'They’re forgetting that though they have a majority of seats, they got less than 40 per cent of the vote in May. I’m disappointed. I was expecting better,' says Queen's University political scientist Ned Franks.PARLIAMENT HILL—The Conservative government is taking a ham-fisted approach to Parliamentary business that is like “warfare by any other means,” one of Canada’s leading constitutional scholars says.
Queen’s University Professor Ned Franks used the term on Tuesday after Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) imposed closure on its controversial 100-page omnibus crime bill and Conservative MPs on the House Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee went so far as putting the name of a Federal Court judge on a list of witnesses they want for an inquiry the Conservatives forced over CBC practices under the Access to Information Act.
Prof. Franks was also commenting on Conservative manoeuvres to avoid committee hearings into new information about Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s (Parry Sound-Muskoka, Ont.) role in the distribution of nearly $50-million in federal funding in his riding for the G8 summit last year. At the same time the government wielded its clout to cut debate on the crime bill, C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, to only two more days and forced a committee inquiry into Conservative allegations of improper sponsorships at an NDP national convention last June.
The Conservatives on the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee also steered the committee into hearings on one of their favourite targets—Canada’s national public broadcaster the CBC.
“I would have thought they would have changed, and stopped their approach to Parliamentary business as warfare by any other means,” Prof. Franks told The Hill Times. “They’re governing by fiat, and they’re forgetting that though they have a majority of seats, they got less than 40 per cent of the vote in May. I’m disappointed. I was expecting better.”
York University political scientist Daniel Drache agreed the Conservatives have returned to Parliament for the fall sittings bent on imposing their will on the opposition, now that they have the power to do it.
He said the Conservatives are set on taking advantage of the fact that former NDP Leader Jack Layton’s political instinct and mastery is no longer there for the Official Opposition party to rely on, following his death in August from cancer, and, as Prof. Drache put it, the fact that the third-party Liberals “are nowhere.”
“Harper’s most important adversary is no longer there. There’s a lot of disorganization, and I think they are leaping to take advantage and be very aggressive with their legislative agenda,” Mr. Drache told The Hill Times.
“The nature of the executive power of the prime minister is enormous and it’s more concentrated this time, with this government, than any other comparable government,” he said. “I think they will argue that public consultation [on the crime bill] is a waste of money. They’re going to say that they’ve heard it before and they should get on with it, but to run roughshod over the Parliamentary process and just make it economies of silence.”
Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro (Peterborough, Ont.), Mr. Harper’s Parliamentary Secretary, and other Conservative MPs put Federal Court Judge Richard Boivin’s name on a list of witnesses the committee’s clerk was to invite for hearings into Judge Boivin’s own ruling last year that backed complaints from Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault that the CBC was improperly withholding information from access requests.
The idea of calling a judge to Parliament to explain a ruling, which the Conservatives likely support anyway, astonished opposition MPs, shocked the legal community in Ottawa and the Federal Court itself. The executive officer of the court, Andrew Baumberg, told The Hill Times the judge had heard nothing about the request.
“I’ve never heard of a judge being asked to be a witness at a Parliamentary committee,” said Mr. Baumberg. “Possibly it’s a mistake in the Parliamentary process. He’s not going to be explaining his decision.”
A senior litigation lawyer in Ottawa said: “The very idea of calling a judge at any level to come before a committee to explain a decision that he or she has made is simply a complete violation of the separation of powers between the legislature and the judiciary.”
To make matters worse, in terms of the inquiry coming now, the CBC has appealed Judge Boivin's decision, and the first hearing in that case is scheduled for Oct. 18.
NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.), a member of the Privacy, Access to Information and Ethics Committee who stirred up the G8 spending controversy in the past two weeks, noted that while the Conservatives are forcing an inquiry into their allegations unions improperly subsidized the NDP convention in Vancouver earlier this year—and calling in Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand as one of the witnesses—they voted down his motion to call witnesses for the convention hearings.
Top Conservative Party officials were charged earlier this year with Elections Act violations, over an advertising scheme the party set up during the campaign for the 2006 election.
Mr. Angus said the same approach surfaced as the government limited debate on the crime bill, which critics says will cost the government billions of dollars over the years for prison expansion while taking Canada further toward tough-on-crime sentencing and laws that failed and led to overloaded prisons in the United States.
“They have a majority, they can get their way, but it seems to have brought out a very nasty, arrogant streak in them," Mr. Angus said. “They don’t want to even have any pretext of Parliamentary review."
Mr. Angus added: “I don’t even think they’ve thought this all through, to ‘We want to bring a judge who ruled on the CBC?' He’s not going to show up. It’s like they don’t even know the rules of Parliament.”
Origin
Source: Hill Times
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