Fowl Lines

Anthony Rota stepped down as Canada’s thirty-seventh Speaker of the House of Commons on September 27, for reasons pretty much the entire world knows. Between his unprecedented resignation and the election of Greg Fergus to take up that fancy oak and velvet chair, the electorate was treated to some familiar headlines. “Who Can Bring Back Commons Decency?” the Toronto Star asked on its front page. “Being Speaker Isn’t Easy,” the CBC reminded us. “And It Just Got a Lot Harder.”

For years, we’ve heard about the “raucous House,” as the Hill Times put it in May, in an article that, if you squinted just a little, read an awful lot like “How Do You Get Decorum in the House?” from a 2006 edition of the same paper. “Heckling and hollering in the House is nothing new,” the Hill Times noted back then. “It’s tradition.” As is the tradition of saying so.