Peace on Earth - Not!

As the country waited in anticipation to hear the result of the Governor General's decision on the proroguing of the House, I just had a troubling sense that there was much more of this hyper-partisanship to come.  Following two years of turbulence in this place, I've had to acknowledge that we're always on permanent war footing.  The old cycle of politics and then governance has been replaced with a permanent campaign that completely hinders the likelihood that opposing parties will cooperate for the common good.It's not as though we didn't see it coming. The speeches of all party leaders in this week-long political crisis have grown increasingly strident, not less so. Where there should have been compromise to avert a crisis, we have had instead conflict that is an affront to the principle of consensus building.After spending months attempting to find like-minded people in parliament who shared my quest for something better than this, it still all comes down to personality. We have had a prime minister who sees the House of Commons as a permanent battlefield and whose purpose is to win the war.  Some will say that this is always the end game in politics and they may be right, but at least there used to be a kind of Geneva Convention of conduct that limited the extended damage of political intrigue.  No more.  In the place of diplomacy we have destroyers and instead of civil engagement we have had a corporate license to punish.  And because this has now gone on for an extended period of time, the "battle" has become the purpose of politics and winning that battle has become the reward.Just think of what Chaucer wrote all those years ago and see if it isn't prescient for today:

"Yes, we know what's coming.  We've seen it already.  The attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences, to turn us against each other for pure political gain - to permanently split this country.  If gold doth rust, what shall iron do?"

Alas, we are all iron smiths now in this place, and the rust has spread at a cancerous pace unlike anything witnessed in over a generation.  Get ready Canada for the permanent campaign and all the violent trappings that come with it.  Just in time for Christmas we will receive chaos and distrust, wrapped in a ribbon of fake patriotism and the decline of civility.How many times have I said this, but it's true?  "Things could have been different."  A Prime Minister, driven by a dark partisanship that casts doubt on the theory of parliamentary decorum, has been exposed for his lust for power.  And opposition parties, finally able to best the man in a titanic battle of willpower, seek to push him over a cliff.  They could have let up; he could have let up.  He could have used last night's address to the nation to humbly suggest he went too far and that he would spend the next few weeks, for the sake of all those Canadians soon to hit the breadlines, summoning the opposition leaders to the table to hammer out a deal. They could have provided the wiggle room to permit him to do so. But now we realize, what would be the point? Give him any flexibility and he'll come back to crush you and as opposition parties you deal with that by attempting to finish him off.All of this just in time for Christmas!  All the attempts made by myself and other back benchers from the Conservative side have come to nothing.  Back channels remained unexplored; a sense of compromise was never discovered.And so we'll have it, just in time for the holidays - a full out ground campaign whose emotional intensity will remain at fever pitch but whose theatre of operation will be in every riding across the country.  We'll take the rank partisanship of Parliament and send it out on a traveling road show across the country.But not me ... and hopefully not you.  We are common ground people and we'll continue to explore in these pages ways in which we can find a better political life, one that makes of this Parliament a "House in Common."  A Christmas that could have brought us gifts of gold has instead provided us pounds of rusted iron, shaped in the form of cannonballs.  How disappointing.  How demeaning!  But like those wise men of old, let's choose to follow a star that is elevated above this dismal place and which can hopefully serve as an illuminating light for all that politically ails us.  It's called "non-partisanship" and it beckons brighter now than ever.  Now, the trick is to find it.