Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre responds to a question during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, September 20, 2012.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Returning from their week-long Thanksgiving break, some Members of Parliament are hoping that an increasingly partisan atmosphere in the House of Commons might be toned down.
Before the break, attention was drawn to the use of an MP's speaking privileges for partisan jabs (Check out our earlier analysis) and the criticisms fired at the Conservatives for their continuing claims that the NDP supports a carbon tax (which the latter party says is a mischaracterization of their environmental policy).
An analysis of the goings-on in the House in the last week before the Thanksgiving break suggests that nothing has yet changed.
What MPs actually talk about
Of all the topics that were raised in the almost 500 utterances by MPs during Question Period and the portion for Statements by Members (known as SO31s) between Oct. 1 and 5, the NDP "carbon tax" and partisan statements of one stripe or another were the third most common.
The last full week in the House of Commons was dominated by another issue, however. That was the concerns over tainted meat and the government's reaction to the danger. Fully one-third of all statements, questions, and answers in the House during the week were related to this one particular issue. It was the top issue for both the New Democrats (31 per cent of their statements) and the Liberals (52 per cent of theirs).
The next most mentioned topic was employment insurance, raised in 6 per cent of statements and 11 per cent of Liberal pronouncements, the second-most for the party (no other one issue was mentioned more than a handful of times by Liberal MPs).
The "carbon tax"
Third on the list, taking up 5 per cent of speaking opportunities in the House of Commons during the week, was the (widely panned) claims by the Conservatives that the New Democrats want to implement a "job-killing" carbon tax. While most of the topics taken on by the Conservatives in the House are not of their own choosing – they must stand to answer the questions of the opposition – when the Tories did get to choose a topic (in SO31s or in questions to their own ministers, an opportunity used four times to tee-up a caucus colleague with a carbon tax slam), one in four of them were related to the alleged tax plan. No other single subject received as much attention.
Aboriginal issues, at 5 per cent of statements, and cuts to the public service, at 4 per cent, rounded out the top five issues.
General subjects
In terms of more wide-ranging general subjects, deficient public services – including those related to food, air and border safety – was brought up most often, at 40 per cent of all statements, questions, and answers in the House. The second most discussed subject was related to employment insurance, poverty and seniors at 9 per cent. The third most, also at 9 per cent, were of an intentionally and almost entirely useless partisan nature.
While the majority were related to the carbon tax, time in the House was also used to change the subject. In response to questions about the government's role in supporting the nomination of Robert Abdallah to the Port of Montreal, a name mentioned in the ongoing Charbonneau Commission in Quebec, on three consecutive days Pierre Poilievre responded with a question to a Quebec NDP MP about past donations to a provincial sovereigntist party. On three of the days when another NDP MP asked the same question, Mr. Poilievre brought up ineligible union donations that the NDP had to return earlier this year.
SO31s, the focus of an earlier analysis which found that their use for partisan ends has increased since the Conservatives came to power, continued to be abused in the last week of sittings. One-in-five statements were of a strictly partisan nature during the week, with virtually all of them relating to a carbon tax or the NDP's shaming of Conservative MPs for having to read them. One SO31 was used to criticize something that Green Party Leader Elizabeth May had written on Twitter in response to a private member's bill. Ms. May brought up the incident in a Point of Order to the Speaker, who said he might return after the Thanksgiving break with a ruling on the use of SO31s going forward. It could be a much-needed first step.
Éric Grenier writes about politics and polls at ThreeHundredEight.com.