When you’re nine years old and it’s the middle of June, the summer break can’t come soon enough. The same can also be said of the summer recess of Parliament, particularly when MPs of late have acted like nine-year-olds fighting for the same swing.
Just when we thought MPs would play nice long enough to make it to the June 23 recess, Parliament Hill has again degenerated into a house of ridicule and overblown indignation, all thanks to a forgetful ministerial aide with a penchant for leaving behind goodies for journalists.
The now infamous accidental tape recording of Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt gossiping with her press secretary about how she might politically gain from the “sexy” medical isotope shortage immediately sparked howls of outrage from opposition MPs. The ink was barely dry on stories recounting Raitt’s gab session — which included criticisms of Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq — when calls came for the minister’s resignation. Ignatieff called the affair a “fiasco,” while NDP leader Jack Layton took the bluster to another level by exclaiming, “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
We have pondered that very question several times over the last year, but unlike Layton the query is directed to all Parliamentarians, not the Conservative party alone. The opposition’s reaction to the so-called “Raitt-gate” is yet another example of MPs resorting to cheap partisan antics at the first sign of a misstep, however feeble the roots of controversy.
While there is no doubt Raitt’s comments were personally embarrassing and likely professionally damaging to the member from Halton, Ont., her private musings about how Atomic Energy of Canada Limited’s (AECL) Chalk River reactor crisis could propel her career if handled properly are hardly the fuel for such heated reaction. It’s the type of political strategizing that happens all the time in government back rooms, just not usually in the presence of a tape recorder.
The opposition parties missed the mark when they chose to first direct their bloodlust toward Raitt’s ‘sexy” comment rather than turning up the heat on the medical isotope shortage itself. The Chalk River reactor had produced 40 per cent of the world’s medical isotopes before it was forced to shut down last month due to leaking radioactive water. Now we learn from Prime Minister Stephen Harper that Canada is getting out of the isotope business altogether, putting the last nail in the coffin of AECL’s aging NRU reactor. Harper has also ruled out reviving the NRU’s ill-fated replacements, the MAPLE-1 and MAPLE-2 reactors, which were mothballed last year before ever producing a single isotope. The government now disputes claims from AEC that the MAPLE reactors can be fixed at minimal cost.
But instead of hitting the government hard for its decision not to proceed with the MAPLE reactors, MPs went for the easy sound bite and called for Raitt’s head. It wasn’t until after Raitt’s teary apology that the opposition ran away with reports that some hospitals are already delaying cancer diagnostics.
Resorting to partisan parlour games is not going to woo voters when this mess of a minority Parliament inevitably crumbles. Such antics will only turn off already disenfranchised electors, only 59.1 per cent of whom bothered to vote in last fall’s election, a historic low. When recess is over next fall, it’s time to get back to work.
