In this article in the NP, Kevin Libin notes the uncivil and unproductive nature of Question Period, where “the men and women who represent us hoot noisily a their parliamentary rivals, loudly spit impromptu comments like delusional street preachers, and phonily guffaw at corny one-liners.”
It is an embarrassing and childish spectacle, largely because virtually every question is an insult, and not an actual question. This yes-or-no “question” from Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez is exemplary:
“Will the Prime Minister keep on acting like a tin-pot dictator who ignores democracy?”
Obviously, opposition MPs weren’t looking for answers per se. When Ignatieff opened the fall session with the question “When will the government start listening to the real priorities of Canadians?” and, later, “When will the Prime Minister put an end to the politics of division and fear…” he wasn’t asking for a date and a time, and neither were opposition MPs like the NDP’s Glen Thibeault, who asked “When will the Conservatives stop playing wedge politics…”, or Lib Maria Minna, who demanded to know “When will the Conservatives stop making poor decisions with taxpayers’ money….”, or NDP MP Megan Leslie, who asked “When is the government going to put aside partisan games and shameless vanity…”
NDP leader Jack Layton, too, had a pressing and highly specific question about the government’s time frame:
“When will the Prime Minister realize that he is making bad decisions for ordinary people?”
Um, next Thursday, at 3:36 pm?
The opposition wasn’t just interested in knowing when, they also demanded to know why: “Why does the government choose to listen to the NRA and not to Quebeckers?” “Why is the Prime Minister so indifferent and incompetent…” “Why is the government determined to divide Canadians on this issue…” Ralph Goodale: “Why so out of touch with ordinary Canadians?” Bob Rae: “Why are the Conservatives prejudiced against democracy in Canada?” Liberal MP Geoff Regan: “Why can those characters not behave responsibly?” Ignatieff, again: “Why is the government so insensitive to the needs of these families…”
The prize for the most disingenuously, entirely rhetorical question has to go to Michael Ignatieff, who asked a question that began –
Is it any wonder, with that record…”
The only part of parliament that the news is likely to run is Question Period. Thus the infantile grand standing and the “Will the member from Kicking Horse admit he enjoys having sex with goats?” type questions.
Remove the cameras and you remove much of the motivation. For the dumb questions, that is, not for the sex with goats. Not that I have sex with goats. Or any motivation for it either, although that’s between me and the goats. If there were any goats, which there isn’t.
Rabbit, that is a very descriptive handle you have there.
“Jack Layton:
“When will the Prime Minister realize that he is making bad decisions for ordinary people?”
That’s the left. They want to make decisions for ”ordinary” people and they are endowed by nature to only make good ones.
Politics in this country, is and will be front and center before governing for a while. The PC’s are as much to blame as any other party in this country for the “divide and conquer” strategy. If they weren’t, they would have lost purely to sticking to their values which they campaigned on(which I wish they did). I realize and understand the argument that they wouldn’t win unless they compromised, but liberty is without compromise.
No party in this country is clean of crap!
In Taiwan, parliamentary debate deteriorates into fisticuffs:
http://www.break.com/usercontent/2010/1/taiwan-parliament-fight-1681725
now that would get me to watch CPAC !!!!
Um knacker you do know that the federal PCs don’t have any seats in parliament don’t you. The abbreviation for the party PMSH leads is CPC.
Thank you EBD for posting this. It does go against the MSM narrative that the CPC are the ones who are dragging down the House, but if the truth hurts, oh well.
Someone commented elsewhere that they thought the Liberal Rat Pack was the beginning of the spiral down for Question Period. The Reform Party didn’t help with their antics outside of the house, I am thinking that Mexican Hat dance thing here.
Is there a simple answer? I doubt it. If the press would ignore QP for a while, both print and TV, perhaps they would get back to actual questions and actual answers, but I doubt it.
Well “The Phantom” didn’t like my suggestion of epee’ swords so I gather they need to upgrade to close combat sabres!
After the melee’ settles you can count up how many Parliamentary pensions have been saved!!
Does the Criminal Code apply in the House of Commons so dueling could be allowed? Heaven knows the libel and slander laws get cut to the knees with regular abandon.
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
In the hierarchy of questions “What” and “How” are primary…”Where” and “When” define the minutiae and “Why” seeks motivation.
“Is” or “Are” questions are not questions at all.
Question competency is highly ignored.
When will the opposition parties stop asking questions that prove they are looney arseholes?
Joe, do you have a point or are you just trolling?
sylvanguy
Minutiae… but a worthwhile question fer sure.
“In the hierarchy of questions, ‘what’ and ‘how’ are primary. ‘Where’ and ‘when’ define the minutiae, and ‘why’ seeks motivation.”
Syncro, even the opposition’s “How” questions are rhetorical. Here are two of the “how” questions BQ MP Johanne Deschamps “asked” in Question Period:
and…
As for the “what” questions, here’s Bob Rae:
Entirely rhetorical questions are smears, not questions. When Pablo Rodriguez “asked” –
– he wasn’t asking a question, he was calling the Prime Minister a tin-pot dictator who ignores democracy. That’s fine – he’s free to say that – but it’s an insult to the voters’ intelligence to pretend it’s a “question” in Question Period, when the opposition gets to ask *questions*.
Yea Knacker, they are so to blame. Harper is trying to run a country, when you run a business or anything you have to focus on the big picture, not the pit yorkies like you and lenins nephew and the other Russian eyebrow that continuously yipe about nothing. Canada with our potential could be out of debt and #1 if it was run like a corporation. Ask yourself this knackers, who would you like in the boardroom, making important decisions of your multinational company,(if you had one), Steven Harper, or Jack and Jill and the walking eyebrow that twitches. Easy one, business creates wealth, something tenured idiot professors and career polititians know nothing about.
“When will the Prime Minister realize that he is making bad decisions for ordinary people?”
As a conservative I’d like an answer to that question.
When I think of all the top down malarky that the Conservative government has done that I wish they hadn’t done any of, I would have liked if they Prime Minister could have answered with a clear conscience, “We are Conservatives, we trust all important decisions to individual ordinary people, unlike the party of the Honorable Member who asks the question!”
Unfortunately that isn’t the case, but I’d still like an answer to that particular question.
I’m tired of government over-reach, intrusive regulation, and being treated like a retarded child in general.
There’s a reason it isn’t called “answer period”.
Mindless rhetoric and mean-spirited mocking is a long parliamentary tradition. Too bad we can’t do more about it.
The inability to answer any and all questions issues forth from the paucity of principle that this government has occasioned to stand upon.
If the CPC had been true to the principles of it’s base every attempt that the opposition has made to mock them would be only an exercise in mocking themselves.
EBD
True enough and my point. Information seeking is not at issue.
The real MP questions regarding problems riding constituents are having with government departments, etc., are written up, given to the minister who then forwards them to the civil servants for an explanation. The televised question period is little more than an outlet for cheap shots from bombastic egomaniacs.
“The televised question period is little more than an outlet for cheap shots from bombastic egomaniacs”
So true. The only answer, other than to turf the entire exercise, is for the Speaker to disallow moronic questions that really have no answer.
For example:
“That question cannot be answered and you are an idiot for asking it. Next question please.”
“That is not a question and you are a grandstanding waste of skin. Next question please.”
“That is the second ridiculous question that you have asked today and you will not be allowed another opportunity because you are obviously stupid. Next question please.”
A few sharp rebukes from the Speaker just might embarrass the fools into growing up.
Biff jr., the Speaker obviously can’t say “you are a grandstanding waste of skin,” – and I know you were just joking – but I agree with your essential underlying point. When an opposition MP asks a “question” like “Will the Prime Minister keep on acting like a tin-pot dictator who ignores democracy“, the speaker could certainly disallow the question for not being an actual question.
It’s called Question Period, not “Rhetorical Question Period.”
Bartinsky@12:32″Yea Knacker, they are so to blame. Harper is trying to run a country, when you run a business or anything you have to focus on the big picture, not the pit yorkies like you and lenins nephew and the other Russian eyebrow that continuously yipe about nothing. Canada with our potential could be out of debt and #1 if it was run like a corporation. Ask yourself this knackers, who would you like in the boardroom, making important decisions of your multinational company,(if you had one), Steven Harper, or Jack and Jill and the walking eyebrow that twitches. Easy one, business creates wealth, something tenured idiot professors and career polititians know nothing about.”
Huh???
This is absolutely stupid that I have to spell this out for you 2. I am “conservative” and “libertarian”. I voted for the Progressive Conservatives’s(CPC’s) both times, and most likely a third time unless a more fiscal libertarian “conservative” party comes about.
I totally understand “playing the game”, but I am sick of the game, and mine and my families life is more important than the game, so i am ticked off at the vote grabbing. Which every EFing party in this country is apart of. The better good is nothing more than a wash.
Rather than basically lying, lets lose with respect.
Politics is sh!+, and I am one Canadian who sees every politician in this country to blame because not one has made enough stink for us.
Knacker, have you ever phoned an MP and told them your concerns? Our MP is such a snivelling servant, he sees me coming and ducks into the ladies room just to hide from me, and he is supposedly a conservative. The only thing a polititian understands is not being re-elected, they need to be told the issues.
The political temperament of this nation is too immature and misguided to sustain a minority government. This minority has been a display of anti-intellectual fraudulent scandal mongering by the visionless opposition, aided and abetted by a cynical anti Harper media. The nation’s business is on hold due to petty partisan lust for governing control.
At one time (in my youth) I was an active partisan Liberal but having witnesses the decay of the party ideology from liberal democrat to statist socialisim, I see the party at war with itself and the Canadian people pushing an ideological agenda that is at odds with our founding principles. The parties left of the Liberals are all single issue axe grinders who see the tyranny of soviet style administration to be the only way their agenda can br forced down a sceptical, unwilling public’s throat.
The Tories have come full circle from monolithic top-down plutocrats to big tent populists (after co-opting Reform) to top-down statists again ( secretive, insular governing where public policy is made in a vacuum).
We need a tea Party populist uprising to break these successive minority governments and to break the party system of running its own self serving agendas. Vote for independent populists.
Take the cameras out. Award a prize for the stupidest question of the week by a poll question and televise that. Do you really, really want your name or party being a repeated winner?
Knacker states:
“Politics is sh!+,”.”
Socialism/Islam/communism/fascism, etc. = “sh!+”.
Mao Stlong ask: Which “sh!+” you wan?
You wan AlMoh’s Question Period (QP)?
Knacker is oblivious of this “sh!+”:
“The Forgotten Evil behind the Iron Curtain”
“Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky, Oxford University Press, 2010
The Firm: This Inside Story of the Stasi by Gary Bruce, Oxford University Press, 2010
An entire American generation has come of age since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. The new threat is Islamic radicalism, and only North Korea, a nation that has developed a nuclear weapons program and missile delivery systems, which it sells to other rogue regimes, gets much attention as a holdover of the “second world” — the Communist nations that were for 45 years our enemy in the Cold War. China is now our manufacturer of choice, and the collector of American dollars and U.S. debt. An authoritarian government has opened up the economy but little else. Russia pines for its former role but no longer has the influence it once had in Europe or elsewhere.
Two books from Oxford University Press provide a reminder of just what life was like on the other side during the last sixty years of the 20th century. The books offer a look at two forms of repressive Communist societies.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/the_forgotten_evil_behind_the.html
…-
Knacker omits this “sh!+”:
“Germany
A nation nice to Muslims”
“”Wulff announces Islam is part of Germany,” reports Berliner Zeitung. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany on 3rd October, President Christian Wulff reminded his fellow citizens that the slogan “We are a nation,” chanted by East German demonstrators in 1989, should also apply to the social integration of immigrants. The daily notes that the situation of Germany’s four million Muslims has been the subject of heated debate in the wake of the publication of a contentious book penned by Thilo Sarrazin. For Berliner Zeitung, Wulff, who is a Christian Democrat, simply wanted to communicate a relatively banal message: “We are a nice nation!””
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/news-brief-cover/352031-nation-nice-muslims
Hmm… Let me think back to when Harper was in oppositions… Was there any difference in QP then?
Most people only see QP as a clip on the evening news so “Will the Prime Minister keep on acting like a tin-pot dictator who ignores democracy?” is televised for one of two reasons. Either the network agrees that the PM is a tin-pot dictator ignoring democracy or the network is trying to show what an idiot the MP is.
I’m voting for the first.
“Kevin Libin notes the uncivil and unproductive nature of Question Period,”.
Libin’s words is a meme of the left-liberal/socialists: no dissent, no questioning; all is to be calm, civil, decorous, controlled, …
How many times has Liberal Iggy skipped Question Period? Why does Iggy skip Question Period?
Iggy is a cowardly pseudo-intellectual of the left. Iggy is tongue-tied; unwilling to dirty his mouth with “sh!+”.
Let Question Period ring out with all its jawing, jawing, talking, talking, hooting, etc.
Our democracy is messy, un-quiet, alive with human emotion.
Humans have been talking, hooting, yelling since we emerged from the cave. When we stop, we are dead.
Here is the decorum/civility of the left-liberals/communism: Red Unity.
Smile:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b5/May_Day_Parade_1957_Moscow.jpg
I’m not sure where all these attacks are coming from, and I certainly don’t remember ever supporting socialism, communism or fascism. I vote for the party that best represents my families interests, which at the moment is the “CPC”. In Alberta it is the Wildrose Alliance, which I also was a member of the board for my constituency until we moved to another part of Alberta. So I’m not sure exactly what your guys points are, but to call me names and upset me.
I have an opinion that every member of government in this country plays politics, and the most important part which is managing our affairs takes a back seat. It is very evident when we view QP. It reminds me of juniour high school, where when you have something valid to say it becomes muffled due to all the other kids not allowing you to speak and setting personal attacks. Sort of what is happening right here at the moment.
I’m positive that both of you have never read my posts on this blog before, if you were to then your premature attacks would never had happened.
I am not going to walk lock step to any political party, ever!. I would relish the idea of a Tea Party in this country. It’s much needed, and this doesn’t mean that some socialists wouldn’t be against it either. The fact that there is talk of a tea party in this nation means that even the CPC are failing the people who voted for them.
Do I still sound like a Marxist?
…and maz2. I believe you would agree that even the debate on the whole global warming issue would be taken to a more mature and civil manner. Having emotions isn’t a bad thing, but letting your emotions stifle a debate is counter productive. I’m glad 10:10 did their stupid commercial, now maybe us on the other side of the debate will be taken more seriously.
Much like other matters these days, it didn’t seem to be a problem when the Liberals held sway in Parliament for years..it’s only an issue when the Conservatives are in power.
A couple of observations:
1. There will not be an election until the mandated time. There will never be a point in time where all three of the oppo parties will see an opportunity to each gain more seats. The CP has no need to call an election as the economy is slowly improving, the warchest continues to grow faster than the opposition’s and iggy seems unable to find his feet while both jacko and gilles are eyeing the retirement exit post the next election and as a result will probably run lackluster campaigns.
2. the questions and conduct of the oppo parties make good fodder for a few attack ads. They will mesh well with the separatist coalition meme.
What is that? Celebrity Jeopardy?
I’ll take tar and feathers for 1000 Alex…
I must agree with biffjr…..this is the result of negligence on the part of the speaker…not a short-comming of the RULES.
This nonsense could be stopped in a heart-beat by the SPEAKER.
Problem is the SPEAKER would be pillaryed as a government biased partisan.
This could be resolved by the SPEAKER rising at the start of Question Period and declaring loaded questions would be ruled OUT OF ORDER.