It isn’t just children who need rules.

Apparently, if you want politicians to behave well, you have to lay down the law with them, too.

On last week’s edition of The House, Kathleen Petty began a political panel on the economy by reading the riot act to Liberal John McCallum and Conservative Rob Merrifield.

Only solutions to economic problems would be accepted as answers and any partisan sniping would be edited out of the interview.

Kathleen acknowledged their inner political animals, though, and allowed the leashes to come off for couple of minutes at the end of the interview.

Surprisingly, the boys behaved rather well.

The end result was a substantive discussion on policy that garnered a ton of listener response.

Sixty-three emails and phone calls, only two of which thought the experiment was a flop.

Many of the emails began with a: “thank you, thank you, thank you,” and more than one ended with a: “wouldn’t it be nice if we could get them to behave that way in the house?”