Question period is something he is present for, but most days it seems Prime Minister Stephen Harper is there only to relive, if for only the first few questions from both opposition parties, the days where he, standing on the other side, would engage in rhetorical battles about the operations of government.
Now, Harper shows up most days, gives a few official answers and casually observes the remaining 45 minutes. Occasionally, he’ll chuckle at a witty rejoinder from John Baird. Sometimes he’ll gaze around at the Commons, checking to see which reporters are watching.
But he rarely seems very engaged, and even more rarely is he animated. Even his staff members leave the gallery above him once he’s finished delivering his first few answers. There are, presumably, better things to be doing somewhere back in the office.
So when New Democrat environment critic Megan Leslie stood up at 2:52 ET Tuesday afternoon to ask about that very past the prime minister once had, one might have been forgiven for assuming that things would be just the same. Maybe Peter Van Loan would handle this one.
“Here is what the Prime Minister said in a speech on May 29, 2008 in London, England,” Leslie began. “’I should mention that while our plan will relatively establish a price on carbon of $65 a ton, growing to that rate over the next decade, our government has opted not to apply carbon taxes.’”
Here, those in the Conservative benches jumped to their feet and cheered and applauded. What a wonderful thing this was, this quote from their leader’s past. The Speaker asked that they hold their applause until the question was finished.
Leslie did just that, reflecting back the Conservative message of late: “Mr. Speaker, why does the prime minister want to put a tax on everything?”
The prime minister stood to reply.
“I thank the honourable member for highlighting the difference between our approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the NDP desire to put a carbon tax on everything,” Prime Minister Harper told the House. Then he offered a bit more history. “The Green Shift of the Liberal party only proposed $15 billion worth of carbon taxes, and these guys” – here he motioned to the NDP – “want $20 billion worth of carbon taxes, something the economy cannot take, something Canadians will never accept.”
His caucus again gave itself a standing ovation.
Leslie tried again, pointing out a point of confusion. In the past, the prime minister expressed his desire to establish a price on carbon, she said. It was going to be $65 a ton. But now, “he’s changed history,” because, she argued, for the Conservatives, a price on carbon is nothing more than a carbon tax. So, she wondered, do the Conservatives now refute the prime minister – the one of the past – who confirmed that a price on carbon was not a carbon tax?
Harper, now apparently enjoying himself, stood again. From the quote Leslie read, it was clear to him that his government was not intending to impose a carbon tax, he said.
“The difference is simply this: No plan proposed by this government has involved raising revenue and taking money from Canadian consumers,” he said.
There’s an airport tax surcharge somewhere out there with a new existential dilemma.
Of course, there is also the question of Conservative party’s own plans of introducing a cap-and-trade scheme in prior campaign platforms. And the statements to support that. But of course, that’s a different history – one that ought never to be spoken of again.
“They have in their platform,” Harper continued, “right in black and white in their financial tables, a $20 billion hit on Canadian consumers and households, which is something this government will never do.” The Conservatives were pleased with this account of the future. They laughed and hooted a bit. Some shouted for “more!”
Leslie rose again.
“They asked,” she said. To her, it seems the Conservatives are “caught in a vicious cycle here. They are either claiming the prime minister never gave a speech that one can find on the PMO website, or that a price on carbon is not a tax on carbon.”
Here, the prime minister lowered his head to rest his thumb and index fingers of his right hand across his forehead and shook it slightly.
Leslie wondered aloud: “Is there anyone on that side who will stand up and defend the prime minister on his position that a carbon tax is not the same as a price on carbon?” As she finished her sentence, a few Conservatives, like Alberta MP Chris Warkentin, who had only a few minutes earlier used his time in the House to read a prepared question to his own side, stood to defend their leader.
“If the member keeps leading with her chin, I am prepared to keep going for it,” the prime minister told the Speaker before going over what he saw as some of his government’s great historical achievements in the realm of environmental preservation – like a “comprehensive plan to gradually eliminate coal-fired electricity in this country.”
“We are doing that without imposing taxes on carbon,” he said. “The NDP, in the name of environmental progress, wants to take money from Canadian taxpayers to spend. We will not let them do that.”
Presumably, by defeating the NDP in the last election, the Conservatives have already done so. But that, of course, was in the past. That is history.
As Leslie then turned to the chair of the ethics committee, NDP MP Pierre-Luc Dusseault, to ask a question about whether the matter of falsehoods in question period might be discussed there, the prime minister held the NDP campaign literature up and waved it in front of his face, back and forth.
• • •
Question period is often referred to as theatre, sometimes as a spectacle. The second description may be more accurate now.
There is a well-known (dare I say perhaps slightly Marxist) bit of critical thinking put forth in the late 1960s by Guy Debord which posits that, “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life represents an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” There is no authentic. We are, apparently – or were, when Debord was writing – on the way to Baudrillard’s hyperreality. We are perhaps there now. We are not looking at democracy; just an abstraction of it.
Within the spectacle, there is a dissolution of logic, Debord wrote a few years later. Within the spectacle there is a “general acceptance of what is; an acceptance which comes to find in it, ipso facto, a sufficient value.”
Spectacular discourse, Debord said, “obviously silences anything it finds inconvenient. It isolates all it shows from its context, its past, its intentions and its consequences. It is thus completely illogical. Since no one may contradict it, it has the right to contradict itself, to correct its own past.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Colin Horgan
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