Madness in the House prelude to a reckoning nd
Parliament has familiar ring of 2005
In days like these, it is useful to remember that there have always been days like these.
Question period may have needed a “viewer discretion advised” warning on Tuesday, when Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre was ejected from the House of Commons and his caucus followed him out of the door.
But anyone who talks about “a new low” in parliamentary behaviour has forgotten their history.
The spring of 2005 is analogous to today’s situation: a Liberal government apparently in its death throes, propped up by the NDP and confronted by a Conservative opposition party that was impatient to have its turn at governing.
Nineteen years ago, the House of Commons was more like a padded lunatic asylum, inhabited by increasingly unhinged inmates, than a legislature.
The House was divided almost equally in half, with the Liberals and the NDP on one side and the Conservatives and Bloc on the other, with two Independent MPS holding the balance of power.
Inky Mark, then a Conservative MP, claimed he’d been approached by the Liberals to take a patronage appointment if he stepped down.
The then Liberal Treasury Board minister, the late Reg Alcock, said that if he was going to recruit someone, he’d pick someone “higher up the gene pool.” Mark, who was of Chinese descent, responded that his biological makeup was being attacked by the same kind of genetic superiority that led to the Holocaust.
Cynicism, contrivance and manipulation ran rampant, and it looked as if the country was headed for an election, particularly after the opposition parties defeated the government on a procedural motion that called on it to resign.
Opposition leader Stephen Harper invoked Oliver Cromwell, telling then Prime Minister Paul Martin: “It’s time — for God’s sake go.”
The following week, Martin’s government scheduled the budget vote the day after one Conservative MP’S surgery, unveiled Conservative MP Belinda Stronach as its newest cabinet minister and persuaded a gum-chewing former Conservative MP turned Independent, Chuck Cadman, to side with them. The confidence vote was tied 152 to 152, leaving Speaker Peter Milliken to break the tie by supporting the government and averting an election. Liberals threw paper in the air in relief, but the whole sordid affair was hardly cause for celebration.
The late Ed Broadbent said in his retirement speech in the House that spring that he wouldn’t let high school kids watch question period if he were a teacher. It was unsuitable for under-18s and unwatchable for adults. The fever only abated when MPS went home for the summer.
As it turned out, it was merely a postponement of the inevitable for Martin. NDP leader Jack Layton withdrew his support that fall and the country experienced a rare winter election.
There is a similarly desperate whiff in the air this week.
The Liberals have spent most of the past year on the ropes but have somehow been induced to come out swinging.
Justin Trudeau seems to have been reminded of the old Keith Davey adage that you’re on the winning team until you lose.
The former Liberal national campaign director once counselled that, in politics, if your opponent calls you fat, you call them bald. “Never be trapped on the defensive,” he said.
Trudeau has taken that old Liberal ethos to heart.
If question period on Tuesday had been a hockey game, the prime minister would have been hit with an instigator penalty, being first to bring up Poilievre’s alleged courting of right-wing nationalist group Diagolon before the Opposition leader called Trudeau a “practising racist.”
(The premise of the Diagolon allegation is that Poilievre stopped to meet a group of carbon-tax protesters in Atlantic Canada last week and was filmed emerging from an RV with a Diagolon flag doodled in marker on the door.)
It was Trudeau who escalated things on Tuesday by calling Poilievre “spineless” (without being reproached by Speaker Greg Fergus), before the Conservative leader referred to “wacko policies by a wacko prime minister” and was given his marching orders.
On Wednesday, Poilievre seemed to have realized that being slung out of the House was not a good look for a prime minister in waiting and behaved as if he’d been shot with a horse tranquillizer dart.
Trudeau, meanwhile, took every opportunity to ask him to reassure Canadians that he does not support extreme right-wing nationalist organizations like Diagolon. Poilievre dismissed the allegation as false, but at some point he should probably expand on how unlikely it would be for a would-be prime minister to back a group that the RCMP says wants to accelerate the collapse of western governments — particularly one whose leader threatened to sexually assault his wife. (Poilievre responded by calling the group “losers” and “dirtbags.”)
But then he’d be trapped on the defensive — not a natural place for him to be, as was clear when he urged Trudeau in the House to stop “trying to score political points.”
The Liberal party’s new inclination to get its retaliation in first was also evident in the decision to carve out the capital gains inclusion rate increase from the budget into a stand-alone bill. This is a potentially astute move. As a recent Ekos poll reported, when voters are asked if they think increasing spending on priority areas like housing, paid for by tax increases on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, is a step in the right direction, a majority of them say yes.
If the government can successfully make its case, and the Conservatives are on the record voting against, it becomes a standard to rally around.
But ... and it is a big but, the Liberals are so distrusted that it’s become hard for them to win any argument — even if people agree with the basic tenets.
A new National Post– Leger poll has the Conservatives 21 percentage points ahead: 69 per cent of voters are dissatisfied with the Liberal government, and only 16 per cent think Justin Trudeau is the best candidate to be prime minister.
There is a new pugnacity to the Liberals. They are making a fight of it, just as an earlier incarnation did in 2005. This means the undignified madness will only get worse.
But the day will come when the NDP feels it is in its interests to withdraw its support, just as Layton did 19 years ago. At that stage, the race will not necessarily go to the swift or the battle to the party that’s 20 points ahead. But that’s the way to bet.