Local MPs take civility to a new level in politics

By LARRY CORNIES, Special to QMI Agency

Two days before Christmas, I was flipping through TV channels when I happened upon CBC's Power and Politics. What stopped me were the familiar faces: London MPs Ed Holder, Glen Pearson and Irene Mathyssen, together, in split-screen fashion.

What became clear was this was not the partisan snipe-fest that characterizes most TV political talk shows - the kind where some central issue is being debated, but the hyperactive debaters never miss an opportunity to score a point, no matter how cheap or tangential, for the party.

Rather, there was a different dynamic at work here. Holder (Con-London West), Pearson (Lib-London North Centre) and Mathyssen (NDP-London Fanshawe) were discussing the ways they manage to co-operate, despite their nuanced differences and sometimes in spite of partisan political machinery, to get things done for their constituents on issues such as poverty, homelessness and the local economy.

The show's host was intrigued, but also a little bemused. To him, it all seemed a tad quaint and small-town. The segment, after all, contrasted sharply with the usual fare on the program, in which power and politics are closely aligned.

This was politics, but shorn of its usual thirst for power and its appetite for partisan one-upmanship. The discussion, unlike what passes as debate in the House of Commons, was insightful, polite and, at times, even deferential.

I confess what I felt at the end of that little segment was a flash of pride - in London, its electorate and its MPs. Not in the "homer" sense of having three local politicians bask momentarily in the fickle national spotlight, but in the sense that what was on display there was a kind of Politics 3.0 - a collaborative, $post-partisan style of political representation that considered the issues first, then how they might be tackled by political power, rather than political power first and how it might be achieved or sustained by manipulation of the issues.

Today's newsrooms provide an apt analogy. A decade ago, news outlets were still thinking about the day's stories strictly in terms of delivery platforms. Newspapers considered how they'd tell those stories through photos, graphics and print. Radio stations wrestled with how to engage listeners through compelling voices and audio. TV stations concentrated on deft scripts that accompanied revealing video. A poor cousin to all three was the news organization's website, where the contents of what was generated daily by each of their storytelling silos would be posted.

The digital revolution has changed all that. The question more often now concerns what the story needs to be properly told. A chart? A timeline? A great photo? A few hundred words of type? Must-see video? A live chat? An active Twitter feed? Great news organizations today employ them all, tailoring the tools and delivery mechanisms to the story, rather than tailoring the story to their delivery modes.

Politics in Canada has not yet embarked on a similar transition. The reason most Canadians don't want another federal election anytime soon is they know they'll be treated to yet another round of Politics 2.0 in a time when active citizenship demands better. The quest for power will trump meaningful consideration of issues and suspend, for significantly longer than just the writ period, the tackling of real problems. Partisan torque, spin, slogan noise and manipulation of the national agenda to suit backroom purposes will overwhelm what should be an important national discussion of priorities at a crucial time.

It was Otto von Bismarck who, in 1867, remarked "politics is the art of the possible." Nearly a century later, in 1962, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a note to President John F. Kennedy with a more cynical message, saying, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

Vaclav Havel, the president of post-Soviet Czechoslovakia and future president of the Czech Republic, gave Bismarck's words a more imaginative and progressive spin.

In a speech in Prague on Jan. 1, 1990, he said "politics can be not only the art of the possible . . . it can even be the art of the impossible; namely, the art of improving ourselves and the world."

Before seeing yet another federal election campaign, Canadians deserve to see a little more of that kind of aspiration from their political leaders - and across party lines.