Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Now where did I leave off?
Canada's chief medical officers of health and other health professionals across the country are closely monitoring vaccine safety, effectiveness and optimal use, as they adapt their approaches. As science and situations evolve, we're committed to providing clear evidence and informed guidance to keep everyone in Canada safe.
That, Mr. Chair, is the basis of this discussion. We are taking away from their jobs the individuals who have responsibility for this, and it's important for everyone who's listening, or anyone's who's reading these comments, to understand how important those roles are and how important it is for us to work with them collaboratively.
My second point, Mr. Chair, is that I was a mayor for 12 years, and when I decided to get involved in federal politics, I did so on the basis of how everybody on council took the time to work together and to provide positive solutions or add value, as opposed to finding fault in everything that was being put forward.
A great example of the way that things have turned out is contained in.... Here I would like to share with you some observations with respect to collaboration, confrontation and partisanship, which, in my view, are counter-productive.
Today, what we're discussing is an excellent example of what is happening. We should be working together to find solutions, but no, we are finding the government the victim of uber-partisanship.
Dave Meslin wrote a book called Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up, which I think is what we need to do. We need to work on finding a way that we can work together collaboratively as opposed to the healthy uber-partisanship that we've always seen in this committee.
It doesn't happen at every committee. Mr. Chair, I've sat in on a number of other committees, and the tone and the tenor of those committees certainly is far different from some of these. However, as Mr. Meslin says, “imagine landing your dream job, showing up for your first day of work and being completely ignored by your colleagues.”
That's what happened to Graham Steele, the former finance minister of Nova Scotia after winning a four-way race to secure the NDP nomination in the riding of Halifax Fairview and then winning the seat itself by 58% of the vote. Steele took his seat in the legislature, but when he rose to speak for the first time, representing the 10,000 residents of his riding, he found that no one in the room, absolutely no one, was listening.
Although Steele thought that the actions of his fellow politicians in any other gatherings of grown-ups would be shockingly bad manners, he soon discovered that the silent treatment was actually relatively good behaviour for his colleagues. His tell-all exposé What I Learned About Politics describes a parody of democracy in the provincial legislature where the most common type of interaction between politicians is to heckle, interrupt and insult. He observed that the last thing on their minds is a mature consideration of someone's argument and sadly confessed that the visitors to the gallery often go away shaking their heads in bewilderment.
Steele's experience is not an anomaly. After interviewing 80 former members of Canada's legislature, the authors of Tragedy in the Commons labelled our Parliament as “kindergarten on the Rideau”. This wasn't just their opinion but the unanimous opinion of politicians themselves. One former MP compared the legislature to a zoo, while another described the partisan drivel and poisonous atmosphere of the chamber.
According to the Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, in her book Losing Confidence, question period has sunk to the lowest levels of rudeness and incivility in living memory. There is no co-operation. There is no effort at consensus. The House has become toxic through excessive partisanship. Collective amnesia has wiped away the sure knowledge that it does not have to be like this. She describes in detail infantile questions, egregious behaviour, cruel tone, and disrespectful heckling that have come to dominate the Parliamentary debate, and we treat this as if its normal. With hundreds of adults being paid to act like angry toddlers, the House of Commons is essentially the largest and most expensive daycare in the country.
The chances are, none of this is shocking you. You've simply become accustomed to verbal warfare as a substitute for thoughtful conversation, and not just as a parliamentarian but in our provincial legislatures and our local city councils. Our militaristic approach to politics takes complex issues and recklessly transforms them into simplistic, polarized teams: right versus left, urban versus suburban, drivers versus cyclists, environment versus business.
This team-sport mentality has four results. First, the legislation is often ideologically driven rather than evidence based. Second, they have fish-tail policies that flip back and forth between binary views, depending on who is in power. Third, actual dialogue is replaced with political theatre that reduces all of our politicians to the intellectual equivalent of hockey goons. Fourth, voters increasingly turn their backs on the whole circus, not out of apathy but in disgust.
Is it too idealistic to imagine another approach rather than the battlegrounds populated by players with inflexible opinions? Could our councils and our legislative bodies serve as arenas of conversation? I confess, I sometimes have doubts.
I watch my young son playing his video games passionately, immersing himself in medieval battles, modern warfare and futuristic laser fights, and it makes me wonder if perhaps our militaristic approach to politics is an unavoidable consequence of human nature. Maybe we're just attracted to the thrill of fighting.
Again, there's Minecraft, an odd video game that's simply about building things. When you play Minecraft, you're not trying to win, and you don't have to kill anyone. Rather, it's an infinite and complex virtual sandbox. Most importantly, you can collaborate. My son and I have built castles, underground subway systems, gardens and bridges. The most interesting part is that Minecraft is the second best-selling video game of all time, and although it was only introduced in 2009, it has already surpassed the net sales of long-time favourites like Grand Theft Auto, launched in 1977, and Super Mario in 1985.
We probably shouldn't make sweeping conclusions about human nature by comparing video game sales. I can tell you that, when my kids play Minecraft, they'll occasionally go on a rampage, killing as many zombies, creepers and skeletons as possible, but the success of both war games and building games serves as a reminder that, while we like to fight, we also have the capacity to energize by acts of creative collaboration. We can be drawn in either direction and can thrive in either environment.
I should also point out that the best-selling video game of all time is Tetris, a puzzle. If political compromise is the art of seeing how people's perceptions and needs differ and then finding a way to arrange all those needs and ideas into one coherent shape, then Tetris lovers should be easy recruits to this new kind of politics.
We are hard-wired to enjoy problem solving, building and collaboration. The question is: Can we take these traits that lie within us and somehow allow them to come alive in our democratic spaces? That shouldn't be too much to ask.
The first step towards moving beyond team sport partisanship that gets in the way of good policy-making is to stop blaming politicians. While we often hear cheap slogans like “kicking the bums out”, or “draining the swamp”, evidence suggests that the problem is much more complex.
Steele writes in What I Learned about Politics, “the fact is our politicians are us. There isn't a better, more perfect, more angelic version of us. The people who are elected to office used to be us, and once they're in office, they respond in human ways to the pressures of the job. You'd do the same if you were elected. Yes, yes, you would, and if you think you wouldn't, you'd be one of those bright-eyed politicians who didn't know what they were getting into.”
Steele tells a story about sitting in the legislature and watching the leader of his party, Premier Darrell Dexter, be asked questions by the leader of the opposition, Stephen McNeil, and suddenly Steele realized that he'd heard the exact same back and forth discussion before when his party was in opposition. “Stephen was using the same words, the same tactics and the same arguments that Darrell had used”, he writes, “and Darrell was giving the same replies that the Conservatives had given to him when he was the one posing the questions.”
He continued: “It struck me then, forcibly, that there was hardly any point to who sat in my chair on which side of the house. None of us were dealing with the real issues.”
MPs interviewed for the Tragedy in the Commons held a similar view. Our exit interviews suggest that politicians seem to deplore their own public behaviour. Loat and MacMillan write, "They fear turning people away from politics". So why not change? If they regret it so much, why didn't they stop? In Losing Confidence, Elizabeth May explains that politicians seem to act out of character, and their surroundings somehow transform them into juvenile thugs. People who would not ordinarily be crude become the worst version of themselves.
It seems that ruthless, adversarial opposition is built into our system by design. In that sense, thinking you can fix the problem by electing better politicians is like trying to fix your smartphone's shattered screen by replacing the batteries. Our elected representatives are just one part of the system, and depending on their environment, they can be pulled towards creativity or battle, towards Minecraft or Call of Duty.
In his memoirs, Steele notes that in the Nova Scotia legislature, 51 grown-ups act in ways that, if repeated in their private lives, would end their personal relationships, and, if repeated in other workplaces, would get them fired.
True, but if the entire workforce were behaving badly, a smart employer wouldn't fire everyone; she'd try to figure out why her workplace was bringing out the worst in her employees, and then make whatever changes are necessary in the political workplace. Our terminology, our procedures, and even the physical spaces used to debate are more structured to maximize conflict. Rather than trying to kick the bums out, we should be looking for what we can change about our political processes—our spaces.
Mr. Chair, I think this captures the tone and the nature of the dialogue that's been concerning me for some time. My biggest concern is that had we tried some collaboration, had we tried to find a plan—and I believe that we agreed to a plan—we would have been able to not be faced with this change and not be caught up in the doldrums that we are facing now.
Mr. Chair, we need to work collaboratively and we need to find ways of building consensus. It's really disappointing that we have to go back and reference a book that was written only a few years ago, but it does capture exactly what we should be trying to overcome. What's going on here is counterproductive. My grandchildren watch from time to time. Frankly, there are things that happen during question period, there are things that happen during discussion and debate here that I'm embarrassed to have them see.
I'm offering an opportunity to find a solution. If we've agreed to do something, our word is our word. We did agree to going into the subcommittee meeting. Frankly, that's what we agreed to do, and no amount of rationalization is going to change that. I believe it's in the record. I think we should go forward with that. We should not be having to reinvent things as we go along.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.