If Ever There Was A Time

Just as I begin to work on a series of posts on the need for non-partisanship, along comes an event, the likes of which many have never witnessed in the Canadian Parliament before.  And it was a doozy.

A Prime Minister, promising in a throne speech a few days previous to work with the other parties to tackle a quickly descending economic situation, unleashes a fiscal update that all but blisters the paint off of any goodwill that might indeed have remained in the House. His brazen attack on all three opposition parties completely changed the dynamic of the Chamber in seconds – perhaps forever.

It’s not what we expected. To be sure, certain portions of the update had been leaked a day earlier, but the sheer scope of the Prime Minister’s statement suddenly laid bare everything that we had all feared might dwell beneath the veneer of the government’s civility. In that moment at least, we stared into a kind of abyss and didn’t like its depth.  What fascinated me were the faces of the Conservative MPs during the reading of the statement itself. They appeared on edge, worried, and more than a little apprehensive, as if they knew danger was ahead.

No sooner was the speech ended than the Prime Minister and his Finance Minister left the House, along with half of the Conservative caucus. The faces on those that remained told the story in vivid detail. Listening to the response from the three opposition parties, you could tell from their countenance some kind of line had been crossed.

In the Opposition Lobby, I saw things I had never witnessed in my two years here. Bloc members were “high-fiving” NDP caucus members, and some women from the Bloc were embracing their counterparts in the Liberal caucus. It was incredible to watch.

There’s no need to say more about such events because they are playing out in real time in the media and could well result in the overthrow of the present Conservative government. And I don’t want to get “off-track” from my ruminations on non-partisanship.  In fact, I can’t think of a better introduction for the need for such an outlook than what has just been recounted above.

What we saw this week was rank hyper-partisanship vividly displayed in brilliant parliamentary technicolor. This kind of extreme partisanship has characterized Parliament for a few years now and its price has been a paralyzing inability to confront the most difficult problems facing the nation – healthcare, the environment, Afghanistan, and of course, the deteriorating economy. On the controversial issues, meaningful progress is all but impossible without a true spirit of common purpose, of non-partisan cooperation.

With the kick-off of this new parliament just a few weeks ago, Stephen Harper started out with over half the country alienated from him. And when he set about to undermine the parties representing that majority of voters in opposition, he sealed his own fate. By starting the session this way, he compounded his problems with his own unique style of polarizing the country, making it almost impossible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

With that now behind us, let’s get back to our focus: the need to recapture the kind of effective governance over the long term that only a spirit of non-partisanship can bring. Prime ministers who divide rarely conquer. Let’s consider how we might bring the country back together in a meaningful way.