The Commons resumes sitting on Sept. 17 and is scheduled to sit for 11 weeks over the next three months, with one week off in October and one in November. The House is scheduled to break on Dec. 14.
“We’re going to continue on our priority which, of course, is the economy, job creation, and economic growth, both in the short and long term. The cornerstone of the fall that you can expect to see will be the second budget implementation bill which will, of course, implement the parts of the budget that we approved in the spring that weren’t implemented in implementation bill No. 1,” Mr. Van Loan (York-Simcoe, Ont.) told The Hill Times last week.
Other top issues that will dominate the fall sitting are the government’s crime and immigration agendas.
“We’ll continue on other issues that are important, for example, tackling crime agenda, and changes to our immigration system, both to tackle the criminal elements of it, but also to ensure we have an immigration system that’s more responsive to our economic needs and challenges,” Mr. Van Loan said.
Liberal House Leader Marc Garneau (Westmount-Ville Marie, Que.) said last week that his party is prepared to force another marathon vote if what is presented in the second budget implementation bill is similar to the first one, C-38.
“We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop on the budget implementation bill. The government has clearly signalled and we know from [Finance Minister Jim] Flaherty’s budget of last spring that not everything has been covered in C-38, so we expect a part two of the budget implementation bill this fall and it will have some things that were obviously in the budget but did not get addressed in C-38 and of course it could have surprises too,” he said.
“We’ll be waiting for that and from our point of view, we hope that the exercise we ended up having to go through with C-38 and the 24 hours of voting and what have you will not repeat itself and the government will not try to give us a kitchen sink bill again, something unreasonable that should really be split into several bills. So we’ll see. But if they don’t, if they decide to take the same approach as C-38 and it really is something that is unreasonable, then they can expect the same treatment from the Liberal Party as we gave them on C-38,” Mr. Garneau said.
The first budget bill was more than 425 pages and contained amendments to more than 70 pieces of legislation. The opposition parties introduced more than 1,000 amendments at report stage, which were grouped to 250 votes. Voting took place for more than 24 hours in June. The bill eventually passed.
NDP House Leader Nathan Cullen (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.) said if the Conservatives were smart, they wouldn’t introduce another omnibus bill.
“I’m not sure what’s left to destroy after the first one [budget implementation bill]. A smart government would take a lesson from that. I’m not sure these guys have done the math and still think that was a victory for them,” he said. “We’re going to try to find a balance. Certainly, civility is going to be a very important thing within the House for me and the caucus. It’s showing respect for the place, even if the government doesn’t.”
Mr. Van Loan said, however, that it was the opposition parties’ games in the spring sitting that brought decorum and productivity down.
“Our approach, of course, is that we want to see a productive, hard-working and orderly Parliament and we’ll continue to proceed on that basis,” said Mr. Van Loan. “I had some optimism a year ago that with the NDP we were beginning to see a more serious debate on policy issues, but toward the end of the session we saw last year, they were sliding into more Parliamentary games and sort of trumped-up scandals. I don’t have the same optimism that I had before that we’re going to see serious policy debate.”
Mr. Van Loan said that Canadians deserve better and that’s what he’ll aim to do.
“Certainly that’s what we would like to see but whether we face Parliamentary games or obstruction or not, we’re going to make sure that we do deliver on the commitments we made to Canadians and that we do get the legislation that’s important in priority to us passed,” he said.
Mr. Garneau criticized the government, however, saying that the Conservatives did not set a good tone with their use of time allocation, closure, shutting down debate and using their majority to hold in-camera committee meetings.
“How will the tone be set? We shall see as the fall session occurs,” he said. “Opposition has a role. People expect to hear from opposition on why it agrees or disagrees with the government and that process has to be given sufficient time so that people can find out what the positions of the opposition parties are because they do represent a significant number of Canadians and it’s not good enough for the government to continually say well we were elected with a clear mandate and can do whatever we want. It’s not true. So we will continue to defend democracy and we’ll see what kind of a tone [is set].”
Meanwhile, Conservative pundit Tim Powers, vice-president of Summa Strategies, said last week that it will be a “reasonably active legislative agenda” but that the opposition would most likely attempt to focus on the government’s weaknesses and continue to point out ethical and election financing issues as well as the ongoing F-35 fighter jets controversy.
“I think it will be interesting to see what happens with robocalls, given the glass houses that opposition members were inhabiting shattered over the summer and they’re still taking shards of glass from their bodies,” Mr. Powers said. “I suspect that won’t stop some from going forward on them. The Liberals certainly have a good degree of credibility challenge given [Frank] Valeriote’s fine from the CRTC and the NDP have had their own troubles obviously with advertising and union involvement in their convention however I don’t think that will restrain the enthusiasm they have for pushing robocalls.”
Mr. Cullen said, however, that the government has made it easy for the opposition to focus on these “scandals” because there is no shortage of them.
“The Conservatives are very generous in the number of scandals they offer up. This is the Bev Oda government, the Tony Clement government, F-35s,” he said. “Often our challenge is not that there isn’t a number of things to attack the government on, it’s staying focused and not getting diverted by the next scandal as it comes rolling down the road.”
Energy will also be a top issue, as the government will make a decision soon on the CNOOC-Nexen deal, controversy over the Northern Gateway Pipeline and Alberta Premier Alison Redford calling for a national energy strategy. Mr. Powers said the Keystone XL Pipeline could also resurface after the U.S. presidential election in November.
“I think we’re going to have a strong period of discussion and debate over Canada as an energy super power and the different perspectives that are out there on it and you’ll see Mulcair I suspect trying to advance his sustainable development agenda,” Mr. Powers said.
Mr. Garneau said his party will also be keeping an eye on the budget cuts and how the 19,000 job losses in the public service will affect service delivery. He said they’ll be watching for Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page’s report on the issue.
“That will be interesting. We don’t know when he’ll come forward with the analysis. The government of course is very vague as usual,” he said. “They say they’re going to cut 19,000 jobs from the public service. Obviously this will have an impact on services and it doesn’t matter if you tell people we’re going to do it through attrition, the point is when you eliminate positions you also effectively eliminate services. And that has not been made clear to Canadians what the impact is and so we need to shine some more light to that as these cuts occur throughout the fall and the coming year.”
Other issues that can be expected to be on the agenda are First Nations education, First Nations property rights, pensions, employment insurance, and international trade, especially the Canada-European Union free trade agreement. There is still no word on how the government will deal with its controversial lawful access bill, C-30.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: BEA VONGDOUANGCHANH
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