Remember that horrible feeling you got when you were day dreaming in class and the teacher called on you to answer a question you hadn't heard?

Well, sometimes it even happens to those who are paid to attend question period in the House of Commons.

Here is an exchange that took place about two-thirds of the way through today's edition (loosely translated from the original French):

Thomas Mulcair (NDP - Outremont): "Mr. Speaker, other Conservative skeletons are coming out of the closet. The Minister of Culture cannot identify key figures from Quebec's and Canada's cultural history. The member for Yorkton-Melville wants to take part in a meeting where Beretta semiautomatic (guns) are the door prizes and the Minister of Science and Technology doesn't believe in evolution, the very foundation of modern biology. Can the minister who said evolution means going from running shoes to high heels explain his theory?"

At this point the Speaker, Peter Milliken, had to hunt around a little bit to see who would take the question, eventually he saw Jean-Pierre Blackburn, the Minister for National Revenue, rise to his feet.

Again, this is a loose translation:

Hon. Jean-Pierre Blackburn (Conservative - Jonquiere-Alma): "Mr Speaker, once again, of course, the New Democratic Party has this great philosophy and thinks that the problem can be solved by giving, giving, giving. As a government, however, we have to try to be neutral, but we are very concerned about people who are enduring difficulties in a lock-out or problems of that kind."

You can try reading it again, but it's no use — it simply doesn't make sense.

Blackburn had answered Mulcair's previous question, which was about locked-out employees of the media giant Quebecor.

It's not clear why he took this question or why he answered it the way he did. Unless, of course, no one was paying attention to the question in the first place.

James Fitz-Morris