Parliament gears up for the real show after the initial fireworks of the budget, Throne Speech

After the Throne Speech pomp concludes Friday and the extra oak benches in the red Senate chamber are tucked away for the next time, the real show will begin.

But with four years to go until the next election, the fusillades that have characterized the most-watched daily event on Parliament Hill over the past five years, Question Period, may be less intense.

Jack Layton, relishing his new role as the first-ever NDP Official Opposition leader, has taken a deliberate and tightly controlled approach in the post-election build-up to Canada's 41st Parliament.

Every sign says he's not going to change just because the lights are on.

Even in the last Parliament, Layton often avoided the flavour-of-the-day scandal when the Question Period rotation finally let him have a whack at Stephen Harper.

He would go for bread and butter issues like health care, poverty on reserves, rapacious credit card rates and the environment, until he realized he was being squeezed out of the evening news and morning headlines as a single government blow-up suddenly overshadowed other confrontations.

Layton is not going to let his new position go to his head and squander the NDP's first turn as Official Opposition.

The barrage that dominated Liberal tactics will likely be replaced with precisely targeted missiles, not aimed as much at Harper himself, perhaps, but the things he and his government do.

For the Liberals, it was personal. Layton is too meticulously efficient to let hot blood take over.

The signals were everywhere when he unveiled his new shadow cabinet.

Pat Martin, likely the most-quoted opposition MP in the series of government missteps and controversies over the past two Harper terms, is now Wheat Board critic. Yes, it is a volatile issue in western Canada, not so much in the 50-plus ridings concentrated in Toronto and the urban sprawl around it, or Vancouver and its version of the GTA.

Layton has earmarked Martin to chair the Government Operations Committee of the Commons, one of four chaired by an Official Opposition MP. Martin says he's ecstatic, but he's out of action in Question Period on the ethics front.

Charlie Angus, a writer and musician from northern Ontario, also a social activist in the past, is Layton's new critic for government ethics. But he will also continue shadowing government changes to digital copyright law, a fulltime chore itself.

There's no question Layton's decision to shift Thomas Mulcair out of the finance critic's post will lower the temperature there, although his replacement, NDP president Peggy Nash, who will likely resign her party position if she hasn't already, is no slouch.

Layton has given some of his new MPs, untested in Parliament, some of the largest profiles. Tyrone Benskin, a veteran performing artist and artistic director of Montreal's Black Theatre Workship, is critic for Canadian Heritage, whose minister is James Moore, Harper's new political minister for British Columbia and a true heavyweight in cabinet.

Christine Moore, a young nurse from Abitibi-Ouest swept onto Parliament Hill by that orange-coloured wave in Quebec, is the critic for military procurement. She was a member of the Canadian Forces for three years, but Moore's CV shows she was devoted to humanitarian work after completing her nursing diploma and degree over the past three years.

She likely doesn't know much yet about the F-35 contract, but it will indeed be an interesting contrast if she ever gets to question Julian Fantino, the beefy retired cop from Ontario who is now in charge of defence procurement, apparently, as associate minister to Defence Minister Peter MacKay.

Romeo Saganash, a 49-year-old lawyer who was director of government relations for the Grand Council of Crees in Quebec, is Layton's natural resources critic. His vast northern Quebec riding includes 17,000 James Bay Cree and 10,000 Inuit.

The natural resources minister Saganash is about to shadow is Joe Oliver, who spent his working life on or near Bay Street in downtown Toronto, an investment dealer who became executive director of the Ontario Securities Commission and, a fact Layton could not have missed, chair of the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada for four years.

Another rookie from Quebec, Alexandre Bouterice, a communications adviser for the Quebec division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, is the critic Layton assigned to shadow Treasury Board President Tony Clement, the smooth-talking transplant from the old Ontario Mike Harris government who is in charge of finding $4 billion in federal savings over the next year.

Raymond Côté, a former Quebec public servant, peace activist and volunteer for persons in need from Limoilou, Que., is assigned to shadow none other than the flamboyant and extremely fiscally conservative Maxime Bernier, the minister of state for small business who Harper brought back into cabinet fold after his misadventures with secret NATO documents when he was foreign affairs minister.

Among the other rookies who got major shadow posts is Hélène Laverdière, an award-winning retired foreign service officer with a doctorate in sociology from the University of Bath, in England.

She will go toe to toe with Bev Oda, the minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency last seen in the centre of a raging controversy over an altered document that discontinued federal funding for the human rights group Kairos, followed by false government accusations Kairos had orchestrated a boycott against Israel.

None of this spells business as usual in Question Period, as far as the Official Opposition is concerned.

There is one qualifier, a big one.

The NDP has become a one-man show over the past few years, and that show is headlined Jack Layton.

He can cut like a knife in Question Period, and he'll be standing directly across the aisle from Harper.

(Reuters Photo)