News / Insight

Parliament: Speaking a language all its own

Fair Elections Act: The political world talks to itself

Toronto Centre MP Chrystia Freeland is led into the House of Commons by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and MP Carolyn Bennett on Jan. 27. Freeland had a rude ride in Parliament this week.

FRED CHARTRAND / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Toronto Centre MP Chrystia Freeland is led into the House of Commons by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and MP Carolyn Bennett on Jan. 27. Freeland had a rude ride in Parliament this week.

Chrystia Freeland, the new member of Parliament for Toronto Centre, speaks Ukrainian at home with her children, English at work and a bit of French here and there.

She does not, however, speak in a language familiar to the denizens of Parliament Hill — at least not yet — which was why she was shouted down, heckled and mocked on Twitter for a question she asked in a high-pitched voice in the Commons this week.

I have a better idea: why don’t we set up a whole new translation system on Parliament Hill so events in the capital can be understood by people unfamiliar with the mysterious, schoolyard-level code of conduct of modern politics?

Women with voices like Freeland’s (or before her, deputy prime minister Anne McLellan, or pick your favourite example) could have their words translated into mellifluous bass tones that would be soothing to the snarling beasts in the spectator stands.

Slogans spouted by Pierre Poilievre, Minister of State for Democratic Reform, would be translated into answers suitable for an audience aged around 5. Whenever he spoke this week about his “Fair Elections Act,” I kept looking around expecting to see the group of toddlers he must have been addressing, perhaps a group hoping to see dinosaur skeletons on their trip to Parliament Hill? How else to explain why the minister kept repeating, over and over and over again, that his bill had “sharper teeth?”

The two developments this week — the heckling of Freeland and the introduction of a 242-page series of reforms to election law — should underscore to us once again how politics is increasingly conducted in a language all its own.

In most other worlds, a person who is heckled for the way he or she speaks is not counselled to buy anti-bullying insurance (in this case, in the form of voice coaching). It is the hecklers who are advised to get help.

The Fair Elections Act is another example of a political world talking to itself.

Page after page, paragraph after paragraph, the legislation deals with elections mainly as an operational concern, conducted by professional operatives in the political trenches.

As my colleague Chantal Hebert has observed, the lengthy document amounts to a tacit admission that voter turnout is not a big deal to the current government.

Past election-law reforms have tried to grapple with ways to make voting easier and to expand the democratic franchise. Not this one, beyond some vague talk of improving “customer service” and adding a day of advance voting.

Many of the provisions, like cryptic humour, have a “you had to be there” element to them.

There’s a piece of the bill that ends the ban on transmitting election results to people living in areas where the polls are still open. That’s a good idea, by and large, but it no doubt assumed pride of place in this bill because a man named Stephen Harper made that a crusade a couple of decades ago when he was in charge of the National Citizens’ Coalition.

The bill also clips the power of the Chief Electoral Officer to suspend MPs while their election returns are in dispute. That’s in the legislation, we can assume, because it almost got in the way of Harper’s plans to put Shelly Glover in his cabinet as Heritage Minister last summer.

Imagine how different this legislation would have been if citizens, not political operatives, had a hand in drafting it.

Thanks to a book I’ve written on politics and marketing, I’ve had a chance to venture out of the Ottawa bubble quite frequently in the past few months, talking to people about modern campaign tactics and what’s bugging them about politics as it’s currently practiced.

From what I can tell, many of them are worried about the barrage of advertising, and the fact that political advertising, unlike advertising in the private sector, is not governed by any codes of fairness, accuracy or — outside of election campaigns — spending limits.

They’re also concerned about the growing political-party databases, storing all kinds of information, gathered by any number of means — including their consumer and digital “footprints.” They’re surprised to discover that they have no right to see what the Liberals, New Democrats or Conservatives know about them.

But there was nothing in the Fair Elections Act about advertising and databases, two of the most important tools of modern electioneering.

It may well be that these citizens’ concerns are being expressed at a pitch that doesn’t register with the politically preoccupied folks in Ottawa.

But that presents another argument for the additional translation system, which could turn the mysterious ways of politics — its old grudges, its slogans spoken slowly in low tones — into something that makes sense to an increasingly disengaged and cynical public.

Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star’s parliamentary bureau. sdelacourt@thestar.ca