It was a classic tempest in a potty. MPs, Parliament-watchers in its press gallery and self-appointed authorities on all aspects of motherhood just had to make a fuss about Skander-Jack's treatment in the House of Commons last week.

Too many issues were at stake. Political correctness was being confounded by archaic parliamentary rules. Women everywhere were being degraded. Motherhood, herself, was affronted.

The particular mother of the threemonth-old, New Democrat MP Sana Hassainia, couldn't find anyone to hold him before she was bidden to cast her vote on the long-gun registry, so she carried him into the chamber.

Other MPs gathered around to make faces and take pictures, as people tend to do when confronted by babies, upsetting the decorum as viewed from the Speaker's chair. Hassainia was under the impression - mistakenly, according to the Speaker's office - that she couldn't vote with her Skander-in-arms.

So she handed the lad to a page, and then the fun started.

It became a women's issue, even though Skander's daddy usually pads around, apparently, at the beck and call of his wife and child. It was cited as an example of what women who dare to run for Parliament face from the old boys' network that presumes to run the country.

The CBC saw fit to review in depth "the issue of infants in public places." This prompted the kind of people who watch the kind of silly issues explored by the national broadcaster to make snide comments about "screaming" and "stinky" kids in restaurants and airplanes, at movies and campgrounds.

There were questions about surgeons operating with kids-in-a-sling, judges on the bench, mouths bristling with safety pins, folding nappies.

The lactating legions rallied. Somehow, the delightful practice of nursing in public places was considered in jeopardy.

Hassainia herself was defiant: There are 40 women in the NDP caucus and "the situation will certainly come up again."

Well, I don't want to go on about this much, for it has been pointed out by many that Skander's mom could use the daycare facilities that taxpayers subsidize on the Hill, at least when daddy isn't about.

I don't recall MPs in my day, of either sex, festooned with children at their desks. They didn't bring their dogs with them, either.

True, mothers with babies can appeal to the mother in us all. MPs have always used their children for electoral purposes, but they used to return them to nannies or reform school when in the House.

There is a parliamentary proscription against "strangers in the House," but that apparently no longer applies to sucklings.

Elizabeth May, the Green Party MP from Saanich-Gulf Islands, has a refreshing talent for making complicated issues simple. She says that the House of Commons should "lead" all Canadians into "the modern age" and should "integrate" babies as well as women.

Hassainia says MPs don't get maternity leave and have to perform their duty to both constituents and kids. She makes it sound as if pregnancy had been visited upon her without warning.

If the Commons allowed her maternity leave with pay, how would her constituents whose interests she's supposed to represent in Parliament feel? Would she, indeed, take it?

I'm afraid this is another example of how out-of-touch with the real world MPs become when they mount the Hill. They accept their entitlements, their subsidized luxuries, their grotesque pensions as if these, somehow, serve the interests of lesser folk at home and the public interest at large.

When Pierre Trudeau was prime minister, MPs were told they were nobodies when they stepped off the Hill. Under Stephen Harper they're learning that even there they don't amount to much.

Prime ministers might be expected to lead; MPs can't. They're in Parliament to represent the interests of their constituents, not to pursue their own and pretend they're leading others into "the modern world."

cruachan@shaw.ca