There’s a bad recycled joke in Ottawa about how the government’s reluctance to provide complete or informative responses in the House of Commons each afternoon should come as no surprise. It’s called question period, not answer period, the gag goes. But, in some fairness, answering questions put to it is only one of the options officially available to the government during question period. Ministers can also: defer the question; take the question as notice; explain why they can’t give an answer at that moment; or say nothing at all.
So, depending on the interpretation of those rules, the government has the option to engage in either a discussion or a dialogue with the opposition. And those are technically different.
A discussion, physicist and theorist David Bohm wrote, “really means to break things up,” and “emphasizes the idea of analysis, where there may be many points of view, and where everybody is presenting a different one.” The problem? It doesn’t “get us very far beyond our various points of view” and, importantly, even if you use someone else’s argument to back up your own, in the end, “the basic point is to win the game.” And if that game is merely to make the other side look like idiots, then baseless accusations and meaningless bragging is acceptable. Which generally describes the House of Commons currently.
A dialogue, on the other hand, doesn’t have a single winner. “Everybody wins if anybody wins,” Bohm wrote. “There is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail.” The goal is to bring about new understanding and move forward. Few are naive enough to think that such a perfect version of dialogue is immediately achievable in the House of Commons. And it mightn’t even be necessary to dream of this utopian version of our political conversation if the problem of the competitive point-scoring “discussion” — if we can even call it that — were limited to those 45 minutes every weekday. It isn’t, though. It’s the same kind of thing our members of Parliament carry into debate on the floor of the Commons and into committees. And worst of all, those MPs most adept at point-scoring are, recently, the ones who get promoted.
This is why we have so little shame in our Parliament. The system as it is encourages point-scoring over progress. So, there is no willingness to engage in dialogue. Nor is there any reason.
If you’re part of a dialogue, saying something inane doesn’t make you a hero; it makes you a problem. It means everyone around you is forced to own an even bigger share of your stupidity than in a discussion, where they could just cherry-pick your best points. They have to own it because the overall goal is to get to some new place, not to keep everybody where they started. Which means if we want to inject a bit of shame back into the system, we ought to change course.
In other words, we need reform, whether it’s via Conservative MP Michael Chong’s new private member’s bill as it stands, or amended. Or perhaps some other way. But broadly speaking, giving MPs more autonomy within their own caucuses, whether legislatively or by changing the culture by another route, will help. Being less beholden to their leader and more so to their riding might make MPs more free to see the parliamentary process as collective bargaining, rather than bickering for a hollow ideological victory. And then, gradually, more of us would win. Until finally we all would. Which is sort of the point.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Colin Horgan
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