One of Mark Carney’s greatest advantages in the last five months, the first five months of his political career, apparently has been his ability to play the role of the adult in the room.
One of the defining characteristics of the Commons Chamber is their ability for adult men and women to act as children.
The arrival of Carney to the House of Commons, as a newly elected parliamentarian and the Prime Minister of Canada, could establish a certain test of wills.
“I would like to welcome the prime minister to his first period of official questions,” said Andrew Scheer, the interim leader of the official opposition of His Majesty, on Wednesday after the speaker announced that the time had come for oral questions. “This is where democracy lives and this is where we provide rigorous scrutiny in every word that says and every dollar that spends in the name of the Canadians.”
After welcoming Carney to the Aren subject that has entered into some dispute from the elections. Scheer considered that Carney had not been honest with the Canadians.
Standing to answer, Carney took a moment to thank his voters in Nepean for choosing him.
“Could you too?” Carney continued, heading to the speaker, “consult …”
“Time!” He called a voice on the conservative side.
Carney smiled in a good way and nodded her torturer.
“… say how good it is to see you in the speaker’s chair and I trust that you are operating under the grace period, which will not be granted, properly as the opposition leader said.”
In his inaugural questions on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney sent questions from the interim leader of the opposition Andrew Scheer about the government’s decision not to present a budget before summer holidays.
Carney proceeded to pump the fist and raise the voice and ensure that the house was estimated that Canada’s tariffs had “maximum impact” on Americans and the “minimum impact” in this country and that all income would be used to support Canadian workers. But his time expired without a direct response to Scheer’s charges.
“Mr. President,” Scheer lamented, “it didn’t take long to collect the old liberal habits of not being able to answer questions.”
The first period of questions of the 45th Parliament continued from there, returning largely to the traditional Din of teasing, topics and ritualist applause.
Will Carngey be a “man from the House of Commons”?
Until now, each person who occupies the seat of the Prime Minister in the House of Commons has spent at least a time in another part of the house before taking that chair. The closest comparison point for Carney could be someone like Lester B. Pearson, who was a famous diplomatic before he decided, at the age of 51, to enter the federal policy.
The first time Pearson got up to speak in the House of Commons, such as the Secretary of State for External Affairs and a newly chosen rookie MIP, deviated from his notes prepared so slightly to launch a light ignition on the other side. In his memoirs, he remembered him as a “free and provocative comment” (he had wondered aloud if “any of us” were “playing politics with peace,” according to today’s standards, it would barely register as an attack).
“I think it must have been because unconsciously I realized that I was speaking as an official or professor and that if I was ever accepted as a politician, as a good member of my own party in the House of Commons, I should do at least one partisan thrust,” he wrote. “The fact that I always regret it was simply another indication that it was clearly not a politician.”
The conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said from the lobby of the House of the Commons that “he had never really been a spectator of the house” when asked how he felt not to have a seat at the beginning of Parliament.
Pearson would become prime minister and famous. However, he would conclude that he was not a “man from the camera of the commons” (on Pearson’s day, they were almost all men). It could respect, even enjoy, the procedures, even if much seemed like a “kind of game performance.” But I had come to the house relatively late in life and “politics and parliament were not in my blood, at least not as they were with many members of the house.”
It is, of course, too soon to say if Carney will become a man from the House of Commons. Some of those who are familiar with the events of the House of Commons may expect not to do so.
(The man who will be the main opponent of Carney in the house this fall, Pierre Poilievre, is an enthusiastic man from the House of the Commons. “I would love to be there, it is a great place. I love emotion and emotion,” Poilievre told journalists on Wednesday when he asked him not being able to participate. “
Is the question period politics as usual?
But Scheer is still right when he says that the camera’s floor is, at least in theory, where democracy lives and where the elected representatives of Canada are destined to analyze each word that the prime minister says and every dollar spent the government (although in practice, it seems to have recently become a study to generate generating clips for the channels of the MPS MPS). And a prime minister could expect to contribute, for example, answering, or at least directly to the questions that are asked.
Under the Parey predecessor, the liberals seemed to simply want to pass the daily transmission of complaints without adding to their problems. Justin Trudeau could call a rhetorical force, and liked to take all questions on Wednesday, but for fear of a false rhetoric step, he tended to retire to topics.
In his first question, Carney seemed happy to spend those 45 minutes. He smiled and seemed to enjoy and even tried a little humor (adjusting the Québécois block for not attending the throne speech). He answered nine questions without the need to read notes (a crutch in which too many parliamentarians depend).
But the first day of any new session is typically the easiest for governments and the least interesting for anyone who is observing. The most difficult days will arrive later, when there is more to ask and more for the government to take into account (or avoid).
When he formally launched his political career in January, the former governor of the Speech Central Bank said that he knew that “it was not the usual suspect when it comes to politics.”
“But,” he said, “this is not the time of politics as always.”
It remains to be seen how well that sense of itself and the moment will survive in contact with the conflict period of ancient and timeless questions.
