GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA.

Stephen Harper has built his political career on promises of high government ethics, accountability and transparency, but we’ve seen precious little of any of that lately. Well, actually ever.

His modus operandi, like his predecessors, is to deny, deflect, demean and control the message at all costs. Indeed, the only place we regularly see him fielding question is in that theatre of the absurd called “Question Period”, where questions are framed by opponents to score political points as they rave, heckle and feign outrage and indignation. If Canadians want to see accountability and transparency we need to look to Washington, not Ottawa.

According to Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University in Baltimore (see Neil Macdonald), after 51 months in office, Obama has held 84 news conferences, 38 of them solo and 46 with some other visiting leader at his side. He's held 110 short question-and-answer sessions, usually with a small pool of reporters, and has granted 700 interviews, either one-on-one, or with a group of reporters. And all this is in addition to the daily on-camera White House press briefings. By comparison, Harper has held five full-fledged news conferences in the past six years.

Harper-style “transparency” – perhaps the word we are looking for is “invisibility” – seems to have worked for a while, but recently the questions are piling up.  And every new revelation suggests a dozen new questions. And every evasive answer in question period further undermines the Prime Minister’s credibility.

If he really want’s to introduce openness to government Harper needs to find a way to speak unambiguously to the Canadian people. Though often chided for acting more like a President than a Prime Minister, he might do well to borrow a page from Obama’s playbook. And a monthly news conference where he answers questions posed by the media might be a good start.

Change is hard, particularly in an institution and old and stuffy as Parliament. But the changes in communication that have happened in recent years: 24 hour news cycles, Internet accessibility, and instant messaging of all sorts, simply demand corresponding change.

And whatever happened to the Reformers who were so insistent about government accountability, open processes, and the modernization (democratization) of the Senate? Well, they’re sitting on the backbenches in the House of Commons, and in the Conservative Party Caucus. They’re the ticking time bomb that might very well spell the end of the Conservative Party if real change doesn’t happen soon.

Is the country really ready for an NDP Government, or another Prime Minister Trudeau?