Jim Maloway

Credit cards, cell phones and an air passengers bill of rights

The NDP says Elmwood-Transcona was targeted by robocalls misdirecting voters.

Rather than simply lament for how little attention is paid to the institution, I thought I’d ask some smart people if they had anything to say in response to my piece about the state of the House of Commons. Over the next little while, those responses will appear here. First up, Nick Taylor-Vaisey.

No one shows up. Nothing gets done. The sad decline of our most important institution.

With the House expected to rise for the holidays any day now, we pause to note that the NDP’s Jim Maloway has officially committed more than 300,000 words to the official record over the past year, more than three times as many as the next most-verbose member. By my count that’s something like 2,600 words per day the House was in session, which is more than 22 of his colleagues have spoken for the entirety of those 117 sitting days.

In the wake of Jack Layton’s announcement yesterday, Charlie Angus, one of the dozen NDP MPs whose votes will decide the fate of the gun registry, doesn’t seem entirely committed to voting for C-391 on third reading. But Jim Maloway, who has repeated his intention to vote for C-391, is unmoved.

Postmedia finds three NDP MPs who are committed to voting in favour of C-391: Peter Stoffer, Dennis Bevington and Jim Maloway. Carol Hughes is undecided. A spokesperson for John Rafferty, the NDP MP for Thunder Bay, says Mr. Rafferty will only comment on his stance to the local media. (The hilarity of this position aside—the invention of the telegraph in 1794 making it relatively easy to transmit news from one city to another—it should at least compel someone from the Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal to give Mr. Rafferty a call sometime today.)

One last time before pausing for the summer: our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses.

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses.

The Mark has taken lately to publishing short essays by MPs who have ideas about things. The latest is Mario Silva on literacy. Previously there was Garry Breitkreuz on the gun registry and Jim Maloway on air travel.

Though perhaps not the most consequential of issues, a rookie MP looking to make a name for oneself could obviously do worse than to take on the scourge of modern air travel—see CTV, CBC, the Globe and Mail, Regina Leader-Post , Montreal Gazette, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province.