When Sergio Marchi recalls his nine years on the opposition benches after the Liberals' crushing defeat in 1984, he is not indulging in nostalgia. He is holding up a mirror to a Canadian parliamentary culture that has spent four decades forgetting why opposition exists in the first place.
The Apprenticeship That Opposition Used to Be
Marchi spent nearly a decade across the aisle from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's government — a period that, by his own account, shaped him more than any cabinet post could have. He was made a critic, served on committees, asked questions, debated, and travelled the country speaking to audiences who expected substance over spectacle. The experience sharpened his political instincts without the cushion of ministerial staff surrounding him. It was, in the most literal sense, an apprenticeship.
The Walrus draws attention to a parallel account from Michael Wilson, Mulroney's finance minister, who viewed his own time in opposition through the same lens: "It resembled in many ways an apprenticeship; a period to absorb knowledge and hone skills. When we won power, I was prepared to deal with challenges in a far more capable manner than I would have had I still been a rookie to Parliament."
That conception of opposition — as preparation, not performance — is the article's central claim. And it is a claim that grows harder to sustain with each parliamentary session.
"A politics built on reflex leaves no space for the apprenticeship [Wilson] described and little capacity to govern once the noise subsides."
The Content Factory
Marchi is candid about his own complicity. The Liberal opposition's daily ritual began each morning with caucus leadership poring over newspaper clippings to determine which questions would "sell with the media." By lunch, designated members rehearsed their questions before the House leader. At 2 p.m., Question Period began — not as a genuine inquiry into government conduct, but as a tactical exercise in political bloodletting.
"Knowing that governments eventually defeat themselves, we wanted the Conservative Party to enter the next election with heavy baggage that the electors, hopefully, wouldn't forget nor forgive."
The mechanics of that strategy are familiar to anyone watching Parliament today. The difference, Marchi argues, is not the tactics themselves but the absence of any larger purpose behind them. The opposition he served in, for all its aggression, still understood itself as a government-in-waiting. The opposition of today treats the job as a daily content factory — engineered for clips, clicks, and confrontation, with no governing philosophy to anchor the outrage.
Critics might note that Marchi romanticizes the past. The "rat pack" of young Liberals — Sheila Copps, Brian Tobin, Don Boudria, John Nunziata — did not operate in a vacuum of principle. They were calculated provocateurs whose "take-no-prisoners" approach regularly earned ejections from the chamber for unparliamentary language. Marchi himself was considered an "honorary" member. The race to the bottom he describes started long before the internet gave it a megaphone.
The Wine Question That Broke Nothing
The article's most revealing anecdote concerns Don Boudria, a competent and dedicated representative who once rose in Question Period to ask Mulroney whether Canadian or French wine had been served on his most recent flight aboard a government Challenger jet.
Mulroney didn't even take the bait. His House leader dismissed the question as "baseless and ridiculous." On supplementary, Boudria pressed again. Mulroney declined once more, leaving his House leader to repeat the same answer.
When Marchi asked Boudria afterward what the point had been, the reply was earnest: "Sergio, don't you get it? He should only be serving Canadian wine."
Marchi's rebuttal was practical and unanswerable. Mulroney didn't drink. He'd sworn off alcohol years earlier. And when his Challenger parked next to other world leaders' aircraft, it was invariably the smallest plane on the tarmac. Was any of this worth one of the opposition's daily Question Period slots?
"Of course, it wasn't."
The Unintended Consequences
What makes the anecdote consequential is not the frivolity of the question itself but what followed. When the Liberals finally won power in 1993, cabinet ministers avoided the Challenger fleet entirely for roughly a year, paralyzed by fear of the same media retribution they had weaponized in opposition. The aircraft sat idle. Pilots were forced to fly them empty just to log the flight hours required to maintain their licences.
Marchi's warning to Boudria in that moment proved prophetic: "Don, if we ever get to the promised land of government, the opposition will undoubtedly rake us over the coals, as well."
And so it went. A second incident involving Boudria — this time criticizing Conservative foreign affairs minister Barbara McDougall for booking a first-class commercial seat to Hong Kong when business class was sold out — compounded the damage. The minister needed to read her briefing materials on a long flight. It was, by any practical standard, the right call. The opposition's culture made it a scandal anyway.
The Walrus notes the cumulative toll: trust between parties eroded. Ministers took accusations personally. Accommodation became harder. And the muckraking, sustained over years, fed a voter cynicism that discouraged ordinary Canadians from entering public life at all.
"The levels of division, shrill accusations, and nastiness have risen, resulting in an often toxic discourse."
Beyond the Chamber
The corrosion has spread beyond Question Period into parliamentary committees — venues that once prided themselves on producing unanimous, cross-party reports. Today, committees are just another arena for the same partisan theatre. The distinction between the chamber's performative combat and the committee room's supposed deliberation has collapsed entirely.
Critics might argue that committees have always been partisan and that the golden age of cooperation Marchi evokes never truly existed. They might also point out that the social media economy rewards escalation in ways that 1980s newspaper culture simply did not — meaning the structural incentives have changed, not just the actors. Neither counterpoint invalidates Marchi's broader concern. It does suggest that the problem is harder to fix than a stern lecture from a former MP.
Bottom Line
The Walrus has written a meditation on what happens when political opposition abandons preparation for performance — and it is not an exclusively Canadian problem. The cost is not measured in wasted Question Period slots or idle government aircraft. It is measured in the slow attrition of a governing class that no longer believes it is being asked to govern.