HOLD THE APPLAUSE
Parliamentarians have been likened to trained seals — circus performers providing applause on cue — by everyone from fellow backbenchers to prime ministers. Sometimes they perform like clowns.
This week in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was apologizing for clumsily elbowing NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau “in the chest” and manhandling Conservative whip Gord Brown during a melee. Opposition members expressed theatrical umbrage, among them Conservative Peter Van Loan, who was the object of complaint four years ago for precipitating a juvenile contretemps characterized as a “near brawl”. All this sudden concern about disrespect in a hall where the scabrous invective routinely includes homophobic, sexist and racist slurs.
But back to the menagerie. Pierre Elliot Trudeau used trained seals to describe backbench MPs. Stephen Harper is accused of treating backbenchers that way by his own MPs. Former Social Credit cabinet minister Rafe Mair used the term regarding the B.C. legislature. And a series of all-party exit interviews of federal MPs by Samara, an organization which researches democracy, reported many felt like “trained seals” as they were whipped to staged applause during question period.
“If all you do is show up at question period and clap when it’s necessary, you can get pretty frustrated,” one MP told Samara. “How much time did I need to stand up there and clap like a trained seal?” complained another.
How much time, indeed? Independent MLA Vicki Huntington did the math. She discovered that backslapping, self-congratulatory eruptions waste the equivalent of seven question periods per legislative session. That amounts to about 100 questions foregone by opposition members thanks to clapping by the numbers. There’s another way to look at this: MLAs are paid a base rate of about $102,000 a year, with an additional $50,000 and change for cabinet ministers. That means question period costs taxpayers roughly $80 a minute.
When Huntington sought to have the legislature restrict applause to appropriate moments, the circus performers instead rose as a pod and, to a loud, self-congratulatory standing ovation, voted her down, upholding the not-so-great parliamentary tradition of trained seals and wastrels everywhere.
Well, not exactly everywhere. Applause like this has been banned in the Mother Parliament for more than 300 years.