David J. Murray is senior vice-president at One Persuasion Inc. and the former director of policy in Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s Opposition Leader’s Office.

Every few months, a clip from Question Period circulates and Canadians cringe. Grown adults heckle. Ministers dodge. MPs shout over each other. Viewers shake their heads and say: If anyone behaved like this in my workplace, HR would step in.

That instinct is human, but it misses what Parliament is for. The House of Commons is not a boardroom. It is the only room where the people who run the government must answer, in real time, to elected opponents who want to unseat them. The friction is not a flaw of the Westminster set-up. It is the point.

The prime minister and cabinet sit in the Commons and stay in office only as long as they hold the confidence of a majority of MPs. Because the same majority writes the laws and runs the government, the only check that bites is tough public scrutiny from the opposition benches.

That work happens most visibly during Question Period in the House.

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Those 45 minutes each day the House is in session are built for a fight. Opposition parties plan sequences of questions meant to expose gaps in a minister’s story. Questions must be brief. So must answers. The rules of procedure, and the Speaker’s authority, set outer limits on behaviour, but they also protect MPs who push for clarity that a minister would prefer to avoid. A quiet, gentle chat simply cannot do that job.

Committees take the same logic and slow it down. When an $80,000 estimate ended up costing taxpayers $59-million, the House asked the Auditor-General to investigate the ArriveCAN boondoggle. Her 2024 report found ballooning costs, poor records and broken rules.

In an extraordinary step, the House admonished a key contractor at the bar and ordered him to answer questions he had ducked. That is adversarial oversight with teeth.

The WE Charity scandal erupted in 2020 when the Canadian government awarded a sole-source contract worth up to $912-million to the charity to administer a student volunteer grant program, despite WE having paid more than $400,000 in speaking fees and expenses to members of then-prime minister Justin Trudeau’s family.

Ethics committee hearings on WE ran for weeks, heard from dozens of witnesses and helped trigger a contract cancellation and a minister’s exit.

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Foreign interference was also a serious issue that required direct, uncomfortable exchanges between elected officials. MPs pressed, in the House and in committee, for documents and for a probe. The government tried a narrower route, then, under sustained pressure, agreed to a full public inquiry. That inquiry’s first report warned that secrecy and poor communication had eroded trust. In each case, accountability moved only when elected adversaries made life uncomfortable.

These episodes hint at what gets lost when scrutiny turns too cozy. In the first months of the pandemic, all parties helped rush emergency spending bills through the Commons in a single day. That speed may have been justified by the crisis, but groups that study Parliament warned that routine sittings, committee work and detailed debate had nearly vanished.

None of this excuses cruelty or spite. Adversarial politics is not a licence to dehumanize your foe. The line between hard questions and personal abuse matters. So do the rules that bar certain insults and let the Speaker eject MPs who cross that line. The target should be decisions, not families. Records, not rumours. Power, not private life.

But if we treat civility and comfort as the highest goals, we will grind down the very tools that make a Westminster Parliament work. Ministers control the government’s machine. They can trigger emergency powers. They decide how to respond to foreign meddling and domestic threats. Those choices deserve more than polite nods and scripted talking points.

Adversarialism helps people see inside those choices. A sharp question that forces a minister to admit a mistake gives voters something useful. A tense committee hearing that uncovers a pattern of mismanagement can change how money is spent. A government that knows it will face hostile questions tomorrow is less tempted to cut corners today.

Democracy is not a dinner party at all. It is closer to cross-examination in a trial. In our system, the people who wield power sit within shouting distance of their critics. They do not get to hide behind press releases or carefully curated events. They have to stand in the House and argue. The noise that follows can grate on the ears, but it is the sound of a system that keeps corruption in check, our leaders accountable, and our national interests safeguarded.