The score: Reform 10, 5 Ottawa press gallery 0 t ee IF THE day ever comes when you need a brain transplant, try to get a member of the Parliamentary press gallery asa donor. That is your best chance of getting a brain that hasn’t been used. The Ottawa Gallery is a sort of Senate of the Canadian newspuper business where one need no longer work. ft is enough to ponderate. As in any organization, including the Canadian Senate, there are always a few members who persist in doing things instead of just sitting there and these few become pack leaders on Parliament Hill. One of them says something, everybody has to say it. So it went with the Reform Party MPs at the end of the first session of the new House of Commons. Pack journalism has branded them fail- ures. Why failures? “Well, everybody says so.” Who is everybody, please? “Why you know who everybody is, don’t you? You must know. It’s everybody. It’s us, the National Press Gallery.” If you want to know what is real- ly happening in Commons, tune in the Parliamentary TV channel when the House opens agyin this fall and see for your- self. The channel filters nothing. It brings you the raw information of what is happening. Perhaps for that reason, the press decides it and calls it terminally bor- ing. The Parliamentary Channel is often boring. That’s what public life involves, frequent periods of tedium. But if you watch that channel you will see for yourself how Reform MPs are conducting themselves and you may well find them a highly creditable and intelli- gent group of men and women who adorn the institution of Parliament. Reformers have, in fact, brought our House of Commons back closer io its original status, a place where the peaple’s clected representatives can speak without fet or hindrance and where party and other factional interests come second to the inter- ests of the constituents who sent you Paul St. Pierre PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES to Parliament. So Preston Manning declined to siton the front bench and instead sits among his fellow Reformers. This is important? No. It’s men- tioned here only because the Press Gallery finds it unusual. To the Gallery anything unusual is unset- tling, and therefore to be con- dernned. They tell us Reformers have not 66 To the Gallery anything unusual be condemned. 99 gone for the jugular in Question Period. Very true. Their questions tend to be quiet, sensible and to the point while tradition of recent years holds that they should be devious and highly embarrassing to the party in power. This is as good a time as any to discuss Questicn Period. [tis not part of normal parliamentary proce- dure. As veteran MP Arnold Peters once said, Question Period was invented by the Press for the Press. He showed his disapproval by never asking questions. He just kept get- ting elected. conveniently located in LYNN VALLEY CENTRE 1199 Lynn Valley Rd, N Van ° Open daily at 12, The Gallery prizes Question Period because it enables them to appear to do a full day's work i140 minutes. They can come itite the House, sit through 40 minutes of snideness and then empty the press box, like a toilet bow! being flushed, and write about who won and who lost. The other advantage of Question Period, from their point of view, is that it fits the style of baseball games or other mindless contests. In this way, government can he reported as a game between fn parties and Out parties and that every day and every event, from Question Period to the weather in Northern Saskatchewan, cun be reduced to a calculation of which team is winning points. So this tiresome and pointless exercise continues in press, televi- sion and, toa fesser extent, radio. We are told the government has became, however fractionally, either more or fess popular with the peo- ple. We are told it day by day and it often seems like hour by hour. This is nonsense. Nobody, including the public, knows the answer. Determining whether a govern- ment deserves to stand or fall requires a long, expensive process called a national election. The idea that the clucking of some old hens in the Parliamentary press gallery can be a substi- tute for this is (oo absurd for contempla- tion by anybody except today’s newspaper edi- is unsettling and therefore to tors. This may seem ill tempered. It is. The public deserves to get information instead of rambling pronounce- ments from reporters in Ottawa and the Reform Pany does not deserve to be condemned by puck journalists yelping like coy- otes crying to the moon, So Reform MPs did not have a clearly defined shadow cabinet in the Jast session? So what? So they didn’t behave as if the election were next week. That's bad? Reform MPs lave given new life to the House of Commons, So has the Bloc Quebecois, although for a different reason. Watch the Parliamentary TV channel occasionally. 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