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Conservative Leader Pierre Poirievre stands up during a question and answer session in Ottawa on May 23. Adrian Wylde/The Canadian Press
In the early, bucolic days of reality TV, random contestants would appear on a show, the action would unfold, and personalities and archetypes would emerge only as producers had fun in the editing room.
There are scheming villains, compelling but unstable villains, kind-hearted underdogs, villains with sad backstories too heavy for the genre's cardboard exoskeleton, and so on and so forth.
There was a kind of beautiful innocence about it: you showed up looking for love or a modeling job, and someone invisible in front of a computer would either ruin your life or transform you into a caricature of yourself and make you a star. What an innocent time it was.
But then, as the genre matured, people became aware of the game and started showing up to these shows donning pre-made personalities like Halloween costumes, prepared to demand camera time. It all became meta, with everyone winking at an invisible audience from behind their chosen mask.
So, speaking of politics, some of the really stupid things that have happened recently have no explanation other than everyone is having a bad-guy period on “The Bachelor.”
This week, Conservative leader Pierre Poirievre asked a characteristically tough question about the government's drug policy in the House of Commons, to which Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland replied — or, in the context of what is still pejoratively referred to as a “question and answer” session, you might say answered.
“Mr. Speaker, the Conservative Leader is wearing more make-up than I am today,” she began. Sometimes you, or the staff writing for you, have crafted a one-liner that you think is brilliant, but when you use it, it sounds like it was sprung from an aerosol can. Here it is.
The rest of Freeland's response was drowned out by laughter and loud groans from each side of the table, after which Speaker Greg Fergus asked Freeland to retract her comments about other MPs' appearances, which she did.
At a committee meeting in November, Conservative MP Rachel Thomas asked Heritage Minister Pascal Saintonge a series of questions about media funding, at one point asking the minister to answer in English “wherever possible”.
Asking such a question in a country like Canada, where bilingual education is difficult, is like sticking a fork into a power outlet. It sparked days of outrage, and Thomas eventually apologized.
But her momentary insanity may have been caused by her pursuit of a recording of a crucial moment when she could have asked a pointed question and received an incriminating answer — and the fact that she missed that moment may have been what prompted St. Onge, who is fluently bilingual, to insist on answering in her own language.
Similarly, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh went too far when he showed up at the committee last year to question then-Loblows CEO Galen Weston Jr., the man ostensibly responsible for sucking up Canada's inflation frenzy. Singh showed up with a stack of papers high enough to use as a coffee table and said they were questions from 2,000 Canadians that he wanted Weston to answer directly.
But when the NDP leader asked to submit his proposal as evidence, the committee refused, saying the questions had not been translated.
What this exchange, and a growing number of others, has in common is that the people present looked ridiculous in a place where they were supposed to be working seriously to shape the country, because all they were actually doing was dancing for an invisible audience somewhere else. Social media performance art, and posing for TV cameras long before that, is nothing new for politicians, but lately it seems to have reached a new level of desperation.
John O'Leary, who was head of communications and opposition research for the Liberal caucus until 2020, explains that the social media carrot dangled in front of MPs is exactly the same as the carrot offered to teenagers aspiring to be influencers: to get clicks and be noticed among the 300 or so extras in the House of Commons.
“I think there's a recognition among members of Congress that they need to find ways to get noticed and to be visible,” he said, “and I think for some, that means being very sharp, very critical and very partisan on social media.”
He explains that these viral campaigns have a dual target audience: Of course, they're trying to reach voters and voters, but there's also the ambition to create something that resonates within the caucus in the same way as other candidates. And the algorithms (both human and digital) have a very clear taste for nuance, seriousness and not being biased towards the technical.
“A post about port funding for small vessels or announcing a new breakthrough in dentistry is very hard to go viral,” O'Leary said. “That's not clickbait.”
In their 1991 book, A Capital Scandal, Robert Fife and John Warren dedicate a chapter to exploring how the introduction of television cameras into the House of Commons in 1977 changed the job of politicians (put simply, things became dumber, meaner, more insidious; follow the dotted line to see where we are now).
The authors write that there was fierce debate over the installation of the cameras, with many raising alarm bells.
“We were elected to represent the people,” warned André-Gilles Fortin of the Social Credit party, “not to entertain the people.”
That idea now seems as dreary and impossible as finding true love in two months on a TV show with its own hot tub.
