House calls

Is anyone surprised that politicians in this province are being accused of bullying? They shouldn’t be. The truth is, politics in this province is nasty and brutish, and has been for years.

What do you call it — as happened during the Peckford administration — when every time a particular NDP politician stood to ask a question, Tory backbenchers made fun of his voice by constantly yelling “Squeak, squeak, squeak”?

Or when, during an election campaign, Liberal Leader Brian Tobin grabbed Tory Leader Lynn Verge’s hand on television at the gates of the Corner Brook mill and refused to let her go, even as she repeatedly tried to pull away?

What about sitting politicians belittling the intelligence and knowledge of Supreme Court justices, knowing full well that those justices can’t answer back?

We have a political system that favours the election of type-a personalities, and then schools them that belittling and shouting over your political opponents is actually praiseworthy. In the echo chamber of the House, it’s applauded and cheered on daily.

And it’s nothing new: here’s Telegram columnist Russell Wangersky, writing in 2012 about the Tories: “Last week, you could have watched as Lorraine Michael, the leader of the NDP, stood to ask a question and was ganged up upon, bullied, insulted and browbeaten by not one honourable member but by a whole bunch of them. It was the kind of mob-rule behaviour that every anti-bullying advocate in the country would recognize in milliseconds. If you did it in a school, you’d be expelled. If you did it in an office, you’d be suspended.”

Or this, from a Telegram editorial in 2010: “Whether the Speaker is willing to admit it or not, there are a number of Tory MHAS whose sole presence in the House appears to be to disrupt the proceedings by shouting anything and everything that comes into their heads. It’s not heckling and it’s not funny — it is bullying, and not only that, it is bullying that is essentially sanctioned by the Speaker and by a government that will not rein in its class clowns.”

Or columnist Pam Frampton, from 2014: “(A) nyone who tries to pass this off as the harmless cut-and-thrust of debate is full of it. It was bullying, insulting and disgusting.”

No one who has spent time in the House of Assembly during question period would be surprised that MHAS might be facing bullying complaints. Bullying in the House is well known — imagine what might happen behind closed doors.

Some argue it’s up to MHAS to police themselves, that it’s a matter of parliamentary privilege.

That ignores the fact that members of the House of Assembly used that kind of privilege to cut themselves cheques during the constituency allowance scandal.

It’s long past time for an intervention.