“The government has got to bite the bullet and fix the rules, otherwise this is going to be a millstone around their neck,” said former Liberal Cabinet minister Don Boudria, who served as government House leader for six years. “They’re going to have to put down a motion and move closure on the motion, and they’re going to be criticized for being draconian and evil. I’ve been accused of all these sins myself, so I know what the criticisms sound like.”
The opposition introduced 871 amendments to Bill C-38, the government’s budget implementation act, in June. The 420-page budget bill amended 70 pieces of legislation. Its third section alone contained more than 150 pages of changes to federal environmental law and regulation.
Although the Liberals and New Democrats were limited to deleting clauses from the omnibus legislation following the Finance Committee’s review of the legislation, Ms. May (Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.) introduced more than 300 substantive amendments. As a member of an unrecognized party and unable to sit on committees, Ms. May was only allowed to introduce amendments to the controversial bill at report stage.
House Speaker Andrew Scheer (Regina-Qu’Appelle, Sask.) bundled the opposition amendments into 156 votes, triggering nearly 24 straight hours of roll call voting.
In previous Parliaments the Reform Party and Bloc Québécois had used the report stage to “slow down the legislative process” by introducing hundreds of amendments making small alterations to legislation, Mr. Boudria said. In an effort to curb that, Mr. Boudria, now a senior counsellor for Parliamentary affairs at Hill and Knowlton Strategies, moved a motion to limit the opposition’s ability to amend legislation outside of committees and prevent “frivolous” amendments from being introduced. The motion was in line with existing rules in the U.K. Parliament.
Mr. Boudria said he started noticing the opposition’s tactics when the Copyright Modernization Act was at report stage and both the Liberals and NDP began partnering with ‘independent’ MPs to take advantage of the Standing Orders. The government should amend the Standing Orders to limit report stage amendments to the removal or restoration of changes made during committee review, royal recommendations, and ways and means, he said.
“Just about everything else should be done at committee only,” Mr. Boudria wrote in a column last week in The Hill Times.
Mr. Boudria referred to the issue as a “looming Parliamentary crisis” and said he’s concerned that increasingly lengthy voting sessions will result in “a loss of human potential.”
“While ministers are in the House doing this 24 hours a day, they’re not running their department. While the opposition stays up all night, they’re not preparing for the questions of the next day that should be holding the government to account,” he said. “All sides of the House lose in this.”
Parliamentary procedure expert and Queen’s University professor emeritus Ned Franks said that Mr. Boudria’s recommendations “make sense” and draw a necessary distinction between members of recognized parties and private members.
“Being an actual party gives you privileges in terms of participation in Question Period and setting agendas, which you don’t have if you’re a private member, which is what [Ms. May] is,” Prof. Franks said. “You can’t have 308 parties in Parliament. Parties are a way of aggregating opinion and activity so you can make the place function.”
Government House leader Peter Van Loan (York-Simcoe, Ont.) said that the government is focused on keeping Parliament “productive, orderly and hard-working.”
“The Standing Orders are currently being reviewed by the Procedure and House Affairs Committee. The committee may wish to consider Mr. Boudria’s comments as part of that review,” Mr. Van Loan responded in an email.
The changes would also significantly reduce the number of amendments deleting legislative clauses that could be introduced by recognized opposition parties at the report stage.
Opposition House leader Nathan Cullen (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.) and Liberal House leader Marc Garneau (West-Mount-Ville-Marie, Que.) were unavailable to comment, but Ms. May took issue with the suggestion that her amendments were “frivolous.”
“I don’t think it’s legitimate in the democratic process or in the history of report stage to say that you can’t put forward amendments at report stage. Otherwise, the entire process becomes a rubber stamp for committees,” Ms. May told The Hill Times.
Ms. May said Mr. Boudria’s recommendations only further reduce MPs’ ability to represent their constituents and make Parliament less democratic. “The impact of what he’s saying is, there’s no point in pretending democracy works. Let’s forget about Parliament,” Ms. May said. “I’m not prepared to take that position.”
Ms. May said her intent in working with the Liberals and NDP to force extended voting on the budget bill was to allow the opposition and government to negotiate.
“The goal was to achieve some level of leverage to lead to some compromise for even some of the amendments to pass,” she said. “[T]here will be more of these and we must not have our hands tied on the opposition benches.”
Mr. Boudria suggested that the government reduce the political fallout by also introducing rules around omnibus legislation.
“There’s going to be an expectation that the omnibus situation that caused the crisis in the first place be addressed at the same time,” said Mr. Boudria. “The fundamental issue is the number of pieces of legislation that [Bill C-38] was amending—not the quantity of pages in the bill, but the quantity of issues it was addressing.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: CHRIS PLECASH
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