Heckling in the House isn't the cause of Canada's mindless political discourse. Bad heckling, however, is a symptom.

A retired professor of philosophy recently described to me an argument he and a colleague had had about Wittgenstein. Their debate had descended into angry sniping and, predictably, failed to shed much light on its purported topic. When I asked the philosopher why he thought scholarly debates often became so acrimonious, he informed me that I had stumbled into an old joke: Why are academic disputes so heated? Because so little hinges on them.

In a recent piece in The Mark, Adam Chapnick called for a ban on heckling in the House of Commons. The climate in the House is, by many accounts, raucous beyond reason and Chapnick’s piece is sensible. But there and elsewhere, heckling gets a bad rap. Chapnick argues that “Less heckling would inevitably lead to more thoughtful discussion;” I would propose the opposite direction of causality: more thoughtful discussion would lead to less – and better – heckling.

Chapnick quotes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who has said that Question Period is all "contrived indignation and cheap shots and phony questions and unserious answers." If this is true, then parliamentary heckles are no worse than the speeches they disrupt: both are just empty performances. It may be that Parliament is so fractious today not because our politicians are becoming more brutal or less intelligent, but because, as in the bun-fight over Wittgenstein, so little hinges on what they say in the House. Policy is crafted elsewhere, the public is courted elsewhere, the opposition holds the government to account by other means. As a result, the House becomes a stage for vacant posturing.

The mace and two sword-lengths between government and opposition benches remind us that Parliament has always been about sublimating violence into talk. The primatologist Frans de Waal, author of Chimpanzee Politics, has said that if you really want to know what's happening in a heated debate, turn off the sound on your television: the grimaces, smirks, pounding fists and jabbing fingers give the essential data; language is just window-dressing. Try CPAC on mute sometime; you can go from Marleau-Montpetit to Planet of the Apes pretty quickly.

When the substance of the debate ceases to matter, the House slides back toward the realm of violence: not toward real physical clashes, but toward political conflict that has no content beyond the quest for dominance. (Chimpanzee politics indeed.) If what happens in the House has no real consequences (other than votes, which are not determined by the persuasiveness of the foregoing rhetoric) it's little wonder the atmosphere is edging its way toward unalloyed aggression. The solution is not to insist that MPs listen more politely to each other's empty bloviating, but to make the debate mean something. After all, if what is said in the House has no weight, what is the incentive to listen? It's more fun to yell.

It is not an excess of heckling that is undermining parliamentary debate, but the fact that the environment is so devoid of real attention that a first-rate heckle – crisp, witty, penetrating – is impossible. When a good heckle hits its mark, it's like the heckler has thrown a match into a tinder pile of inarticulate dissent, which ignites into laughter. A heckle can be a shining moment of intelligence and humanity in an otherwise dull, pompous, or unfocused gathering. Where there is good heckling there is substance and shared attention; heckling is a delicate verbal act that reminds the speaker that the audience, though silent, is dangerously alert. The challenge to our system is not to suppress the conflict that is a normal part of politics. It is to make discussions in the House substantive enough that they are worth listening to – at the very least for MPs, and at best for all Canadians. It is to ensure that, in order to really understand what’s happening in the lower chamber, you need to keep the sound on. If in five years Canada’s House of Commons is a place where the best heckles on earth ring out, we'll know we're on the right track – and staying one step ahead of the chimps.