IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE last week, sitting through a bitter, partisan and pointless Parliament Hill subcommittee meeting on a timetable for hearings on food safety and the listeriosis crisis of 2008, not to think back to gentler, kinder times.
The scene March 25, 2009 was a collection of MPs – the minority government and the majority opposition – determined to get their way, determined to turn hearings into food contamination deaths to their political advantage.
It was an unseemly, depressing display of political partisanship and distrust, a real indication of how dysfunctional this generation of minority Parliaments is.
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Will the subcommittee on food safety work with a broader focus to get a report to Parliament by June, possibly to the Conservative advantage as they temper the emphasis on the listeria outbreak with evidence of new resources for food inspection?
Or will it spend weeks on the listeria outbreak, during which opposition MPs will call every witness they can find who will point a finger at Conservative policies on food inspection as a culprit?
With the possibility of an autumn election, a June report on the listeriosis crisis could be the only one before Parliament is dissolved, weighting the investigation against the Conservatives.
Outside the Parliament Hill partisan bubble, who cares? Get on with it. Twenty people died. Why?
“I think the public reaction is a pox on both their houses,” a Conservative MP said after the first fiasco meeting of the subcommittee created to probe the issue. “This is not us showing our best face.”
During the meeting filibuster by Conservative MPs to block a vote on an opposition motion to extend hearings into December, southwest Ontario Conservative Bev Shipley argued that the extension would send a bad message about the urgency of food safety procedures.
“We’re going to have the press saying ‘what are these guys doing? I thought this was an issue that required some immediate action,” he said.
Never mind what the press thinks. What will voters think? MPs on all sides embarrassed themselves by displaying their narrow partisan instincts.
Last week’s political stalemate reflects a reality of minority parliaments that Canadians have elected since 2004.
There is dislike across the aisle of parliament. There is distrust. There is an opposition assumption that the Conservatives are illegitimate and that Canadians made a mistake twice in electing them even as the Conservatives imagine the opposition a spent, irrelevant force.
These are not elected folks who see their role as respecting the voters’ decision that they want a minority parliament to work.
So was there really a gentler, kinder political time outside the memory of an aging Parliament Hill journalist?
The mind last week wandered back to one of the most partisan times in the early 1980s when the Liberals were ending the Crow rate. New Democrats and Conservatives were vying on committee to be seen as the most opposed.
A witness confused New Democrat Les Benjamin and Conservative Don Mazankowski.
“I don’t know who should be more offended, me or Maz,” quipped Benjamin.
It is hard to imagine that exchange in this hostile political culture.
