Over the past few weeks they have had useful sessions and policy announcements on pensions, governance, parliamentary officers, job creation, child care, Senate reform, health care, and Afghanistan, to name a few. None of it is bang-down-the-door-and-stop-the-presses stuff, but that’s good. It’s just solid, steady government work, and much-needed cred-building as the party builds momentum toward its big thinkers conference in Montreal at the end of March.
The broader lesson is that the cut and thrust of the Commons may be overrated as a mechanism of accountability. According to the House of Commons compendium, question period’s main aim is “to seek information from the government and to call it to account for its actions,” which is like saying the primary purpose of ice fishing is to catch fish. As the saying goes, there’s a reason why they don’t call it “answer period.” Question period may not be obsolete, but there’s no reason those 45 minutes per day have to dominate everything that happens when the House is sitting. After all, over in the mother of Parliaments in the U.K., the PM only submits for his ritualized hazing for a half-hour once a week.
Weird, isn’t it? In one of those great reversals of fortune that only politics can serve up, it’s now the Conservatives that look scared and directionless. Meanwhile, it might turn out that prorogation is the best thing to have happened to the Liberals, letting the party mount an effective opposition, and establish itself as a legitimate government in waiting.
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