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COMMENTARY
May 14, 2005
On our disgrace
There are occasions when one must frankly admit one’s own stupidity, and it struck me this week that I have wasted a lot of precious time over the years, working on the obtuse assumption that people in Canada today can be shamed. Or possibly, people anywhere, or at any time.Worse, reading through Stephen Harper’s very able and impressive parliamentary speech, Wednesday, moving an adjournment of the House (an historic speech, which went almost unrecorded in our media), I realized that Mr. Harper shares my disability. He may even have it in a more extreme form: for he seems to think the prime minister and other prominent bench-warmers of the Liberal Party can be shamed into behaving in conformity to constitutional norms. Here is my mistake, so far as I am able to penetrate to the bottom of it. The person who can be shamed is unlikely to act shamelessly in the first place. The fact he has, indicates that the sense of shame has no influence upon him. Thus, the only benefit from attempting to shame him, is the mockery one’s efforts call back upon oneself. The courting of mockery may have some penitential value. “Offer it up,” the priests advise. Though I have not thoroughly reviewed all volumes of Hansard since 1867, I am fairly sure this week was the most disgraceful in the history of our House of Commons. The disgrace could not be confined to the government, for the catcalls and heckling from both sides of the chamber was beyond what we had become accustomed to in recent decades. Honourable members would seem to have lost sight even of the television camera that is sometimes trained on them; although the camera lies. It is prevented from panning through the benches to catch some of the gestures and blatherings of those members who go unrecognized by the Speaker. A viewer from the gallery, however -- such as the President of Mali, visiting this week -- can see the full Lord-of-the-Flies spectacle. Since Mr. Harper, oddly enough, seems capable of shame, let him tell his caucus to set an example. They should neither respond to taunts, nor make them. The member who is unrecognized by the Speaker should remain silent and still, ignoring provocations. He should appear to be listening to the member who is recognized. Both inside and outside the chamber, he should behave as graciously as his personal demons will permit. This is not much, just a beginning. But though we had some precedent for the boorishness, infamy was achieved by another means. On four successive days, the opposition moved motions which were clearly presented as votes of confidence. In each of them, the government was defeated (once with the mocking antic of voting against itself). Prime Minister Martin refused to recognize the express intentions of these votes, and then refused to call an immediate, explicit, vote of confidence himself, to legitimate his position. The Governor-General has been approached by all the party leaders. She is understandably hesitant to act in the confusion of the circumstances, while in receipt of contradictory advice from a variety of constitutional experts, but will soon risk appearing a Liberal Party stooge if she does not herself order a dissolution of Parliament. Mr. Martin has meanwhile proceeded with an obvious trick. He suggested that he would recognize a confidence vote on his budget, for Thursday next week -- but without opposition agreement to the schedule. In our constitution, the question of confidence takes priority over anything else in the political agenda; yet he presumes to have the leisure to wait until an opposition member goes into surgery for cancer, and to dicker with Independents over the price of their support. (The Queen’s visit should already have been cancelled, to prevent her being used in this political stunt.) In particular, though he denies it, David Kilgour, Independent, is allowing the government to bid for his vote, telling Mr. Martin he has “got a week” to satisfy Mr. Kilgour’s full demand for action on Darfur. Though the project might have merit, the tactic, and his characteristic moral posturing with it, are equally contemptible. The opposition NDP has already been bought off, publicly; and shamefully, but again, they do not know shame. A government clings to power in defiance of the Canadian constitution, setting catastrophic precedents day by day. And the media are treating it as the usual political game; though perhaps less from shame than from ignorance of what has happened. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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