Source: CBC News: Speaker Andrew Scheer Warns Mulcair and Others over Bias ClaimsSource: Library of Parliament: Standing Orders, Chapter One, Section 11.2 Anyone who has bothered to turn on the news during Question Period over the last, oh I’d say nine years, probably finds themselves in a continuing series of
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Canadian Political Viewpoints: To Hell With Tradition
Source: CBC News: Speaker Andrew Scheer Warns Mulcair and Others over Bias Claims
Source: Library of Parliament: Standing Orders, Chapter One, Section 11.2
Anyone who has bothered to turn on the news during Question Period over the last, oh I’d say nine years, probably finds themselves in a continuing series of disbelief when the whole spectacle is over. This wasn’t a trend that was started by the Harper Conservatives, but it was certainly perfected by them. Especially when one views the actions of one Paul Calandra.
Calandra rose out of the fall of Dean Del Mastro taking Dean’s place as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister; or more aptly, the PM’s mouthpiece when the PM isn’t in the House of Commons. Calandra made name, and a reputation, for himself when he served as Harper’s ‘deflector shield’ with regards to questions surrounding Mike Duffy and the Senate Expenses Scandal.
Calandra’s non-answers, outright dodges, and ridiculous non-sequiturs involving his family and pizza shops set a new low for decorum within the House of Commons. When it was all said and done, I think most Canadians thought the bar could not get any lower. It seems we all completed underestimated Paul Calandra.
Last Tuesday, Tom Mulcair rose to ask questions on Canada’s involvement in fighting ISIS/ISIL in Iraq. Enter Paul Calandra, who rejected the premise of the question put to him and instead went off on a tangent about Israel and whether or not Mulcair agreed with a position posted by a reported party fundraiser on Facebook.
Mulcair appropriately laughed off Calandra’s first response; even putting in a jibe about understanding Calandra’s confusion with I countries in the Middle East, but the question was about Iraq not Israel. Mulcair repeated the question, and again Calandra rose and provided more or less the same response.
Mulcair appealed to the Speaker at this point, noting that there are rules regarding relevance and asked that they be enforced. Again, Calandra spouted non-sense with response to the question put to him.
Of course, this led to Mulcair making a comment with regards to the Speaker’s impartiality (or lack thereof), which led to the Speaker finally taking action but against Mulcair and not Calandra. Mulcair was stripped of his remaining questions for the day, and Question Period moved on.
What followed was quite the media firestorm.
Numerous political reporters called it an unbelievable display, unheard of before in Canadian Parliamentary history. And then came the chorus of talking heads: some of the side of Mulcair, and others on the side of Speaker Andrew Scheer. (Unsurprisingly, no one really rushed to Calandra’s side.)
And so began a question of who was in the right and who was in the wrong.
Many condemned Mulcair for challenging the Speaker’s impartiality; while others agreed that Mulcair was right to challenge Scheer on the issue. So, how is it possible that so many of Canada’s best informed political minds could have such differing views? Surely, the laws of the land that govern the role of the Speaker and the House of Commons would prevent any sort of casual interpretation?
Well, written meet tradition.
Mulcair’s defenders were quick to point to House Standing Order 11.2,which states:
It’s not uncommon, and Scheer has done it often, for Speakers to reference past Speakers and their decisions when they make a judgement on something. That creates a lot of precedent that often flies in the face of the written rules and powers for the Speaker. Just because a Speaker in 1976 chose to read a rule a certain way, or ignore it, doesn’t exactly mean the same interpretation holds in 2014 for a similar, yet different, situation.
That brings us to the final question: What do we do about it?
Well, the NDP is trying to bring change forward, with a motion introduced this week to give the Speaker explicit authority to act during Question Period. However, the Conservatives have attacked the motion.
House Leader Peter Van Loan has argued about the motion turning Question Period into a “one way street” that would tie the hands of the government.
Well, here’s the good for the goose and gander argument. If the Conservatives defend Scheer’s inaction based on convention and tradition, then they need to look back to the Speaker James Jerome. In 1974, Jerome ended the practice of allowing Parliamentary Secretaries (like Paul Calandra) to pose questions to the opposition.
Furthermore, if we want to stick to convention, Ministers are conventionally not allowed to ask questions since they often provide answers on behalf of the government; the rules do not forbid Ministers asking questions, but convention says that only Private Members should do so.
So, conventionally speaking, the government side of the House shouldn’t be asking questions from the front bench (Cabinet) at least.
Van Loan, and his party it seems, want to have their cake and eat it too in this regard. Let us keep this part of the conventional tradition, but disregard this other. Either they have to commit wholeheartedly to whole bundled mess that is Parliamentary Tradition, or they have to work with the Opposition Parties to codify new and clear rules.
The NDP motion is looking doomed to fail thanks to no support from the Conservative bench. So for now, we’re stuck with the notion of conventional tradition as the guiding principle for how our Parliamentary system is administered.
The bigger problem, as I think we’ve illustrated, is not that the Speaker actually needs more powers (they already have them), they just need the will to exercise them.
People have already drawn comparisons to our Speaker and the Speaker of the House in the UK Parliament. Many have linked to the Speaker shutting down speakers from the floor, including the Prime Minister. Yes, Parliamentary systems evolve and we should be looking to other Parliaments to see what sort of improvements have been made and should be adapted here.
But until we accept that written rule and authority has more credence than past ‘convention’, all the reform in the world won’t do a thing.
Canadian Political Viewpoints: To Hell With Tradition
Source: CBC News: Speaker Andrew Scheer Warns Mulcair and Others over Bias ClaimsSource: Library of Parliament: Standing Orders, Chapter One, Section 11.2 Anyone who has bothered to turn on the news during Question Period over the last, oh I’d say nine years, probably finds themselves in a continuing series of
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