When every part of Parliament is weaponized, blow-ups are inevitable

There is cross-partisan agreement on at least one thing in Ottawa: last week’s meeting of the House of Commons committee on the status of women was an embarrassing spectacle.

The only real debate is over who should feel the most embarrassed.

Officially, last week’s committee meeting was held so that MPs could hear from three witnesses on the topic of violence against women. After a half-hour of testimony, a Liberal MP moved to have the committee return to a previously adjourned discussion about abortion. Liberal and NDP members voted to do so and the hearing on violence against women effectively came to an end.

As the Canadian Press reported, two witnesses — one of them a survivor of domestic abuse — angrily departed the meeting shortly thereafter. At least one witness and one member of the audience heckled the committee members.

Conservative MPs had promoted the meeting on social media as a chance to highlight the issue of violent crime and criticize Liberal justice policy. When the meeting collapsed in acrimony, they took to social media to heap scorn on Liberal and NDP committee members.

“You can’t make it up,” Conservative MP Michelle Ferreri told her online followers. “Even if you tried.”

“Victims invited to testify today at an emergency committee on violence against women were SILENCED by Liberal and NDP MPs today,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote.

Before the meeting was adjourned, Liberal and NDP MPs made clear that they were upset with how the hearing had come to take place. But the Liberal MP who moved the motion — Anita Vandenbeld — has now offered her side of the story at some length.

As Vandenbeld says, committee hearings typically occur after committee members have agreed to a study and suggested witnesses. But in this case, the chair of the committee, Conservative MP Shelby Kramp-Neuman, unilaterally scheduled the meeting and invited witnesses. Other members were not able to vote on the decision or suggest witnesses.

In her own social media posts, Kramp-Neuman said she was exercising her “prerogative” as chair to call an “emergency meeting.”

And this isn’t the first time in recent months that a Conservative chair has taken it upon themselves to dictate committee business. Conservative MP Kelly McCauley invited three Conservative premiers to appear before the government operations committee in May so that they could air their complaints about federal climate policy during a meeting about a completely unrelated matter.

In that sense, Vandenbeld viewed her motion as a procedural response to the Conservative side’s own procedural gamesmanship.

“If a committee chair (or multiple chairs) openly flout[s] the established practices and procedures, it can have long-term consequences for the fairness of our democracy,” she wrote. “It is therefore vital that these kind of breaches of the rules be called out and stopped.”

In a social media post, Ferrari described Vandenbeld’s explanation as “gaslighting.”

“Referring to yourself 36 times is a weird way to apologize to survivors of [intimate partner violence],” Ferreri wrote.

The matter probably won’t end there.

Using committees to score points

If Conservative MPs continue exploiting a chairperson’s ability to call meetings, Liberal MPs surely will be motivated to return the favour whenever they are next in opposition. At some point, some party with a majority in the House probably will change the rules to make it impossible for committee chairs to act unilaterally — and that move probably will invite some kind of response from opposition parties.

That elements of parliamentary proceedings are being used for partisan purposes isn’t exactly surprising. It’s basically impossible to separate Parliament’s higher calling — to examine laws and hold the government to account while debating and studying issues of public importance — with the partisan competition in which most of its members are engaged.

But the more such proceedings are weaponized, the more likely blow-ups like the one at last week’s committee meeting become.

“We could have done this properly, Chair, because it is an epidemic of violence,” NDP Leah Gazan said at one point during last week’s committee meeting. “I hope that we can do better. Lives are on the line. This isn’t a game.”

Is social media driving parliamentary proceedings?

Before tabling her motion last week, Vandenbeld predicted that if the Liberals didn’t agree to go along with the meeting, there would be “all kinds of social media [saying] that Liberals or others don’t care about this issue.” In her longer account, she suggested again that parliamentary proceedings are being used to generate content for social media.

Whether one agrees with Vandenbeld’s larger claims and arguments, she’s not alone in wondering how (and how much) social media is influencing Canadian politics.

Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole framed social media as a corrosive force in his final speech to the House in 2023. And former Speaker Peter Milliken co-authored an op-ed this week that argued the “current shadow over parliamentary debates in the House of Commons” reflected “the influence of digital media and the rapid dissemination of confrontational rhetoric.”

This isn’t the first time people have worried aloud about the impact of popular media on the tone and tenor of Parliament.

There’s a theory that says MPs behaved better before television cameras were introduced to the House of Commons in 1977. There might even be some merit to the idea. But the problem with the theory is obvious — there’s no going back to a time when the proceedings of the legislature were not televised (nor would it be acceptable to hide Parliament from a wide audience).

The same is basically true of the social media era. But even if social media isn’t going anywhere, it’s still fair to consider how platforms that thrive on outrage and confrontation are influencing what happens within legislatures. 

Granted, it’s also possible last week’s meeting of the status of women committee would have unfolded exactly as it did even if news was still being transmitted via telegraph. Either way, that meeting reflects poorly on the state of things in and around Parliament.

Addressing her fellow committee members shortly before the meeting was adjourned last week, Bloc Quebecois MP Adéanne Larouche said, “Nobody wins after a meeting like this.”

“I am so disappointed by what happened at the status of women today,” she said. “In a newspaper article, I talked about mud-throwing between the party in power and the opposition. I said to journalists that I had seen many committees become political and they were no longer serving their causes … and the same thing is now happening at the Status of Women committee.

“You all fell into this trap and we have made this issue of violence against women political. It is very disappointing.”