Perhaps the most telling impression of all: this instructor of Canadian Politics, an academic who so enjoyed the study of the institutions and practices of government that he made his life's work doing so, and sharing it with willing (and some not-so-willing!) students, would be ashamed to take one of his classes to question period.

What has Parliament become, if the people who teach its history and operations are too embarrassed to show their students how it "functions" today?

I agree it was interesting, although he drifts off at the end into rather inaccurate stereotyping of the Conservative Party and a rather wooly-headed plea for some muddled version of parliament as a place for doing good, rather than politics.

Still, an interesting way to raise questions. I don't think his suggestion that parliament in Ottawa is so acrimonious because it doesn't sit as often as it used to. His statistics are skewed a bit by stopping in 1945. Parliament used to sit for far less time, but I'm not sure it was less harmonious as a result. As well, no provincial legislature sits for as long as the Federal House does, as fars as I know – are they less collegial, more hostile, less productive than parliament? If not, then the apparent increasing shortness of parliamentary sessions seems unlikely to be the cause of the current rancour.