When the House of Commons was choosing a new speaker this week, there was much talk of the need for a "strong" speaker who would enforce "decorum" and "civility." 
New Speaker Greg Fergus
Susan Delacourt wants a strong speaker, and she illustrates the decorum problem vividly:
In my three decades or so of watching question period, I’ve seen lots of hard-to-watch spectacles. But it’s the constant, unrelenting viciousness of the political combatants that makes it now feel more chronic, harder to fix. The name-calling and the sheer noise seem worse now, too.
But she mostly handwaves about why Parliament is so disfunctional. (Maybe it's social media, etc.)
Some columnists understand that decorum is not the real problem. Aaron Whetter goes a little further, noting it's MPs, not the Speaker, who can set the tone of the House. He cites one Speaker candidate who was willing to tell the MPs about that:
If MPs were willing to be part of a "collective effort to restore public confidence in the way we treat each other and the rules of Parliament," Casey said, then he would be "honoured to lead that cause." But if members were "comfortable with the current state of decorum and level of respect for the office of the Speaker," he said, he did not want their vote.
Among the commentators I've seen, only Andrew Coyne gets serious about the root of Parliamentary childishness: you cannot have a strong Speaker without a strong Parliament.
The greater [than decorum] problem is the impotence of the Commons as a body, and of MPs individually, either to represent the people who elected them or to hold government to account.
In fairness, the two are related. People tend to behave with a greater sense of dignity when they feel they have a meaningful role in life, notably in the work they do. Conversely, people who have no such meaningful work to do tend to act up. If your only job was, in effect, to stand up and sit down when you were told – if your every act or statement had to be vetted by some higher authority, if you could not so much as go to the bathroom without asking someone’s permission – you’d probably utter the occasional incivility, too.
But Coyne suggests only a few procedural tweaks that might guide MPs toward greater assertiveness.
He refrains from taking up a theme he has considered before: that Parliaments can only be strong and serious when parliamentary caucuses are strong and serious. Ultimately, that is only possible when they know they have in reserve and (when needed), actually assert their right to remove their party leaders and choose their successor. Parliaments are only real when power is accountable. MPs who do not hold their leaders constantly accountable cannot and will not hold governments accountable. And if they can't hold governments accountable, they are a waste of space.
While the United States is going through its own, and even dumber, Speaker search, Adam Gopnik draws attention to a new book that argues the fix for division and intolerance within democracies is ... legislatures. In diverse societies, direct democracy is inherently divisive, while representative legislatures have an incentive to seek common interest.
The essential compromises arrive, instead, through the proceduralism of representative democracy. ....
Professional politicians are a necessary social class; as the late sociologist Howard Becker explained, all social systems need unofficial experts who can mediate between competing groups. Their virtue is that, whatever they say to their constituents, the habit of compromise is imprinted on their profession.
Good luck to the new Speaker. But it is MPs with a newer truer sense of their own responsibilities that we really need.
