When asking a bad question goes horribly wrong

Opinion

New lawyers are often told that, when they’re cross-examining a witness, they should never ask a question for which they don’t already know the answer.

Why?

Because an unexpected answer can lead the cross-examination off in unplanned directions, making the lawyer look unprepared, unprofessional or worse — and can damage the entire case.

There’s a similar axiom that journalists are taught early in their careers — that they should never take anything for granted, and should question even things that seem obvious. That they should never assume. There’s even a pithy little saying about that: “when you ‘assume,’ you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and me.’”

Now hold those thoughts and consider the question period stylings of Riding Mountain MLA Greg Nesbitt in the Manitoba legislature on Tuesday.

Nesbitt took information from finance department documents to try and skewer Finance Minister Adrien Sala on what was looking like a case of the minister serving himself.

Here’s the question.

“Hon­our­able Speaker, more than ever, Manitobans find them­selves under increasing financial pressure and stress. Over half of Manitobans struggle paycheque to paycheque. Almost 40 per cent of busi­nesses are looking at lay­offs. But never fear; the minister of finance is here. Why is this minister spending over $10,000 of taxpayers’ money on therapy? … While being an MLA can be stressful, why is this finance minister billing taxpayers for his personal, and I quote, ‘journey of self-reflection, awareness and discovery?’”

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

Why ouch?

Because the Tories apparently took a contract issued by Sala’s finance department and jumped to the conclusion that the contract was for personal services for the minister himself, rather than doing more research.

Problem was, the contract wasn’t for the minister at all.

The contract was to provide counselling for workers who were taking part in the search for missing and murdered women at the Prairie Green landfill.

Acting PC Leader Wayne Ewasko blamed the NDP for the ruckus that ensued, saying, “It was a simple question. We could have received the answer in the chamber, but it turned toxic.”

But it wasn’t a simple question: it was a deliberate attempt at a “gotcha” question. A simple question would have been, “What was this contract for?” and would have left out all the discussion of Sala’s pay rate and the insinuation that the spending was for Sala’s personal treatment. And, most likely, that simple question, minus the political grandstanding, would have received a simple answer.

The chamber turned toxic because the question was toxic. You can’t fault someone else for the explosion, if you were the one who lit the fuse.

It’s bad enough that the PCs jumped to conclusions about who was receiving therapy and whether that therapy was necessary. It’s worse that the counselling sessions the Tories were snidely questioning were for searchers who had been looking for missing and murdered Indigenous women in the Prairie Green landfill. And, worst of all, that the question came from a member of a provincial political party that had campaigned in the last election on having made the “tough decision” to not launch a search of the landfill.

It turned a fishing mission into an embarrassment.

Look: oppositions are always at a disadvantage in question period. The government holds all the cards: it has vast resources at hand, immediate access to information, and plenty of ways to obfuscate and complicate answers to questions.

Oppositions are generally of limited size and have limited financial and research capabilities. (And Tuesday’s session was topsy-turvy enough that the supposedly impartial Speaker ended up apologizing for comments he made about Nesbitt’s question.)

But jumping to conclusions will always be the wrong way to deal with a shortage of facts.

As self-inflicted political missteps go, it was epic.