Can our Canadian leaders do what my kids and I did last night?!

I have some ideas about what went wrong on Parliament Hill, most people do. But what this situation needs now is a bit of parental wisdom. The good and helpful question now is not about who spilled the milk or who stole the peanut butter but rather, how do we make things right?

And I am speaking out of personal experience from as recently as yesterday after school. Obviously things didn't go so well when my kids (aged 13, 11 and 9) got home after a long day of reading, writing and arithmetic. I wasn't there to see it all unravel, but I did get a distraught cell call once the feathers had flown. As the story goes, people were trying to meet their basic needs by putting together a snack of crackers and peanut butter, and somehow things got personal, really personal. A bit of selfishness, a bit of misunderstanding, a bit of stubbornness and before you now it we've got a full out crackers and peanut butter tug of war that comes to some less than admirable behavior as people take out their frustration on each other. Very quickly people are hurting, they feel insulted, wrongly accused and they're angry. I secured the area over the phone by sending people into respective areas of the house and planned a conversation one on one with everyone involved when I got home.

What transpired over the next couple hours was not easy, it wasn't exactly fun, but the end results are remarkable. After hearing people out, inviting responsibility taking, and making some clear parental errors myself by exaggerating the circumstances and escalating rather than de-escalating the rhetoric, we came to a brief but most profound moment. We looked at each other and said, "I'm sorry, I was wrong, will you forgive me?" And I heard the words coming from and to me and to each other, "I forgive." The heavy emotional air lifted, the sense of possibility returned and we could get on with figuring out what snack would be for everybody today. For the record, it's crackers and chocolate milk - back to basics, will add in the peanut butter in time. Late last night, as we prayed before bed, all of the parties involved in Crackergate spontaneously thanked God for forgiveness, for making a way to make things right. How else would we have found a way through? The moment wasn't about concessions, it was about confessions and forgiveness.

I know it was only about crackers and peanut butter and you may be saying, you went through all that for just that?! While we're just one simple Canadian family out on the frozen tundra trying to figure things out, I can't help but wonder what Canada would be like if our leaders could do what my kids and I did last night. Perhaps there'd be more crackers and peanut butter to go around come the New Year if they did.

(Snack suggestions always welcome...)