In theory, the decision taken more than 30 years ago to permit live radio and television broadcasting of the activity that takes place inside the House of Commons and its constituent committees was a step in the right direction, a move that facilitated greater transparency and encouraged Canadians to participate more fully in their democracy. In practice, though, it has had a rather different effect. Like lifelong meat eaters given full and unfettered access to what happens on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, Canadians have by and large recoiled in horror at what they see taking place in their country’s appropriately named lower chamber. Maybe this is what Otto Von Bismarck was getting at when he compared the legislative process to that of sausage-making.

Nobody’s had a more intimate vantage point from which to witness this grotesque daily carnage than Aaron Wherry, Maclean’s magazine’s parliamentary reporter. Evidently, he’s seen enough, judging by his recent piece in which he describes the House of Commons as a sham. His timing couldn’t have been much better, either, as the piece was published in the midst of the Conservative government’s farcical handling of Bev Oda’s decision to lie to a parliamentary committee of her colleagues. It was a display that was shameful even by the degraded ethical standards of partisan politics in 2011, one that culminated in Government House Leader John Baird’s decision to describe her colleague’s conduct – lying, remember – as “brave” and “courageous.” Kafka would have struggled to come up with a more preposterous scene.

The answer, as Wherry has written, isn’t as easy as removing the cameras from the House of Commons. “It would be, first and foremost, an admission of defeat. A concession that not only can’t our politicians behave respectably in the public sphere, but that we shouldn’t even expect them to.” Fair enough. How, then, to convince a community of (mostly) educated adults not to behave like children, never mind the braying jackasses that they transform into for 45 magical minutes every day during Question Period?

The easiest solution, and the one to which many Canadians have turned when faced with this question in the past, is blaming the media. The media, it is said, focuses only on the instances conflict and ignores those of consensus, and in so doing presents a distorted picture of political life in Canada. But isn’t that like blaming a police officer for issuing a speeding ticket? Yes, the driver may well have been travelling at the speed limit for the bulk of their trip, but it’s no more the police officer’s job to commend good behaviour on the road than it is the parliamentary reporter’s job to emphasize the good that elected officials are doing to the exclusion of identifying the bad.

Blaming the voter is no better. Yes, Canadians probably should spend more time paying attention to politics. Yes, it would be nice if they voted more frequently, and did so as informed and involved citizens. But they don’t, and they won’t if the situation doesn’t change. Expecting the average citizen to solve the problem of incivility in Ottawa is like waiting for a clock to fix itself.

What’s the solution, then? If you ask a member of parliament – a member of parliament, that is, who’s willing to concede that there even is a problem – the answer that you’ll get will have something to do with the empowerment of backbench MPs. That could mean more free votes, a less rigorous exercise of party discipline or some other expression of greater freedom and independence for the nearly 90 per cent of elected officials who aren’t part of the cabinet. Given the iron-handed way in which Stephen Harper has controlled his caucus – and even his cabinet, as the Oda-affair (in which Oda, despite being present at question period, wasn’t permitted to answer any of the questions directed at her) illustrated – such improvements would almost certainly help.

But these would be steps towards a solution, and not a solution in and of themselves. We still have a Westminster system of government, and as anybody who’s taken a first year political science class understands (or they should, anyways) it’s not one that it designed to accommodate the empowerment of individual members. As such, attempts to graft an American-style conception of political representation onto our existing parliamentary infrastructure amount to cosmetic surgery. They might make our system look a little better in the short-term, but they won’t do anything to address the underlying disease that’s really making our democratic culture sick.

What’s really required a full personality transplant. In other words, it’s the people who populate our political institutions that are at the root of the problem. Our inability to have sophisticated adult conversations about important matters of public policy is a reflection of the fact that we don’t have very many sophisticated adults participating in them. Look at the inner circle of Stephen Harper’s cabinet. It’s a blend of lifelong politicians and former lawyers, along with a rather disquieting number of people with no formal education to speak of (Chuck Strahl, for example, is a drop-out, and from Trinity Western University no less).

The recent race for the leadership of the BC Liberal Party (and, by extension, the Premiership of the province) was similarly coloured by professional mediocrity. Kevin Falcon, a longtime minister in former Premier Gordon Campbell’s cabinet, has a background in real estate and corporate communications. George Abbott, another longtime loyalist, worked previously as a political science instructor at Okanagan University College (scarcely a more reputable institution than Trinity Western) and also owns a berry farm. Mike de Jong, meanwhile, was once a lawyer in Abbotsford, a school trustee and an army reservist. Christy Clark, the eventual winner, essentially went straight from university into political life.

It’s no different in other political constituencies, either, where the ranks are invariably dominated by former political staffers and lawyers. And while they might make for good partisans,  but their inclination towards intellectual combat and reductionist or binary forms of thinking leaves them ill-equipped for what ought to be the serious and sobering work of parliament. Yes, our elected officials are capable, hard-working people. But are they remarkable? Hardly. They’re life’s B-plus students, the kind of people whose abilities are outstripped by their ambitions.

How do we get the A students involved and interested in public service? I’m tempted to suggest some form of targeted draft lottery, the political equivalent of jury duty for a specific subset of society, but I’ll have to shelve that alongside my other unrealistic political fantasies (single-transferable vote electoral system, an end to calls for the abolition of the Senate) for the time being. Instead, there’s a more prosaic solution: pay our elected officials more money.

This might seem like blasphemy in a political culture where even the slightest increase in the remuneration that elected officials receive – even those that seek to track the rate of inflation – is viewed by most Canadians as a capital offense. But there’s a chicken-and-egg dimension to that attitude, since the vitriol around pay increases is linked to the fact that the way politicians behave renders them unworthy of even there current salaries. If their conduct improved, perhaps our attitude towards their compensation would as well.

Now, the idea of luring people into public service through a more generous pay package might seem unduly cynical. After all, shouldn’t the call of public service be enough to entice even the most reluctant partisan to fulfill their civic duties? In an ideal world, it might just be. But as anyone who’s paid even a passing glance at partisan politics in Canada of late understands, idealism is a virtue that enjoys no standing in official Ottawa. In the real world, politicians are subjected to the kind of scrutiny that someone in the process of receiving a prostate exam would find uncomfortable. Equally humiliating is the treatment they’re almost sure to receive at the hands of some young and undereducated political staffer, those hyper-partisan loyalists who surround the leader of every political party (well, maybe not the Greens) and are primarily occupied with either kissing asses or covering them.

Meanwhile, the spoils of political life aren’t quite what they seem. Yes, there’s the six-figure salary and the promise of a pension whose generosity is directly proportional to time served in office – hardly an incentive for selfless behaviour, that – but neither of those compare particularly well to the pay and benefits that a senior business executive, civil servant or other type-A candidate already earns. In most cases, they’d be taking a substantial pay cut, and that’s a tough sell given both demands of the job and the professional interruption that serving in office would represent for many of these people. In public life, as in most other areas, we get what we pay for. If we want the best, we have to be prepared to offer more than ritual humiliation and a six-figure salary.

The other way we can improve the talent pool on Parliament Hill is by finding a way to attract more women. Canadian soldiers might be deployed in Afghanistan to help the women of that country, but given the fact that there are more women sitting in their parliament than our own we might want to redeploy some of those troops back home along Wellington Street in Ottawa. It’s no secret that women bring a different perspective to a given problem, and the more collaborative and co-operative strategies to which they’re more naturally inclined – this is no idle stereotype: see Carole Gilligan’s work on the subject if you’re not convinced – might be just the tonic that Parliament needs.

Anne McLellan, a former Liberal cabinet minister, travelled the country after her defeat at the hands of Laurie Hawn in 2006 searching for a way to draw more women into federal politics. Her conclusion is that any such effort won’t be easy. As the Globe and Mail’s Gloria Galloway wrote on October 12, 2010, “the women she spoke to expressed concerns about finding a balance between work and family life. They said they were discouraged by the hyper-partisan atmosphere in Ottawa and the ‘men playing silly games.’ And they were turned off by the media’s sexist depiction of female politicians.”

Creating quotas, as some have suggested, isn’t the answer to this problem. Such a measure would almost surely lead to a whole slough of other identity-based quotas, and make the House of Commons less a venue for consensus building and national discussion than an echo chamber for the grievances of an even-widening constellation of groups. Something, though, needs to be done to increase the level of participation by women in Canadian politics. More women won’t be the solution to parliament’s problems, but they certainly couldn’t make things any worse than they already are.

It’s about talent, in the end, and if we truly want to change the tone and tenor of our national political discussion we need to find a way to bring more of that to bear on the process. As it stands, politics remains the business of the B-plus students of society. Until that changes, little else of significance on Parliament Hill will either.