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There’s a certain frustration in Canada.

Like a simmering crock pot full of seafood gumbo, the political intelligentsia in this country seem  prepared to boil over at any moment with sweet, savory goodness.

Okay, that metaphor kind of falls apart at the end.

The point is, the righteous-indignation-ometer has been consistently peaking at pretty-freaking-indignant for the past several months. Maybe even years.

There are those who have their rifles up (so to speak) over the abolition of the long gun registry. Some are in feminist fervor in response to the opening of old wounds on the abortion debate. Others are upset over federal job cuts; the possible degradation of food safety inspections, the Italicization of our Coast Guard, the speeding-up of environmental review and untold else. Then there’s controversy on copyright, immigration, crime & punishment and yadda yadda yadda.

[[MORE]]It’s worth pausing here and considering that, while one may not be happy with those decisions, it’s sort of nice to see such a wide breadth of policy discussion taking place on such a national level. Maybe it’s unfortunate that it had to happen in such a divisive manner.

Which brings me to my next point - the largest acrimony this government receives from the fourth estate has little to do with substance and much to do with form. 

There has been no ink spared ruminating on the impact of social media (Twitter, especially) and its influence on national discourses. I think it’s bullshit. 

Twitter impacts the national dialog only insofar as those transcribers of the dialog are Twitterfanatics (myself included.)

So that’s to say, the ones who have the largest impact on the national political conversation - politicians, journalists, thinktankers, etc. - are the ones most active. That’s no great surprise.

And we’ve all heard the old ‘echochamber’ theory - Twitter acts as a great soundingboard where opinions and ideas are eternally reverberating and self-perpetuating, destined never to reach any layperson in a meaningful way.

I think it’s half true.

In the battlefield of Canadian politics, that echochamber channels itself through our media - Facebook, CBC, the Toronto Star - by way of high-level pundits. That punditry trickles down.

That punditry, like some gross sea sponge, tends to stitch itself together and morph into a sole collective consciousness. Currently, that consciousness goes that goes that the parliament we find ourselves in is the most secretive. The most anti-democratic. The most so-and-so. 

Certainly they’re not entirely wrong. The facts are clear, no doubt. This government is doing bad things that are impacting how we discuss issues of grave national importance. I watch Question Period enough to know that. 

But one has to wonder if this omnipresence of eyes is just making it look worse.

As the Library of Parliament shows, the previous Liberal governments were much more secretive than this Conservative one. (This, to be fair, has been taken on by the effervescent Kady. And iPolitics, too, shows some interesting numbers.)

The fact that Martin’s use of committees is being analyzed now - when it was ne’er an issue then - is encouraging. It’s a lovely brand of revisionism.

What this echochamber is very good at is taking an arcane issue, magnifying it, and giving it a central national stage. 

Take, for example, the wonderfully nerdy Twitter spat between Tony Clement and John McCallum:

.@JohnMcCallumMP Section 81(7) of the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. Thx.

Without missing a beat, Aaron Wherry put it up on Macleans.ca

In no other time period in Canadian history has such an obscure issue gotten so prominent so immediately. One struggles to recall anything analogous from Paul Martin’s stint as PM, let alone Mulroney or Trudeau. 

Anyone looking for adorable pictures of Prince Will and Princess Kate may well stumble across Wherry’s quirky blog and find themselves enlightened. Or bored. But at least they stumbled.

So it leads us down a path into the deep dark woods of self-analysis - are things really worse, or are we just paying better attention?

This isn’t to say there’s something wrong with such analysis, nor that Harper is right to, say, invoke closure on debate or to take committees in camera. Rather, the big microscope is recognition that we’re doing good. 

While one may look at this coverage, throw their hands above their head and find a nice cave to move into, it’s worth noting that Harper’s style - not entirely inconsistent with the historical norm - is becoming less and less acceptable. It shows that, as a country, we are moving slowly towards accountability, towards openness and steadily towards engagement.

This seems to strike a blow to the idea - drowning in cognitive dissonance - that our citizenry is unengaged. This suggests the opposite - while the average Joe or Jane might not give an especially large hoot if Harper is limiting debate in the House, the very fact that he or she may be aware of the issue is a monumental step forward.