Ottawa

Foreign Affairs field trip

What happens when the State Department asks about Question Period

The Foreign Affairs committee was having a lovely time in Washington. Then the State Department asked about Question Period.

Leaving a meeting at the State Department late in the afternoon yesterday, I was asked by a State Department official what I thought of the doings in the House of Commons during the day’s Question Period. I confessed I had been in meetings all day and hadn’t heard. Finally on the Internet in the evening, I read the accounts of QP and of the hyper-partisan attacks. Again, it was saddening. He we were with major players, acting professional and serious with some of the high people in the American administration, while back home it was partisan business as usual. Our teams had let us down. We had put aside our differences here to make an impact, and under Mr. Sorenson’s help I think we did, but it was being eroded at home. The saddest part of it all was that it was a State Department official who alerted me to the conduct in our own Parliament. This is hokey stuff and deserves better from all of us.

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