National Post
Wednesday, February 14, 2001


Calling forth a greater eloquence
There was a time when a speech in the House of Commons could sway a nation

'The feature of this afternoon's debate was St. Laurent's magnificent speech," Mackenzie King recorded in his diary for Dec. 6, 1944, at the height of the conscription crisis. "Magnificent in the sense that it was forthright, honest, sincere, straightforward and true. His decision to stand or fall with me was tremendously applauded in the House..."

To a modern reader, the passage is striking in several respects: The notion that the fate of a bill, indeed a government might depend upon a Cabinet minister's decision "to stand or fall" with the Prime Minister; the notion that he might declare his position in the course of a debate in Parliament, and that on the strength of his speech the votes of many other MPs would be decided; or perhaps it is the notion that anyone would make a speech in Parliament that could be described, even by an admirer, as "magnificent." Parliament is not that place any more, and parliamentary debate has not that quality.

Of course, times of great moment typically call forth greater eloquence: It is easier to work up a lather in the midst of a world war, with the country's unity in the balance, than it is over, say, an act to amend the Eldorado Nuclear Limited Reorganization and Divestiture Act. If ringing political speeches are the sound of a nation in crisis, we may take it as a mark of our good fortune that Parliament is such a bore.

But there have been great Parliamentary occasions of late, bills of historic import, and even then the quality of debate -- when there was a debate -- was historically low. The death of Pierre Trudeau offered up the sort of set-piece at which any experienced politician ought to excel, rather like school figures. Yet the speeches in the House were flat and uninspired. The Clarity Bill was, by the Prime Minister's own reckoning, the most important piece of legislation his government has introduced, or will -- a radical break with 40 years of precedent on the defining issue of our politics. Yet it was barely debated in the House: had it not been for the Senate, the bill might not have received any serious scrutiny, still less the sort of high-minded declamations such an existential moment deserved.

The decline of parliamentary debate has been going on so long that it is easy to forget that there was a time when these debates mattered; and because they mattered, they were closely followed in the country at large. Or perhaps they mattered because they were closely followed: When page after page in the next day's newspaper was given over to detailed accounts of Parliament's doings, as was the case until well into the last century, there was more incentive for the aspiring politician to sharpen his debating skills.

There never was a "golden age," if what is imagined is a time when debates actually changed minds within the chamber: Canada's House of Commons has witnessed few scenes of such political drama as Cromwell's dismissal of the Long Parliament ("you have sat too long here for any good you have been doing ... in the name of God, go!") or Peel's conversion to free trade ("You must argue against them," he confided to his seatmate, Disraeli, "for I cannot.") But it really did use to be the case that a strong performance in Parliament could sway the country: not by publicity stunts, or by mindless barracking, as at present, but by logic, rhetoric, humour and all the other arts of persuasion. Parliament was the theatre in which the debates of the day were played out, public approval the prize.

The Confederation debates are notable for the quality of the speeches: Men like Macdonald and George Brown were known for their ability to sustain an argument through a long series of supporting points, buttressed by facts and salted with vivid phrasing. D'Arcy McGee represented another school, an almost lyric oratory less concerned with argumentation than with arousing the sentiments. Noted debators of the first school include Edward Blake, Arthur Meighen and, in our day, Preston Manning; McGee's inheritors include D'Alton McCarthy, John Diefenbaker and Brian Tobin.

Through the years, the most memorable debates have almost always hinged in some way on the country's linguistic and religious divisions: The hanging of Louis Riel; the Manitoba schools question; the Jesuits Estates disallowance; and of course conscription. Other high points include the Pacific Scandal debate, in which a dogged Macdonald fought to save his government with, as the historian Christopher Moore records, "a passionate five-hour argument, fuelled by gin delivered in water glasses from three different supporters, each unaware of what the others were doing," and the reciprocity debate of 1911. The historian Michael Bliss reckons the early years of the last century, under the silver-tongued Sir Wilfrid Laurier, to have been the highwater mark of parliamentary oratory.

There have been some examples in recent decades. The patriation debate had its moments, as did the flag debate. But for the last really good parliamentary set-to, historians agree, you have to go back to the pipeline debate of 1956. Ramsay Cook, editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, remembers the public galleries being full every night for weeks. "It was a very good debate -- you had strong debators in the House like George Drew -- punctuated by Stanley Knowles pointing out new rules of procedure that no one had ever heard of. And the government fell over it, eventually."

But soon after that the House descended into the petty squabbling of the Diefenbaker and Pearson years, followed by the imperial prime ministership of Pierre Trudeau, whose long rule saw power increasingly agglomerated in the Prime Minister's Office. Closure, the use of which had so inflamed the pipeline debate, became almost routine. The rise of television, and the consequent necessity of generating clips for the nightly news, shifted the focus of politicians and media alike, from lengthy speeches in the Commons to the controlled bursts of the scrum. Parliament ceased to be a place where important decisions, or even important announcements, were made. The quality of parliamentary debate suffered accordingly.

Even unparliamentary debate has declined. Beauchesne's Rules of Order contains a list, to which the Speaker may refer, of those expressions previous Speakers have ruled unparliamentary: a handy catalogue of invective extending back to Confederation. Those from decades past display a vigour of expression, a delight in language that is rare today: "A dim-witted saboteur," one anonymous MP was called, while others have been described as "inspired by forty-rod whiskey," or even "the political sewer pipe from Carleton County." It's a long way down to "you fat little, chubby little ... sucker." (Darrel Stinson, MP, December 4, 1997).

Does it matter? Parliament is not there for our amusement, after all, and while there are many reasons to want to reform Parliament, improving the quality of debate is surely the least. Nor is prowess in debate necessarily an indicator of fitness for office. "Arguably the best parliamentary debator we ever had was Arthur Meighen," Bliss notes, "and he was one of the great failures," while his nemesis King, though no match for him as a speaker, is widely judged among the greatest of our prime ministers. Diefenbaker regularly bested Pearson in the House, but it is Pearson whose reputation endures. The NDP has furnished Parliament with some of its greatest performers, from Tommy Douglas to David Lewis to Bob Rae, without ever translating it into electoral success.

But the decline of debate is not only a symptom of institutional sickness, or of the talents of particular MPs. It bespeaks a culture that is fast losing its ability to reason collectively, to argue things through to a logical conclusion, at least so far as this requires paying attention to what is being said. Perhaps we should not be expected to sit through the two- and three-hour speeches that were the diversion of audiences 100 years ago; perhaps not much has been lost. But it is surely no accident that, in the age of the music video, the long, slow decline in the quality of parliamentary debate has turned into a rout.