It’s not my usual habit to do write-ups of Friday QP, but today I felt like it warranted a mention because it was, in my opinion, probably the best Friday QP that I’ve seen in all of my eight or so years on the Hill. And yes, I’m being completely serious.

For the most part, Friday QP has been an exercise in patience, which I generally refer to as B-team day, and every now and again, it’s been the C-team. The practice under the previous government, and most especially in the previous parliament, as was it tended to be an exercise of deputy critics and parliamentary secretaries reading scripts to one another. It was a pretty sad affair, saved only by the occasional parliamentary secretary who was taking his or her job to heart and outshining their minister by learning their file and giving responses that weren’t the mechanical recitation of the material in front of them. It was probably at its worst in the last parliament, with the NDP serving as official opposition, with nearly all of their MPs unable to ask a question that wasn’t on a sheet of paper in front of their face, followed by another MP to ask the very same question in the other official language, creating the most stilted of exchanges across the aisle. It was puppet theatre at its worst.

I feared greatly that this new parliament would carry on the tradition. In December’s sole Friday QP of the new session, it was very much carrying on the same way, with scripted questions eliciting scripted responses (though, to be fair, the attendance of ministers has been higher in both of the Friday QPs that we’ve seen so far). But today, unlike that December day, we had a marked improvement coming from the new batch of parliamentary secretaries. The vast majority of them were able to give responses off-the-cuff, and even if they had notes in front of them, they weren’t reading the prepared lines. Okay, not all of them – Kim Rudd was struggling a lot more and was reading her lines quite obviously, and it was pretty galling for one of the Conservative MPs to heckle her with “nice reading,” considering that they made a virtual art out of reading their scripts, sometimes with holding up the binder as they did so. But the fact that the majority of the parliamentary secretaries this time were able to deliver responses, some of them impeccably – David Lametti and Pam Goldsmith-Jones as standout examples – gives me great hope for the future.

In fact, given that the majority of cabinet can answer responses off-the-cuff, and that their parliamentary secretaries are following that example, it gives me renewed hope that we have a parliament that is starting to take their duties a little more seriously. Now we need to get the opposition to get off their own scripts, and better yet, restore the Standing Orders that banned prepared speeches altogether, so that we can have a parliament that is better engaged in the debate and in the work of holding the government to account, and for government to show that they are taking issues seriously.