Charles Foran, author of "Mordecai: The Life and Times," has written eight previous books, including the award-winning "The Last House of Ulster," as well as documentaries for CBC Radio. He holds degrees from the University of Toronto and University College Dublin and has taught at universities in China, Hong Kong and Canada. He lives in Peterborough, Ont.
Are Canadian politicians as rude and, frankly, embarrassing in private as they are in public? Do they sit around the dinner table with friends and family and interrupt each other, issue odd braying sounds, catcall like drunken louts in a peeler bar? I'm guessing not. I'm guessing that, away from the parliamentary cameras, these people behave with at least the same decorum found elsewhere in adult society. Needing to get re-elected every few years, they may even possess deeper reserves of social graces, not to mention patience for suffering fools, than most of us. It's almost a comedic inversion of the two-faced cliché: the "bad" displayed in public, the "good" reserved for private life.
The deficit of civility in Canadian political life isn't funny for two reasons. (The banishment of civil behaviour from U.S. political life isn't funny for about a dozen reasons.) One, the escalation of it in recent years has not been coincidental to the endurance of the Harper minority governments. It has been a strategic ploy by that government, a dumbing of discourse designed to flummox, undermine and just outshout the opposition. It has also served to signal, with a nudge and a wink, to a segment of their presumed voting base, for whom Don Cherry is "real" Canadian speech and the CBC is out to pick taxpayer pockets of their loose cultural change. What that signal is isn't clear, and the bigger issue appears to be volume. Keep it loud.
Second, all parliamentary bluster has left the chamber a hostile place for our elected officials to display their better angels, or even to fulfill their mandates as the people's representatives. They shout rather than speak, and score sound bites rather than engage in debate. Rarely - at least during Question Period, the only time the room seems to have more people on the floor than in the spectators' gallery - do they express aloud a thought that those "people" they are meant to be representing might find insightful or uplifting. The real conduct of the nation's business, the vigorous exercise of democracy, has been chased from the house of Parliament by bullies. What a shame.