If you like live theatre, if you like comedy, tragedy, and drama, if you like larger-than-life characters who strut and fret their hour upon the stage, then there's only one Canadian city to visit.
And no, I am not talking about Stratford. I mean, of course, Ottawa.
Ottawa, after all, is the home of the largest, most expensive, most publicized stage show in the country. It's called the House of Commons.
Yes, I know the House of Commons is really supposed to be about making laws and debating issues and all that serious stuff you learn about in high school civics class.
But let's face it, politics in this country has gradually been transformed into nothing more than glorified theatre.
To paraphrase William Shakespeare: All Parliament's a stage, and all Members of Parliament merely players … and one MP in his time plays many parts.
Just consider, for example, backbench MPs. The part they play in Parliament is that of the spear-carrier or extra. Their role is essentially to make up the crowd scenes in the background, and to cheer and laugh and heckle on cue. And as extras, they are not supposed to have many lines of dialogue. In fact, like actors, all MPs work from carefully crafted scripts (officially known as “talking points”) written for them by party officials. These scripts tell MPs what to think, what to say, and what to do.
If an MP changes parties, no problem. He simply changes scripts – see, for example, Liberal (formerly Conservative) MP Scott Brison or Conservative (formerly Liberal) MP David Emerson.
And woe be to any MP who flubs his lines in public, or, worse, who ignores the script so he can express (horror of horrors) an independent opinion. Such ad libbing, commonly called “committing a gaffe,” can bring down the curtain on any political career. Former Liberal MP Sheila Copps, for instance, famously ran into trouble because she suggested her party was actually serious about scrapping the GST.
In 2004, Tory MP Scott Reid had to resign his position as official language critic because he openly mused about whether official state bilingualism was a good idea at a time when the Conservatives were trying to win votes in Quebec.
Of course, the real stars of our national political drama, the prima donnas, if you will, are the party leaders: Stephen Harper, Jack Layton, Stéphane Dion, and Gilles Duceppe. These leaders get top billing, they get the best lines, they get the limelight.
But even they must follow a script.
Armies of spin doctors, pollsters and political consultants stage-manage and choreograph their every move, their every statement, and their every gesture.
It's all designed to achieve the maximum political dramatic effect. Like playwrights, political strategists aim to manipulate our emotions, to make us cheer, to make us cry, to make us angry.
(Sometimes of course, they inadvertently make us laugh.) That's why a good political leader must also be a good performer. What matters isn't so much what our leaders say or even what they believe in; what matters is how they say it, how they look, and how they act.
Do they act like leaders? Do they look good on TV? Can they zing their political opponents with witty one-liners? Can they boil down complex socio-economic issues into snappy, 10-second sound bites?
The media too has a role, always there to help us rate the performance of our leaders. Rather than boring us with substantive pieces on, say, the serious issues facing the country, Ottawa-based journalists critique the various political plotlines and give us “behind the scenes” glimpses of what our political stars are really like.
For instance, the media informed us that Liberal leader Stéphane Dion has a pet dog named Kyoto, that Prime Minister Harper likes to shake hands with his son before he goes to school, and that suddenly-former foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier recently dated a buxom biker chick.
This is what our democracy has become, which probably saddens a lot of people. But at least there's one consolation: The Canadian voter still has the power to close down any political show with a ballot.
For that, I say, bravo!
