Actually, what Halton MP Lisa Raitt has caught is a virus. Some would say it’s nothing more than a bit of political fever. Others would say it’s something far more insidious, worming it’s way into the previously sharp mind of the successful mother of two, causing strange symptoms: a tendency to yell out “Shame” when another human being is speaking or often launching into standing ovations for no apparent reason — embarrassing tics one would usually struggle to conceal during normal conversation.

But what ails the young entrant into Canadian politics is nothing new. For generations, men and women across this great land have been exposed to the disease upon entering the House of Commons.

And the contagion knows no bounds: blue, red, orange, or non-aligned colour — everyone picks it up.

It starts slowly, as the rookies wonder what strange phenomenon has taken possession of their colleagues during that odd time called Question Period. But soon, the rot takes root, and the novice members display the early signs of a boorish pack mentality, crying at the enemy and crying out for their leader.

Politicians call it party discipline, or more nefariously, parliamentary custom. Civilians wonder why their leaders can’t act civilly.

And journalists despair, knowing as they do that previously independent-minded people like Raitt, a Conservative from Cape Breton coming from a union-leader father, will in future be regurgitating ‘talking points’ in place of plain speech.

Whence comes this tragic plague? Why, from those selfsame journalists, for whom the politicians seem to believe they serve, according to Jeffrey Archer. As the Briton writes, that astute Irish-English Whig, Edmund Burke, “looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, ‘Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.’”

But nay, if it’s not a disease then that troubles our local Tory, it is not this ink stained wretch. It is but the microphones and cameras that can command the calls of our howling mad elected men and women. Time then to turn off the lights and let civility return.