Wuflu: The Early Show

Allow me to quote from my trusty and freshly towelette-sanitized Big Book of Columnists’ Clichés. “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise,” Winston Churchill said in 1947. “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government—except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Ah, Churchill. So wise. But even that greatest friend of every pundit who was ever hard up for a lede would have admitted that parliamentary democracy, the least-worst form of Government, sometimes does its best to out-worst the other forms.

And so, as if on cue, Canada’s Parliament returned to an Ottawa grown silent with quarantine. Or part of it did. Several Senators moved into the temporary Senate in an old rail station across from the Château Laurier, and a selection of MPs into the temporary House of Commons in the courtyard of the West Block. (Even our Houses of Parliament are practicing social distancing.) For the first time in memory, only a bare minimum of MPs were asked to show up: 14 Liberals, 11 Conservatives, 3 Bloc Québécois members, 3 from the NDP, and one Green. It was like in 1950 when Count Basie gave up trying to support a big band and made do with an octet for a few years.

You would think the smaller ensemble would play together more cohesively. You would especially think this if you had not attended a standard-issue Commons committee meeting. Around here, chaos poured into smaller packages tends to concentrate.

The chaos this time was two layers deep.

[Interesting Read]

See Also:

(1) COVID-19: Beware the wartime propaganda as we battle this plague

(2) Ottawa can’t beat COVID-19 alone, and it’s doing a questionable job trying

(3) Consumers didn’t cause the mask shortage — governments did