Speaker Andrew Scheer, assert yourself

If any comfort at all can be drawn from the banquet of idiocy that Question Period has become on Speaker Andrew Scheer’s watch, it is this: By granting discourtesy, disrespect and outright stupidity free rein, he allows the people who pay for it all to see, and to judge.

At specific issue, now as in the past, are the antics of one Paul Calandra, 44, Conservative member of Parliament for Oak Ridges-Markham, and parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Those are Calandra’s official titles.

Unofficially, Calandra is an enforcer — placed on point in QP each day, at the direction of his boss, to foil and blunt the opposition’s attacks. In the Commons context, he’s a bodyguard. In that sense, Calandra is merely a cog in a bigger wheel, which is as old as the British Parliament and has countless precedents in Canadian legislatures.

This delicate system only hangs together, however, if the enforcer treads a fine line of goading and annoying and ducking, while avoiding grotesque rudeness, flagrant stupidity and open contempt for the very notion of holding a question period, which de facto expresses contempt for democracy itself.

Here then, is Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair’s opening question in the House Tuesday, from Hansard: “Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has failed to answer clear questions about his ill-defined military deployment in Iraq. Yesterday Conservatives refused, once again, to answer in this House, but the member for Selkirk-Interlake stated on CPAC that the mission will end Oct. 4. Will the Conservative government confirm that the 30-day Canadian commitment in Iraq will indeed end on Oct. 4?”

Calandra’s response, on the PM’s behalf: “Mr. Speaker, there is a great deal of confusion with respect to the NDP position on Israel. I wonder if the Leader of the Opposition could confirm for me whether Alex Anderson, who identifies himself as a fundraiser at the New Democratic Party, speaks for the NDP when he says ‘eff’ the IDF and all who support them, and that he is sick and tired of the media BS trying to sell lies and hide an effing genocide. Does Alex Anderson speak for the NDP when he says these shameful things?”

Mulcair, rather patiently I thought, repeated his question. Calandra repeated his unrelated, expletive-laced declaration — whereupon Mulcair asked the Speaker to intervene. But rather than do so, let alone direct Calandra to answer, Scheer allowed him to repeat his non sequitur a third time. That prompted Mulcair to question the Speaker’s impartiality. For this temerity, the opposition leader lost the remainder of his questions.

Wednesday, Scheer sought to justify these actions, citing several precedents. His author- ity does not extend to judging whether a question has been answered, he said. He can determine when an MP can speak, whether his or her language is parliamentary or constitutes an unacceptable personal attack, but it’s not his job to judge whether any given answer is, in fact, an answer. Semantic content is, apparently, irrelevant. “That is why it is called question period, not answer period,” Scheer said, quoting his predecessor, Peter Milliken.

Which, if you think about it, is astonishing balderdash.

First, by this logic, it now becomes acceptable for a government MP to say anything at all in Question Period. Calandra could, when confronted with an opposition question, begin chanting in ancient Greek.

Second, Scheer is underplaying his own importance. In the British Parliament, Speakers rear up on their hind legs, bellow and holler when they feel the need. Within the Westminster tradition, precisely because so much rests on convention, the Speaker has broad leeway to use moral suasion — that is to say, to bellow and holler — when he or she feels it necessary to impose order. The trick is that they have to want to.

Andrew Scheer became Speaker of the House of Commons at age 32 — making him the youngest person to serve in this role in our history. For that reason, and because he came to office as a Tory, Scheer bears the special burden of having to occasionally demonstrate that he can master the bonfire of egos that is the House of Commons, especially on the governing side, to establish his impartiality, and frankly, his mojo.

Egregious buffoonery such as Calandra displayed Tuesday — his forays were notably absent in Question Period Wednesday and Thursday — will ultimately blow back on the government, if only because it was so over the top. But that isn’t the point. The Speaker’s job, in Question Period, is to preside. He can’t do that if he allows inanity to prevail utterly, making a mockery of the very institution in which he sits.