A few questions about question period

Of late, goaded by the Tories, the media has made much of the prime minister’s poor attendance at question period — the worst-ever performance by any prime minister ever, at just under 30 per cent. Many pundits have opined, many news sound bites have been uttered, decrying this inexcusable insult to our sacred democratic tradition.

And oh, look, the media has said, on the rare occasions he’s been there, he seems to have enjoyed the camaraderie of his loyal backbenchers cheering him on. He’s even cracked smiles and been witty and pithy.

Yes, Mark Carney should be sitting in his chair in the House of Commons daily, engaging in essentially meaningless verbal battle with the preening, strutting, squawking theatre performed by the Opposition leader, who very much wants the audience watching at home to see his own daily polished, vitriolic grandstanding.

But shamefully, our gadabout prime minister instead spends his precious time flitting around the planet forging defence alliances and trade agreements in the face of the dissolution of American democracy and, with it, traditional international trade patterns and NATO.

At the same time Canadian media was hand-wringing over Carney’s poor question period attendance, U.S. President Donald Trump was graduating from coy verbal insults to NATO, to finally bluntly telling NATO members (who’ve refused to rush to his side during an illegal war, the reasons for which remain utterly opaque, and which is rife with actual and threatened war crimes), that he’s written NATO off completely.

Go get your own oil, he’s told NATO countries. Never mind that the absence of such oil and the closing by the Iranians of the Strait of Hormuz is the direct result of an inexplicable “lovely stay” by America about which nobody, not even his own Congress, was consulted, with a boots-on-the-ground escalation happening any minute.

Meanwhile, our government’s defence spending finally hit the two per cent target promised to NATO that it has never before reached, not even under Conservative governments. It will have to be even more than that very soon.

Once Trump, having seen instant gratification with his Venezuela strike, grows terminally bored with Iran (which really is taking far too long and his attention span gave out many days ago), he’s already said Cuba’s next. Greenland’s on the list. Canada’s there, too. At some point, if the madness continues — and there is no “if” about it — we will need all the defence we can muster, and the support of NATO.

Trump wants natural resources: water, oil, rare earth minerals. We’ve got them. It’s just that simple, and that alarming.

When it comes to actual news, our media appears to have forgotten that context matters.

A little context, then, as a reminder: federal and provincial question periods may theoretically have been designed to enable the official Opposition to hold the government’s metaphorical feet to the fire of passionate, if frequently ill-informed or intentionally warped, scrutiny.

They have never served that purpose. They have been an opportunity for Opposition grandstanding. And the media has always known all this.

Claims made by the Opposition during question period occasionally, though rarely, become valid news stories, easier pickings than if the same claims arise during long, boring committee hearings seldom staffed by media because they are — well, long and boring. Mostly, carrying it live on television just gives anchors and control-room personnel the chance for a decent potty break and a leisurely coffee and doughnut, while some poor intern monitors the feed in the unlikely case it suddenly drops out and dozing technicians must be alerted to unacceptable dead air, or anything worth noting happens.

Like a recent prime minister and son of a prime minister storming across the room and manhandling a female Opposition member some years ago. That was great television; how dare our prime minister deprive Canadians of the anticipatory possible excitement of watching a prime minister snap and lose his temper?

Perhaps teachers no longer take elementary school students to view this sordid little example of democracy supposedly in action; I know when I was such a student, we 10-year-olds were appalled at the behaviour of the MLAs performing their histrionic insults beneath the public gallery.

Those field trips did not have the intended effect of impressing us with the wonders of democratic government. They did implant suspicions in our young minds that grownups were allowed the appalling behaviour toward their peers that we were denied on our playgrounds. In my few live exposures to the federal version, MPs were even more rude and raucous.

And Carney is supposed to waste his time with this drivel instead of leading a full recrafting of the international order that the U.S. is blowing up in our collective faces?

Seriously? Come on, people. Surely we’re better than that.

Retired Winnipeg journalist Judy Waytiuk has always and still does watch far too much news television.