Trudeau will probably miss our unaccountable pandemic Parliament

If you have any interest in federal politics, the end of the pandemic can’t come soon enough. For over a year, Canadians have been governed by Zoom democracy: virtual question periods, committees and press conferences. It’s not like we had many options as three waves of COVID-19 rolled across the country. But as this sorry session of Parliament comes to a sorry close, it is hopefully a situation Canada will not have to repeat.Why? Because the situation has made it near impossible to hold the government to account. You can’t have a level playing field in question period with one person in the room, and the other just a talking head. The media can’t chase a politician down a hallway in cyberspace. And most Canadians are too busy trying to stay sane through this crisis to pay rapt attention to politicians’ rantings on Twitter.On top of this, no one wanted a lockdown election, and the Liberals knew it. Consequently, they behaved more like a majority government than a minority one, ramming through a leviathan budget bill, shutting down debate on Bill C-10’s changes to the Broadcasting Act, and tabling sweeping changes to the Official Languages Act days before Parliament was set to recess for the summer.Read the full column on the National Post website