Rota, had introduced a constituent in the gallery who had fought for a Nazi unit in the Second World War, and called him a “Canadian hero.” Rota epitomized the unseriousness that has beset our Parliament, more concerned with showing off and being everyone’s friend than he was in doing the serious work of being Speaker, and even after he spent a weekend being berated for his judgment in making that introduction in the Chamber, he still tried to hang onto his job before the House Leaders had to gang up on him and make it clear that it was untenable.
Once Rota resigned, and the process to elect his replacement got underway, MPs once again decided not to be serious about the task at hand. Rather than choose the woman who had been doing the job of assistant Deputy Speaker for years in competent fashion, and who had taken on non-partisan roles in the years leading up to this, they instead chose the much, much more partisan Greg Fergus, who while affable, had absolutely no experience in the role of being Speaker, and the Conservatives immediately tried to undermine him publicly. Fergus didn’t help himself as he started peacocking, and within weeks, found himself the subject of a privilege motion, and later a committee report recommending a fine and another apology, because he didn’t have enough foresight and judgment not to record a video for a provincial party friend while in his robes and in his official office. It remains to be seen if he can maintain his role with two opposition parties looking to remove him from the job.
The government, trying to recapture its economic credentials with the communications exercise of “Team Economy” press conferences every Tuesday morning, and some actually sound housing policies finally rolling out, stepped on yet another rake in announcing a “pause” on the carbon price for home heating oil nationally, but because Trudeau made the announcement with all of his Atlantic Canadian MPs behind him, it looked like he was trying to disproportionately benefit one region in order to salvage his polling numbers there. It also undermined the integrity of the carbon pricing regime, and set off a frenzy of demands for more carve-outs, for all home heating (never mind the price differential for heating oil versus other forms), and for on-farm fuels that aren’t already exempt, and this in turn led to some of the worst abuses of parliament in recent memory.
In the leadup to several votes making these demands, the Conservatives turned Question Period into a nihilistic exercise in clip-gathering, repeating the same scripts over and over again but changing the MP they are trying to single out for shitpost videos that would be triggers for their flying monkeys to harass and intimidate those MPs. This also got used against Senators who moved a routine procedural motion so that more senators could join the debate on a bill the Conservatives decided was a pressing wedge on the carbon price they could weaponized, and when a couple of Conservative senators also joined in with the intimidation tactics, one of them in person rather than simply online, things have become incredibly heated in that Chamber as well.
To cap off just how unserious this has all become, Pierre Poilievre spent the last couple of weeks shilling for a disinformation “documentary” on the housing crisis he produced, while engaging in some of the dumbest procedural tactics to try and force the government’s hand on carbon price carve-outs, with a vote marathon on the Estimates (which had nothing to do with the carbon price, and only served to punish the staff of the House of Commons who had to put in overtime to make this happen), and make empty threats to extend the sitting into the holidays, even though there is a fixed calendar and he couldn’t do that, plus it would actually benefit the government because they’d have additional time to push through their legislation. And in forcing the marathon, Poilievre seemed to actually unite the Liberal caucus, which had been grousing pretty hard over Trudeau in the weeks leading up to it.
The absolute decay in what is happening in Parliament was on full display, in large part because nobody is actually worrying about public policy any longer—nearly everything is now just about their comms strategies, and pushing it out over social media. Everything is just performance—substance has almost entirely left the building, and every party shares the blame in this. Canadians cannot afford for our political leaders to be taking their eye off the ball at such a critical juncture in history, and yet all we have to show for this are stupid games that are eroding our institutions. It’s time for all parliamentarians to grow up, before it’s too late.
