A leaner, meaner house
Well, I'm not sure if the house is actually leaner than before, but according to some, it's meaner.
Now I unfortunately have been a bit busy this term with school to be able to watch too much Question Period, but it does seem pretty bad. I agree that the standing ovations have gotten a bit ridiculous ("Tax cuts are good! Yay! Yay!" [standing ovation]), but it does add some fun. Heck, we should start up a drinking game:
Take a shot whenever the Conservatives directly blame the Liberals for something, or talk about the Liberals "13 years of incompetence" [but be careful to only include direct quotations, otherwise we'll have too much alcohol poisoning]
Take a shot whenever the conservatives get a standing ovation
Take a shot for when we have 3 questions in a row about the exact same topic
Take a shot for whenever you can hear actual heckling words through the CPAC feed
Take a shot whenever Milliken has to calm everyone down [bonus shot when they burst out laughing at his comment]
That should get you good and drunk, so as to make the "tabling of documents" which usually follows interesting ("I love you stander order 12!").
But now that we can enjoy the raucousness, is it really impeding women from getting in to parliament? Perhaps a bit, but no matter how much we clean it up, it will never get to the point of being civil enough for a normal person watching to not think that these people are crazy. I think the better way to encourage more women to go would be to try to emphasize the 90% of the day where people aren't yelling at each other. I think if people saw that, and realized that QP was only a small part of the parliamentarian day, we would see more women get involved.
2 comments:
Yeah, I have to agree with you. QP is like a circus. The rest is pretty quiet(and boring).
I think Question Period definitely gives politics a bad name. Also a lot of the rhetoric is over the top and more meant and scoring political points than any substantiative debate. The other problem is besides votes and question period, the house is usually close to empty the rest of the day. In fact usually there are only barely enough people to maintain quorum outside of QP and votes, so that gives the impression that MPs only are there for question period, when in fact they are in committees as well as doing other work elsewhere.
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