Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Harper should nix omnibus bill

Are omnibus bills anti-democratic? No doubt about it. Are they something new invented by the current Harper government? Not hardly. Every majority government since Pierre Trudeau’s has used its majority to ram through large pieces of legislation full of all sorts of amendments to several acts of Parliament.

That fact doesn’t justify the Harper government’s use of the current mammoth budget bill (C-38). It merely means the Tories’ bill is not some new threat to our democracy devised by Stephen Harper, as the Liberals and NDP contend.

Some clever columnists and bloggers have made much of the fact that Harper himself in 2005 called omnibus bills “a contradiction to the conventions and practices of the House.” Hehe, they sniggered. Here was Harper proving himself that he was abusing our traditions. Missing from their observations, though, was the fact that Harper’s remarks were prompted by the Liberals’ introduction of an omnibus bill of their own.

One of Pierre Trudeau’s first pieces of legislation after becoming prime minister in 1968 was the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

Like the Tories’ C-38, the opposition charged that Trudeau’s C-150 was an attempt to change the nature of Canada by stealth without proper debate or accountability in Parliament. Liberals of the day in fact boasted that Trudeau’s bill was “the most important and all-embracing reform of the criminal and penal law ever attempted at one time in this country.”

The act legalized homosexuality, abortion and contraception. It permitted lotteries. It imposed restrictions on gun ownership, brought in new drinking-and-driving penalties, outlawed harassing telephone calls, regulated misleading advertising and redefined what constituted cruelty to animals in ways that concerned farmers.

The fact that the contents of an omnibus bill are admirable doesn’t make their use any less offensive, though. They are almost always an attempt to slip controversial amendments past Parliament and the public without adequate scrutiny. They seek to minimize the political damage the governing party must take to advance its policies.

There’s much to admire in the current Budget Implementation Act.

Raising the age of eligibility for Old Age Security from 65 to 67 is sensible, as are efforts to make it harder for seasonal workers to claim EI year after year after year. Limiting the length of time environmental reviews of major construction projects can be drawn out and reducing the number of vexatious witness at hearings is wise. And it’s a good thing to change federal law so Ottawa’s bureaucrats cannot use environmental regulations to ride roughshod over authority given to the provinces under the Constitution.

But does anyone truly believe that the third of C-38 that deals with the environment shouldn’t properly be in its own bill or bills? Is anyone fooled that these major environmental changes aren’t being hidden in a budget bill to minimize public awareness and criticism?

The Tories’ C-38 is an especially egregious use of omnibus law-making. It is more than 400 pages long, contains in excess of 750 clauses and amends nearly 70 laws. (By comparison, Trudeau’s C-150 was 126-pages long with 120 clauses.)

But it would be hard to ban omnibus bills. As House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer explained this week when ruling that C-38 was a valid law, there is no good definition of what constitutes an omnibus bill and it would be hard to devise one because it isn’t always clear whether two clauses belong together in the same piece of legislation or not.

Still, as someone who has proclaimed himself a fan of our Parliamentary conventions, Prime Minister Harper is hardly practising what he preaches.

Original Article
Source: calgary sun
Author: Lorne Gunter

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