Leader of the Conservative Party Pierre Poilievre rises during Question Period, in Ottawa, on May 23.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
In the bucolic early days of reality TV, a bunch of randoms were cast for a show, and it was only as the action unfolded and the producers had fun in the editing suite that personalities and archetypes would emerge.
They’d have the scheming villain; the hot-but-unstable one; the underdog with a heart of gold; the one with a back story that was way too hefty and sad for the corrugated cardboard exoskeleton of the genre; and so on.
There was some beautiful purity to this. You’d show up looking for love or a modelling career, and some unseen person at a computer would either ruin your life or make you a star by turning you into a caricature of yourself. Such innocent times.
But then, as the genre matured, people got wise to the game and would come onto these shows ready to claim their camera time with a prefab personality they wore like a Halloween costume. The whole thing went meta, with everyone winking at the invisible audience from behind their chosen façade.
Which brings us to politics and some of the truly absurd things that have happened lately that have no explanation, except that everyone is in their villain-on-The Bachelor era.
This week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rose in the House of Commons to ask a signature hard-nosed question about the government’s drug policy. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland answered him – or “answered him,” given how things go in what is still insultingly called Question Period.
“Mr. Speaker, the Conservative leader is wearing more makeup than I am today,” she began. You know when you – or, say, some staffer writing bits for you – cook up a one-liner you think is a winner, but when you deploy it in real life it sounds like it was sprayed out of an aerosol can? This was that.
The rest of Ms. Freeland’s purported answer was drowned out by cackling and loud harrumphing from the respective benches. Then Speaker Greg Fergus asked her to withdraw the comment on another member’s appearance, which she did.
Back in November, at a committee meeting, Conservative MP Rachael Thomas was asking Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge a string of questions about funding for news outlets. At one point, she requested that the minister “if at all possible” respond in English.
Asking such a thing in a country where bilingualism is as fraught as it is in Canada is like jamming a fork into a power outlet. A multiday outrage festival followed, and Ms. Thomas eventually apologized.
But the reason she might have temporarily taken leave of her senses was that she was chasing a slam-dunk recorded moment in which she asked a pointy question and got an incriminating answer. And denying her that just may have been why the fluidly bilingual Ms. St-Onge stuck to responding in her mother tongue.
Similarly, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh overplayed his hand when he showed up at a committee last year to question then-Loblaws CEO Galen Weston Jr., Canada’s designated inflation-rage sponge. Mr. Singh rolled in with a stack of papers tall enough to use as a coffee table, which he said were questions from 2,000 Canadians that he wanted Mr. Weston to personally answer.
But when the NDP Leader asked to enter his prop into evidence, the committee refused because he hadn’t had the questions translated.
What these interactions – and a growing parade of others – share is that the people involved looked ridiculous in the moment and in the room where they were supposed to be doing serious work to shape the country, because what they were really doing was vamping for an invisible audience somewhere else. Social media performance art – and long before that, posturing for the TV cameras – is nothing new for politicians, but lately it seems to have hit a new volume and level of desperation.
John O’Leary led communications and opposition research for the Liberal caucus until 2020. As he describes it, the social media carrots dangling before MPs are exactly like those of a teenager aspiring to be an influencer: Get clicks and get noticed among a cast of 300 or so extras in the House of Commons.
“I think there’s a perception among members of Parliament that they need to gain attention and find ways to stand out,” he said. “And for some, I think that has meant being very sharp, being highly critical, highly partisan, on social media.”
He describes a dual audience for these viral bids: They’re trying to reach voters and constituents, of course, but there’s also within-caucus ambition to produce something that gets the same bounce as someone else. And the algorithms – both human and digital – have very clear taste, and it doesn’t lean toward the nuanced, the earnest or the technical.
“It’s awfully hard to go viral with a post about small-craft harbour funding or announcing a new milestone in dental care,” Mr. O’Leary said. “That’s not clickbait.”
In their 1991 book A Capital Scandal, Robert Fife and John Warren devote a whole chapter to exploring how the arrival of TV cameras in the House of Commons in 1977 changed how politicians worked (the short answer was that it made things dumber, meaner and greasier, so trace the dotted line to imagine where we are now).
There were intense debates about letting the cameras in, the authors write, and plenty of people rang alarm bells.
“We have been elected to represent the people,” André-Gilles Fortin of the Social Credit Party warned. “Not to entertain them.”
That idea seems about as wistful and impossible now as finding true love in two months on a TV show with its own hot tub.