Sex, Drugs, and Parliamentary Democracy

The NDP and Quebec injected the House of Commons with a dose of youth this week. How dare they!

The NDP is sending 57 rookie MPs to Ottawa from Quebec, many under the age of 30. The Toronto Star's Chantal Hébert terms them the “Arcade Fire generation” – Quebecers who grew up after the constitutional crises of the 1980s and 1990s, and came of age after the 1995 referendum. Embodied by 19-year-old Pierre-Luc Dusseault, the youngest MP ever elected in Canada, this cohort is “the first wave of Quebec politicians in decades to come to Parliament with a priority other than addressing the relationship of the province with the rest of Canada,” says Hébert. “And that makes him more, not less, representative of Quebec’s current reality than his defeated Bloc predecessor.”

And embodying the “Stay off my damn lawn” generation is Don Macpherson of The Gazette, who terms his new MP an “orange traffic cone.” Fearing a parade of embarrassment from the youthful caucus, Macpherson poo-poos Quebecers for “[making] a joke of the election and their duty as citizens” by electing students, pub managers, and museum guides, and not those hard-working and honest lawyers and career politicians the other parties typically run. “In terms of their effective representation, the joke is on them,” says Macpherson, because Quebecers' previous choices – lockstep Liberals or separatists – were such a sterling lot.

Heaping onto that line of ageism, err, reasoning, the Windsor Star's Chris Vander Doelen dismisses the youth movement en masse, predicting (seriously, it seems) that they'll drink away their careers in Ottawa, in one of the more condescending columns this year. “Hundreds of cute young things prance into new jobs on the Hill and the nearby bars in the Byward Market boom anew,” he writes, adding they'll show up to work late or not at all while the “mature, experienced and competent” Tory members (the fleet of new members who wouldn't debate local candidates during the campaign) focus on governing. Yes, they're young, and they're bound to slip up. But let us be the first to suggest that missing question period due to a hangover is far less an affront to our democracy than being found in contempt of Parliament.