Mock and Pillory

Resist the urge to treat this as a wheeze. It's a bloody brilliant idea and should be taken seriously.

Perhaps Canada is drifting towards disaster while our elected officials bicker, snipe and throw pies at each other. Or perhaps our federal system has succeeded despite this sideshow for so long that the really important things are sort of firewalled off, and Canada will continue to prosper even as its politics tries to find a lower place than the gutter. Either way, it's clear that politicians waste a huge chunk of their time (for lack of a better word) discussing—and political journalists waste a good chunk of their time covering—issues that don’t really matter.

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Any format that involves even a 10-second clip from Question Period needs serious tweaking if not outright abandonment, unless it's designed, like I said before, to mock or pillory the participants.

Whoah, hang on, that’s it—that should be the new format. Hell, that could be the new name: Mock and Pillory. “Welcome to the broadcast. First up, we’ll ask some smart, disinterested people what they think about employment insurance. Then, we’ll show you what our politicians said about it, while pointing out all their errors, distortions and outright lies. Then, as ever, we’ll show you the best bits of Question Period overdubbed with the soundtrack from Benny Hill.” It’s win-win, no? CBC can keep Canadians “connected” to their government without giving them an ounce more respect than they deserve. And if they want to be taken seriously again, all they have to do is start behaving like civilized, reasonably intelligent human beings.

Well that certainly would be a refreshing change from what it is now: listening to our poor pundits toss off their intellectual vanities about politician X's "brilliant" or "lame" political maneuvering. --As though the fat-kid-wiles of Canadian politics could ever, in a million-bazillion years, be said to offer even the consolation of wit or sophistication.

via Olaf