Summer is here and it's time for barbecue season. For most of us, that means burnt weenies and men strolling around like they're master chefs because they actually help do the cooking - though in the end, we make more of a mess than it's worth.
But there's a darker, more sinister meaning to barbecue season: it means that our politicians, freed from their tyrannous duties in the House of Commons, are coming out to pretend they're ordinary folks.
I don't know, after the past few months worth of follies, if that's such a good idea. If I were a politician coming out to press the flesh at a barbecue, I'd be afraid of ending up on the spit - or at least spit on.
Recently, in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Paul Martin gave Opposition Leader Stephen Harper a copy of The South Beach Diet to help get him through barbecue season without gaining too much weight.
I smiled when I saw the exchange. It was the first civilized, decent gesture I'd seen between parliamentarians in months. It was also several months too late.
The past session of Parliament has seen us sickened by the arrogance and cronyism of the Chretien years, served up fresh daily by the Gomery inquiry. But if that wasn't bad enough, the behaviour of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition has been so poor that Martin & Co. are surviving a scandal that should sink any government. From the embarrassing redneck knee-jerks after Belinda Stronach bolted the caucus to Lower Mainland MP Gurmant Grewal's Keystone Cops spy caper, the Tories seem to be determined to prove that yes, you can do worse than the Liberals.
What is happening? I think it has something to do with the fact that for the first time in quite a while, what happens in the House of Commons actually matters. For decades now, with majority government after majority government making votes in the House a foregone conclusion, MPs have had far too much time on their hands and little enough attention paid to them. With so many of them so far away from the people who elected them, a sense of unreality has set in. It's like Vegas, withoutwell, everything but money and a lack of good sense. What happens in Ottawa, stays in Ottawa.
Maybe the nation's business would be better conducted somewhere other than those not-so-hallowed halls, away from the ordinary people. Why not a traveling Parliament road show? A session of Parliament in every province at least once in a four-year term. Let the public see what they've elected and how it works - or doesn't - up close.
And if they turn out to be just as badly behaved in public as they are in Ottawa? Well, it's still marginally better for you than TV wrestling.
