VERY little changes beneath the Manitoba legislature's bronze dome. Elections pass, a few faces change but inside the legislative chamber, stasis descends on the MLAs arguing over the same things they did last year and the decade before that.
Manitoba MLAs returned to business this week for the first real sitting of the legislature since the NDP won its third consecutive mandate in May. And just as nothing changed May 22, the day voters handed Premier Gary Doer and his party a solid vote of confidence, nothing changed over the summer as the opposition Progressive Conservatives and Liberals came back to work with the same predictable attacks and the New Democrats mustered the same predictable defences of their record.
One starts to wonder why our elected officials engage in the daily charade of political debate known as question period.
When the legislature is sitting, it is the focal point of the political day. Countless hours are spent preparing the premier and his ministers for possible lines of attack, while opposition MLAs and their assistants spend a good chunk of their time formulating ways to embarrass the governing party with examples of failure -- with plenty of rhetorical flourish added for good measure.
The end result is a daily confrontation that produces poor questions and even poorer answers. Every statement oozes aggressive partisan sentiment, yielding little in the way of fact or truth when it comes to the important issues of the day.
Opposition MLAs hyperventilate in forced outrage for the benefit of their desk-thumping colleagues and the increasingly disinterested scribes in the press gallery, while government ministers retort in the face of the latest spending "scandal" or health-care horror story with yet another tiresome example of how the MLAs opposite screwed things up worse when they were in government.
Meanwhile, Manitoba voters go about their daily routines, paying next to no attention to the three-ring circus playing out under the dome. This works to the governing party's advantage, as it can divert attention away from the errors and lapses brought up in the legislature by handing out tax dollars, naming new winter holidays and the like.
In theory, question period exists to make the government more accountable for its actions. Canada is one of the few countries in the world that takes the exercise to its sadomasochistic extreme by forcing ministers to answer daily for the business of their departments. George W. Bush never has to face the U.S. Congress to account for his mistakes, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown only gets grilled once a week by the opposition -- and he gets to see the questions in advance.
Yet those countries, and many others, do not suffer from a lack of political accountability. In fact, it is strengthened in other ways, such as the ability to approve nominations and the means to compel officials to testify before congressional committees.
Beyond that, it is the role of an opposition party to prove that it is a government-in-waiting. It does not fulfil that role if it simply drools like Pavlov's dog over every government shortcoming and howls in protest. Even though an election is now a long way away, the Progressive Conservatives and Liberals need to demonstrate that they are capable of governing. Outside of campaign periods, they haven't done that particularly well.
Back in the day, before television and the Internet, politics was a form of entertainment, and question period was the best show in town. Today all but only the most-diehard political junkies change the channel to something else when the MLAs start their daily dog-and-pony show. Though the content of this particular melodrama is important to the health of our democratic society, the characters and the plot make it almost unwatchable.
Surely there's another way to make politics matter again to ordinary Manitobans.
ctbrown7@yahoo.ca
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