Television brought me to Parliament Hill as a rookie journalist in the late seventies. With cameras being introduced in the House of Commons, Radio-Canada needed a junior staffer to help cobble together a weekly broadcast.

That was the first installment of a 35-year voyage from wonderment to bereavement.

Host Jean-Marc Poliquin was a senior correspondent and a journalistic icon in his own right. As French was then not as commonly used in the House as it is now, the broadcast featured a lot of simultaneous translation. To give francophone viewers a bit of a break, Poliquin would ensure that the small contingent of Quebec Créditistes had a spot in the line-up.

His over-riding rationale was that every member counted.

That message was driven home again soon after my return to Otttawa a decade later. I’d just settled back on the Hill when the House took the definitive vote on the death penalty.

Anyone who has attended a landmark vote in Parliament knows that television cannot do justice to the occasion. When MPs vote, their mission on our collective behalf takes on its full meaning. That they would be allowed to do their legislative homework before discharging that duty should be a given.

The Mulroney decade was particularly ripe with debates, including a protracted one on abortion rights.

At one point, the House sat non-stop for more than 24 hours to give every MP a chance to have a say on the issue. The result was a revealing collection of soul-baring speeches.

The free-trade and constitutional wars consumed Mulroney’s Parliaments. In those days, what was on the mind of the House of Commons was also on the mind of the country.

After the 1993 election, two new parties took over the opposition side of the House. Reform party leader Preston Manning would regularly bring reasoned arguments to battles often fought on ground that no federal politician usually dared to thread. Win or lose, the parliamentary fabric was richer for his contribution.

One night, I watched Lucien Bouchard — who, by then, was the leading sovereigntist in the country — deliver the most passionate defence of Canada’s peacekeeping role that I would have occasion to hear.

It was a rare insight into the fact that behind a sovereigntist facade, there often is a disappointed federalist. There is much unrequited love in that disappointment.

On the day after the 1995 referendum, a fractured House of Commons gathered. MPs and journalists alike came out of question period that afternoon with their stomachs in knots.

Today, that roller-coaster feeling has been replaced by the mild nausea induced by a never-ending ride on a merry-go-round.

No woman and no journalist could feel nostalgia for the era when I first came to the Hill. Tagging along with my Radio-Canada colleagues to an MP’s office for a private Christmas party one evening, I turned out to be the only female who was not paid to be there!

The old boys’ network of the not-so-distant past often held Parliament back rather than contribute to move the country forward.

The make-up of the Hill today is a more diverse; it is a less intellectually claustrophobic place.

Ultimately though, it is the House of Commons that defines the character of a given Parliament.

Three decades ago, I was taught that the rule that stipulates that MPs shall not accuse one another of lying was based on a code of honour that equates intellectual honesty with respect for the institution.

As I watch MPs routinely abuse their parliamentary privileges to weave webs of lies about their opponents these days, I have come to the conclusion that there is not a rule of parliamentary conduct too sacred to be broken.

The worst is that I no longer necessarily expect regime change to reverse the downward spiral that Parliament has been on for the better part of two decades.

The last time I harboured hopes along those lines, official opposition leader Stephen Harper was asking Canadians for a mandate to tackle the democratic deficit.

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Over the past few years, I have spaced my visits to the Commons; there is only so much corrosive rhetoric one can be exposed to before one’s soul becomes corroded.

The first time l took a seat in the House gallery as a 20-something reporter, I was wide-eyed. Today, I mostly wish I could look away.

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