Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Roundup: Rebutting the reformers’ complaints

Posted on by

If it were possible for someone to write a column that was basically one long subtweet, then I’m pretty sure that it’s what Andrew Coyne did with his column on electoral reform, with me as his unspoken target – particularly as he parroted several of my arguments (that no one else seems to be making) without actually getting their substance correct. So here we go.

When proportional representation advocates complain that the allocation of seats among the parties in the legislature does not resemble their relative shares of the votes cast — with the especially unhappy effect of allowing a minority of the voters to rule over the majority — first past the post’s defenders reply: why should it? Members were elected in 338 separate riding elections, not in a single nationwide vote.

Yes, and that’s pointed out for a number of reasons – that the vote share figure that reformers cite as evidence is not actually real (hence its use as evidence is meaningless), and the fact that each MP is elected to a single seat in a separate election has a particular meaning that gives them individual agency rather than making them a thrall of a particular party. This is an important consideration in the electoral system because it gives a clear line for how MPs are empowered, which is what we keep insisting we want. It also demonstrates that if the complaint is that MPs aren’t empowered, it’s because it’s their own choice or ignorance – not the electoral system that is at fault.

When reformers point out the imbalance this creates between voters — in a given election it typically takes many more votes to elect a member from one party than another — first-past-the-posters look positively mystified: everyone gets one ballot. And when the former observe that under first past the post the votes cast for anyone but the leading candidate in a riding are “wasted,” in the sense that they do not contribute to electing anyone, the latter lose all patience. How could any of the votes have been wasted, they ask, if all were counted? The candidate who was elected may not have been everyone’s choice, but he still represents everyone.

Here Coyne adopts the same specious math that the Broadbent Institute was pushing over Twitter yesterday, which ignores how ridings actually work, and that elections are 338 separate events, and mashes the figures together and divides by 338, pretending that it’s a number with meaning when it’s not – just like the popular vote. It’s pretty much like bringing a unicorn to a logic exam. As well, he doesn’t make a compelling argument about why votes are “wasted” because it ignores the broader political ecosystem. It has little to do with the fact that the MP who won the seat represents everyone, but that the vote itself is but one small piece of political engagement. Casting a vote is not the end-all-be-all of political engagement. Rather, the system is built for people to be joining parties and engaging at a grassroots level to develop policy and for riding associations to act as interlocutors between the local community and the caucus, even when they don’t have a local MP in that party. As well, the percentage by which the MP won the seat is a figure that matters. If it’s by a slim margin, then those votes against are certainly not “wasted” – they have a meaning in the message that it sends to the MP about where his or her support lies. That matters.

To reformers’ complaints about how the system works, in other words, the answer commonly offered is: that’s how the system works. It is as if that were not just the system we have now, but the only system there is. And of course if you assume that then yes, reformers’ objections become literally incomprehensible. They might as well object to the weather. If only one member can be elected per riding, then obviously it’s silly to talk about wasted votes, or to complain that voters who supported another candidate are not represented. That’s life. Suck it up. The resulting parliament was not proportional? That’s not how our system works.

No, that’s not why one has to point out that it’s how the system works – one needs to point that out because you need to understand how the system works before you go about changing it, which usually means breaking things and making them worse. It has been proven that every time we tinker with our system, we make it worse, which leads us to want to tinker with it more, breaking it even further. Why? Because people don’t understand how the system works, so they assume that it’s broken, particularly if they get emotional that it doesn’t do what they think it should. This is the whole premise of my book – that we need to stop and understand how and why things work the way they do before we go about messing with the system some more because history has shown repeatedly that tinkering makes it worse. Ignorance is literally killing our democracy, and no matter how well intentioned its reformers tend to be, they almost always make it worse.

At any rate, it’s worth debating. Some might argue that single-member ridings give constituents a clearer sense of who to take their problems to, and who to hold to account. Others might reply that, with several members competing to represent them, constituents might get better service: if one didn’t answer your letter, another might.

From here, Coyne goes off about how maybe multi-member ridings would be better, possibly sprinkled in with single-member ones where they would be too large (hello, all of rural and remote Canada), which immediately brings up questions about how that could possibly be considered a more fair system. And while he touches ever so briefly on accountability, he gets the premise wrong – an MP’s job is not to “service” one’s constituents. It’s about holding the government to account. This, however, is lost on the reformers, whose fetishisation with fantastical notions about “representation” overshadow all other aspects of how the system works in its broader ecosystem. Yes, representation is a part of it, but it is not the totality, and yet that is what all of their reforms are geared toward with no regard for the bigger whole.

So no, it’s not about whether other systems are possible – it’s about not making things worse because you don’t understand how things work now. That’s a very different thing entirely.

Continue reading →

Roundup: More awful electoral reform questions

Posted on by

Another day, another meeting of the electoral reform committee, which produced yet more kinds of awful. Marc Mayrand, the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer, gave a few facts to MPs, like the fact that a referendum (if the enabling legislation were changed) would cost about $300 million to run, or the fact that Elections Canada could be ready in time for a 2019 election under a new system, provided that everything was settled by May of next year. (Note: This may be overly optimistic considering the constitutional questions raised by some kinds of voting systems). But some of the worst moments were around questions raised to both Mayrand and his predecessor, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, about things like online voting.

No. No, no, no, no, no. The problem with online voting has zero to do with encryption technology and everything to do with the secrecy of the ballot, and anyone who confuses the two needs a smack upside the head. The secrecy of the ballot is ensuring that nobody sees who you are voting for, so that you can’t be rewarded or punished for it, you know, like in the era of “rum bottle politics.” And you can’t ensure the secrecy of the ballot with online voting. “But what about mail-in ballots?” you ask. Well, the proportion of those is so small that it’s a compromise that we have to make. Online voting is not comparable.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/751122720520282113

This particular intervention is complete nonsense. Does David Christopherson not take the phone calls of his constituents unless they can prove that they voted NDP? Does he not present their petitions in Parliament? Oh, so he does? Then they don’t “get nothing,” and it’s fundamentally wrong for anyone to suggest otherwise, and proof that they don’t know what it means to be an MP.

And then there’s this specious and utterly wrong nonsense, because it’s fundamentally dishonest. Do you know how many voters it took to elect Elizabeth May? 37,000 votes. We have ridings, where people decide who gets to sit in each seat. We don’t apportion seats based on the number of votes they receive, and to try and present it as such in order to prove some point is basically lying. And yes, this is the kinds of discourse that this process is bringing out, so well done everyone.

And then there are the editorials and op-eds. Christina Spencer is not at all impressed with how this committee has gotten started (and I can’t say that I blame her – it’s been pretty awful). Kelly McParland thinks the Liberals are counting on apathy in order to get their preferred electoral system through (hence their reluctance for a referendum), while Michael Den Tandt thinks the insistence of “focus grouping” their electoral reform consultations is really a shell game of “trust us” while they push ranked ballots through. Colin Horgan suggests that the “electoral reform toolkit” is an attempt at making the conversation appear to be more grassroots.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Duffy expenses redux

Posted on by

Because it’s never over, the saga of Mike Duffy’s illegitimate expenses are back in the news as Senate Administration is demanding that he repay some $16,955 in expenses claimed improperly that were paid for using his third-party contract with Gerald Donohue. And, wouldn’t you know it, Duffy’s lawyer is raising a huge fuss saying that the judge in the trial already declared that these were okay – something senators dispute, saying that just because they were not deemed criminal it doesn’t mean that they were okay, particularly when these expenses were not allowable and that the third-party contract was used to go around the approval process. (Duffy’s lawyer, incidentally, is also hinting that they will demand back pay for the suspension, to the tune of $155,000). But this is where the particular nature of the Senate comes into play, which is that it’s a self-governing body that is protected by parliamentary privilege, and it needs to be in order to safeguard our democratic system. In governing its own affairs, it is allowed to enforce its own rules (which, it bears reminding, do and did exist no matter what Bayne tried to argue in trial). And it is also empowered to enforce its own discipline, which is what the suspensions were related to – not a determination of criminality or a reflection of it, but rather that Duffy (and Wallin and Brazeau) had brought disrepute onto the Chamber and an example needed to be made. Is it fair? Possibly not, but this is also politics. Bayne raised the straw man argument that the 29 other senators whose expenses were flagged by the Auditor General weren’t suspended, which is a ridiculous argument considering that a) Duffy was not part of that process at all; and b) they ensured that there was a resolution process that ended in repayment one way or the other, so nobody was seen to be escaping justice. I don’t think Bayne will find much truck in the courts if he wants to press the issue around Duffy’s suspension or the fact that they are demanding repayment for expenses that clearly were not allowed, but it seems that we may be subjected to more drama around this, possibly for years if they take the matter as far as the Supreme Court of Canada.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Bills left unpassed

Posted on by

While the House of Commons may have risen for the summer on Friday, they did so with an unusual number of bills waiting to pass third reading, not to mention the fact that Bill C-7 on RCMP unionization is heading back to them after the Senate amends it (and those amendments have passed at the committee stage and are awaiting third reading vote). What is most unusual to me is the fact that C-7 was another bill that was in response to a Supreme Court decision that also was granted an extension, and still managed to miss its deadline and remains un-passed. Now, the government is prepared to allow it go un-passed through the summer, despite the fact that while it was under consideration on the Commons side, they insisted they couldn’t make substantive amendments to the bill because of the deadline. That deadline has passed, and they are willing to now let it go through the summer, the sense of urgency suddenly evaporated? How? It makes no sense. And looking at the other bills that they haven’t passed yet, there are two that are both awaiting Third Reading and could have passed if they’d sat for an extra couple of days: C-2 on their vaunted income tax changes, and C-4 on undoing the Conservatives’ changes to labour rights. Why they’re letting these languish through the summer – particularly C-4, which keeps some pretty onerous regulations for labour unions on the books – is frankly mystifying.

I will say that the mood in the Commons was strangely exhausted by the time Friday rolled around, when they hadn’t even been doing late-night sittings up to this point in order to get things passed an off to the Senate (often with the expectation to get those bills passed as well before rising themselves). In fact, normally by this time, MPs are outright feral, and the tone in the Commons could generally be compared to jeering, hooting baboons. Mind you, we had The Elbowing and that associated drama a few weeks ago, and as someone remarked to me the other day (and if I could remember who you were when I had this conversation, I would credit you), they basically peaked too soon this year. And that very well could be. It still makes no sense that they would leave these two bills on the Order Paper waiting for final debate, or not waiting for C-7 to come back from the Senate. But then again, there have been a lot of questionable choices made this spring, so perhaps we should chalk it up to more of that.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Parliament’s ongoing abdication

Posted on by

After a day of impassioned and indeed blistering speeches, Bill C-14 has passed the Senate without its key amendment that would remove the “foreseeable death” restriction, and has received Royal Assent, making it law, but it wasn’t done without more damage done to our parliamentary system. No, I’m not one of those pearl-clutchers who saw the Senate doing its job in standing up against unconstitutional legislation as being some kind of anathema or affront to the democratically elected Commons – indeed, anyone who listened to Senator Serge Joyal’s speech yesterday about all of the times that the elected majority in the Commons used their powers to strip away people’s rights should see that’s why simply hand-waving about “democracy” can’t be an argument that holds water – but rather, it was the burden that is being placed on the Supreme Court of Canada and those who must challenge this legislation that is the affront. The prevailing sentiment in the chamber became “this is going to be challenged, and we did as much as we can so now it’s up to the Supreme Court,” when no, the Senate could have dug in their heels and used the powers available to them under the constitution and threaten to defeat the bill outright because of the grave doubts about its constitutionality if the government didn’t back down. Joyal tried to move an amendment that would restore the previous amendment with a proviso that it be suspended for up to two years until the Supreme Court could weigh in on its constitutionality, which was a compromise that I remain uncomfortable with because I don’t like the fact that we are increasingly demanding that the Supreme Court weigh in on bills as though legislating were a game of “Mother May I?” I was almost convinced, however, by the fact that doing it this way would be at the government’s expense rather than at the expense of a family with a suffering member who would need to begin the legal challenge process all over again – something that some senators deemed to be an immoral action. It bothers me a great deal that this is becoming the new normal in our politics – that we are increasingly becoming dependent upon the courts to deal with matters of evolving public policy because MPs – and indeed senators – lack the testicular/ovarian fortitude to actually deal with tough issues.

To that end, I’m also extremely disappointed that you had senators who said that they did their job in warning the government about the fact that the bill was unconstitutional, and that the government will have to answer to the people for it. Except it’s not the Senate’s job to “warn” – it’s their job to protect minorities and the constitution, which they did not end up doing today. And “answering to the people” is precisely why the government has been so forcefully timid in what they were going to allow under this bill. “This is just the first step,” they kept insisting, but to be perfectly frank, I don’t believe them. The bill mandates that they must have a report within two years on things like advanced directives, mature minors and the mentally ill, but if you think they’re going to do something that report other than refusing to touch it with a bargepole, well, you’re a far more optimistic person than I. No, what happened today was a further abdication by parliamentarians in both chambers of doing their jobs, and forcing more of it onto the courts (and at the cost of the individuals who will be forced to bring the challenges). It’s disgraceful.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Squeamish MPs and the problems they cause

Posted on by

So many pearls got clutched yesterday on a couple of topics that, while unrelated, actually have a lot more in common than one may think. The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the legal definition of bestiality must include penetration (with only Justice Abella dissenting) based on its common law definitions going back years. It was a case that involved the sexual abuse of teen girls, but if you judged by the headlines and the reactions on social media, it was a number of bizarre over-readings of what the ruling was, as though they ruled it legal rather than saying that there is a hole in the law because MPs didn’t properly update it when they had a chance. And this is where this starts to overlap with what else is happening.

As you may have guessed, the pearl-clutching amongst the pundit class carries on over the Senate amending bill C-14 (I swear that Michael Den Tandt has clutched his pearls so tightly that he’s cut off the flow of oxygen to his brain) and the “suddenly assertive” Senate (it’s actually not, but rather it has a couple of genuinely problematic bills before it), and while I won’t repeat yesterday’s civics lesson, let me say that the Supreme Court decision around bestiality is exactly the kind of object lesson that the assisted dying legislation could easily become.

Let’s face it – MPs don’t like to deal with tough issues. When the abortion laws they tried to pass post-Morgentaler decision was defeated, they didn’t make a second attempt. When they passed “temporary” prostitution laws in the 1980s to deal with a specific public nuisance issue, they didn’t return to the issue as promised to deal with it until the Supreme Court struck them down in the Bedford decision. We saw yesterday morning with the bestiality case that where MPs should have dealt with the issue when they changed other laws around the issue in the 1980s, they didn’t until the Supreme Court had to render a decision that pointed out the loophole and a sexual offender had two charges against him dropped rather than the court make up a new law holus bolus. And now there’s doctor-assisted dying. The Court had very good reasons when they made the Carter decision to insist on a timeline, which MPs have been balking about because they don’t want to deal with it. When the Prime Minister defends the conservative nature of C-14 with the excuse that it’s the “first step” of a longer conversation, I don’t actually trust that there will be a second step because MPs are too squeamish to deal with tough problems. And that’s exactly why I think the Senate is right to rip the band-aid off right now and force the government to actually deal with the whole issue as the Supreme Court laid it out. And yes, the government is going to grumble and say they don’t want to accept the amendments, but I also think that it’s part of the narrative of reluctance, where they can then hide behind the Senate as having “forced” them to accept the changes, so that they have political cover when interest groups confront them during the next election. But we’ve seen this problem of MPs not wanting to do their jobs time and again and the problems that it eventually causes. And if it means that the Senate has to be the grown-ups and make them deal with it this time, so be it.

Continue reading →

Roundup: An exit and a streamlining

Posted on by

In case you hadn’t heard, there are two national political policy conventions happening this weekend, both at the same time, so Kady O’Malley came up with a viewer’s guide to both events. Last night we heard from Stephen Harper in a pretty canned speech that was mostly the same talking points that were in his retrospective video, and he wants the party to look forward. The rest of the Conservative convention is to be dedicated to reinvigorating the party as opposed to giving it a complete overhaul, so say its attendees, but there is a push to get a better organization in place to engage youth in the country – something the party has not been good at doing, officially eschewing a youth wing – and the “draft Rona Ambrose” movement continues to try to get enough support to modify the party’s constitution to allow her to run (never mind that she’s stated repeatedly that she’s not interested in the job).

As for the Liberals, it’s not just a victory lap for them as they went from third place and from talks of their time being over and needing to merge with the NDP to forming a majority government. No, they’ve got a very serious debate on their hands as it relates to whether they adopt a new “streamlined” constitution or now, and by “streamlined,” it means more than just the actual streamlining of having 18 different constitutions, but it centralizes all of the power into the leader’s office and eliminates pretty much every accountability mechanism that exists in the party for the sake of becoming a party of Big Data. So while some streamlining is no doubt necessary, I’m not sure that this is the way that the party should be run. There is also a movement to have an emergency resolution debated to pressure the government into amending C-14 to make it more Carter decision compliant, but it appears that the party has quashed it.

Continue reading →

Roundup: The elbowing

Posted on by

I can scarcely express just how stupid things got yesterday because everyone needed to rush to score points. But here we are. Starting back at the beginning, the government decided to put a motion on the Notice Paper that was basically the nuclear option of time allocation measures – essentially suspending all avenues by which the opposition could propose dilatory motions until the Commons rises for the summer, so that they can get C-14 and a few other timely pieces of legislation passed. And the opposition freaked out.

Nobody is quite sure why the Liberals resorted to such tactics, but my working theory is that the closed-door House Leaders’ meetings have degenerated to being unworkable (not an unlikely theory considering that my sources told me in the previous parliament that Peter Julian was impossible to work with), and Monday’s surprise vote after the NDP lied about the motions they were moving that day broke the trust of the Liberals, who had been attempting to work amiably with them. It’s also possible that putting this motion on the Notice Paper was as the nuclear option – the threat to hold over their heads in order to try and force them to come to the table with reasonable requests for timelines on debates. Dominic LeBlanc went so far as to suggest that rather than constraining debate, they were trying to allow for more under this motion, not that the opposition believed him. Temperatures got raised, and QP was one of the most heated of the current session.

After QP and the Komagata Maru apology, the procedural games started up again, including a privilege motion from Julian about how terribly draconian these tactics were. Fast forward a couple of hours to the time allocation vote on C-14, and the NDP apparently decided to play the childish tactic of physically blocking the Conservative whip from being able to walk down the aisle. The NDP claimed they were just “milling about,” but people milling about don’t all stand facing the same direction, and both Elizabeth May and Andrew Leslie have confirmed that there were shenanigans being played. And it would seem that Justin Trudeau had lost his patience by this point, possibly because Christy Clark was waiting in his office for a meeting he was already late for, and he still had a Komagata Maru apology reception to speak at, also late for. And so he did something completely boneheaded – he got up, went to the NDP blockade, and reached through to grab the Conservative whip and pull him through (which he apparently didn’t appreciate either), and in the course of that, accidentally elbowed Ruth Ellen Brosseau. Moments later, he went back to apologise to her as she fled the chamber – apparently flustered and unable to cope – when Thomas Mulcair began screaming at Trudeau and jabbing in his direction, when suddenly MPs from both sides of the aisle went to pull them apart before things got physical. It was all over in seconds, and Trudeau apologised for his actions.

Not well enough, apparently, as he did it again later when Brosseau reappeared in the chamber, but it doesn’t seem to matter because opposition MPs were now in point-scoring mode. Niki Ashton immediately got to her feet to decry that Trudeau had violated the “safe space” of the Chamber and NDP MPs started likening the incident to domestic violence, bullying and physical intimidation, and Julian talked about how his aunt was beaten to death. No, seriously. The Conservatives soon after began piling on, smelling blood in the water, and it devolved from there. Outside the chamber, Scheer and Julian took to the microphones to ramp up the spin, Julian deciding to drop the hints that there were “rumours” to the fact that Trudeau has some kind of history of violence, because there were points to be scored. And the faux outrage dominated the Twitter Machine as “fearful” MPs registered their shock and horror at what they’d witnessed. And it was just so stupid that I can’t even. Suffice to say, this looks like it’s going to boil down into privilege hearings in the Procedure and House Affairs committee, and we’re going to be subjected to weeks of un-clever “sunny ways” references, and suggestions that Trudeau is apparently unfit for office. It’s a good thing that next week is a constituency week, but I fear for what the final stretch of sitting weeks is going to be like if tempers are this frayed this early. I suspect it’s going to get really ugly from here.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Who to blame for short timelines

Posted on by

Our friend Kady O’Malley penned a column over the weekend about how anyone upset about the tight timeline of the assisted dying legislation should be upset at the fixed election date instead of the Supreme Court for imposing the deadline. And she’s right, but I’m not particularly enthused about her suggestion that the election date be moved to earlier in the year instead of October, as that date pretty much wipes out the fall sitting of Parliament. I mean, that is a valid point, but if you were to ask me, the real suggestion would be to simply eliminate the fixed election date as we already have a constitutional requirement that elections be held every five years, whereas the fixed date is a particular bit of Americanisation that is supposed to provide stability but just winds up making the whole system worse off, from turning Question Period into an unrelenting series of election ads, to simply changing the government’s calculations on policy to suit that date rather than supposedly helping the opposition by giving them more predictability when it comes to election timing. It didn’t, incidentally, stop the speculation of early election calls since pretty much every media outlet continued to ask whether there would be an early call (as is permissible, since the legislation can’t actually bind the powers of the Governor General), so it’s not like it changed that conversation any. That all being said, I would like to note that while many people quite rightly point out that there was no obligation on the Supreme Court to give the government that year (plus the extra four months) to come up with a bill, but could rather have struck down that prohibition immediately and we would have had few ill-effects, I will point out that without a deadline, MPs would simply keep putting off the legislation under the constant plaintive wails that it’s “deeply personal” and “a difficult subject.” Our MPs, in the event you haven’t noticed, are a lot that really are pretty lacking when it comes to moral courage to deal with difficult things. Instead, they wait for people to bring it to the courts in order to be “forced” to deal with it, and if you look at the pattern from the last decade or so, their response is to half-ass some rushed legislation in response, decry the courts for forcing them into such a compromise position, and leave it for it all to be challenged in court once again. That we have a new government doesn’t seem to have changed the pattern too much, with overly cautious legislation that doesn’t appear to meet the test laid out by the Supreme Court in the Carter decision, while MPs fall all over themselves to declare that it’s a “deeply personal” issue while wailing plaintively that there are no provisions for more palliative care in a bill that is about changing Criminal Code prohibitions. So rather than blaming the fixed election date (which is a valid position), I choose instead to blame our rather spineless crop of MPs, who have mostly chosen to complain about the lot they’ve been given rather than rise to the occasion.

Continue reading →

Roundup: A rare apology

Posted on by

A trio of Justin Trudeau-related items in the news today, which makes me want to look at them together. The first incident of note was actually last in chronological order, but to me it seemed most significant, which is the fact that during Question Period yesterday, Trudeau stood up and apologised for having told reporters on Wednesday that opposition party obstruction was to blame for why a committee on electoral reform was not yet up and running, and pledged that he was still serious about the topic. I’m not sure that we ever saw Stephen Harper apologise, nor would we ever see it because that was a man who was not only determined to always be seen to be right, but he also had a particularly obstinate streak that made him dig his heels in rather than be proven to be wrong. Most often this was around the inappropriate behaviours of cabinet ministers, and rather than have them step down over wrongdoing, Harper would keep them in position well past the time that the heat was on them, and only shuffle them once the attention was elsewhere so it didn’t look like he was capitulating to demands of the reporters. Trudeau on the other hand owned up to what he had said, apologised, promised to do better, and even applauded when the MP who called him out made a slightly clever dig about it in his follow-up question. It was a show of humility and accountability that we are unused to seeing here. The second incident of note was after his speech on Fort McMurray at the start of the day, during Statements by Ministers (a practice in Routine Proceedings that the Conservatives had virtually allowed to fall into complete disuse). Rona Ambrose rose to give remarks in reply, and got emotional during it, and once she finished speaking, Trudeau was quick to cross the aisle to give her a quick hug – again, something that cold fish Harper was loathe to do, and only once gave awkward hugs around speeches related to either an MP’s passing or the attack on Parliament Hill (I forget which and tried to find a reference but couldn’t – forgive me). Trudeau remains a master of the humanizing gesture that helps to civilise politics in a way that we have become unused to after a decade of angry sound and fury. The third item of note had to do with a point of order raised after QP, when Blake Richards accused Trudeau of sticking his tongue out during a question raised by Diane Watts about P3 projects. Nobody but Richards seems to have witnessed this, but we do know that Trudeau does occasionally possess an irreverent side. Did he stick his tongue out? Maybe. Is it the end of the world if he did? Hardly, and in the theatrics of QP, it’s a bit tiresome but does raise the spectre of the “fuddle duddle” incident, if only less profane.

Continue reading →