REALITY TV IN OTTAWA. COYNE,
Reading the lives of the greats, one is constantly reminded of how small their world was.
Periclean Athens, birthplace of Plato and Socrates, had a population of just 300,000, half of them slaves. Renaissance Florence, city of Leonardo and Michelangelo, had fewer than 70,000 inhabitants. The London to which Shakespeare was drawn in its Elizabethan golden age was a city of perhaps 200,000.
The English Civil War was fought for control of a territory containing fewer than five million people; the American Revolutionary War, barely half that. Even at the time these were relatively insignificant numbers, compared to China’s 200 million-plus.
And yet the people of those days were convinced they were engaged in struggles of great moment, their lives filled with an urgency most of us never approach. Of course, when the consequence of defeat is not shame or embarrassment but death, it tends to raise the stakes a little; add in the fate of your mortal soul — for God was watching, and if not taking part, at least keeping score — and you can see why they took it all so seriously.
But I think an equal part was the limitations of their horizons. When your world is defined by the boundaries of a city, a country, or a time — when whatever is beyond is dimly perceived at best — your own role in the proceedings will seem the larger. Had even the greatest among them been able to see how small the world they bestrode really was — had any of those cinquecento Florentines said to themselves: “Wait a minute, this centre of art and culture, glory of the age, is about the size of a 21st century North Bay” — they mightn’t have bothered. A certain element of delusion is necessary to greatness.
I am thinking of all this as I consider the question of cameras in the House of Commons. Or rather reconsider, for I have been a supporter until now.
A great many things have contributed to Parliament’s decline, but I wonder if it is entirely coincidental that the age in which the Commons mattered, when a good speech could turn a debate and debates were of consequence and giants walked the Earth, predates its televisation.
Look at it from the point of view of a member of Parliament asking a question or giving a speech in the Commons. Before the television cameras were introduced in 1977, who was your audience? Who were you trying to persuade, or impress? Who graded you on your performance? It was the people within its walls — your fellow MPs, mostly, plus the press. That was your world: people who were committed to Parliament, and knowledgeable about its traditions, and who themselves believed in its importance. For it was their world, too.
Perhaps they were wrong to believe this. Perhaps it was no more important, objectively, than it is now. Except that they believed it was, and believing it to be so, acted accordingly. And as it was important to its participants, so that importance was communicated to the country, which after all had no evidence to the contrary. If it was a delusion, it was a shared delusion.
The Pipeline Debate, for example, transfixed the nation for weeks, and why not: the government had presumed to limit debate on a bill — in peacetime! For in those days to limit Parliament’s right to debate was unthinkable. Today it is a weekly occurrence. That, too, is possibly not coincidental.
Consider what it means to speak in Parliament today. You are only partly speaking to your fellow MPs. You are acutely aware that your real audience is the viewers at home, or at least the television producers waiting to take a clip for the news. As such the chamber itself inevitably dwindles in significance, along with everything that goes on within. It is not the world, after all, but just a particularly shouty little corner of it.
Worse, the world outside is not even watching. It would be one thing if there were millions of Canadians tuning in. But as in fact the audience is largely limited to journalists and other shutins, the effect is simply to reinforce the sense of pointlessness and insignificance. All of that posturing for the cameras, all that canned outrage, and for what? Maybe a few hundred views on YouTube, if you’re lucky.
But of course no one’s watching. Have you watched Parliament? It would be unexciting enough, without the help of the rules governing the parliamentary television service, which allow only a single, fixed camera on a speaker at a time — no cutaways or reaction shots. Not only does this drain the proceedings of any drama, but it presents a stilted, distorted version of what goes on. Witness the little charade wherein a platoon of a speaker’s colleagues are assigned to occupy what would otherwise be the empty chairs around him. The public has been given the pretence of a direct, unfiltered view of Parliament, one that is vastly less interesting than the real thing.
Either get the cameras out, then, or let them all the way in. Let there be several cameras around the chamber. Let them roam about, pan in, pan out, pan across. Let the broadcast cut between them, or put them all online and let viewers choose among them. Free them to show reactions, heckles, and otherwise capture the reality of the place.
If Parliament is no longer a world unto itself, let it at least have some genuine connection with the wider world. If MPs no longer perform for each other, let them at least perform for someone. If we can no longer have the delusion, let us at least have the truth.