The bill implementing the government’s March 21 budget would give Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) and his Cabinet new powers to interfere in collective bargaining and, the opposition now says, possibly even hiring and firing at the CBC and other Crown corporations.
The government has limited witness testimony on the 115-page bill, which will amend more than 50 other federal statutes, to only four meetings after Parliament returns from a week-long recess next week, following just two hours of testimony on Thursday this week from government officials.
NDP MP Peggy Nash (Parkdale-High Park, Ont.) told The Hill Times after Thursday’s committee meeting that opposition MPs were unable to probe bureaucrats on the entire bill, and because of the time limitation did not even get to the final section containing the Crown corporation measures that have sparked an uproar, generating an online petition protest with more than 130,000 signatures that was printed and delivered to the front doors of Mr. Harper’s Langevin Block office building near Parliament Hill.
“It’s a complete sham,” Ms. Nash told The Hill Times. “We’re supposed to have meetings, the first one is with officials. We didn’t even get to ask half the questions that we had, and the last meeting is the clause by clause [final committee passage], so there are really only three meetings,” she said. “We don’t know whether all those witnesses will accept and whether they can be booked for the dates that they’re being invited for.”
The committee deadlines imposed by the government, along with even shorter time frames for five other committees that will separately conduct hearings on different aspects of the legislation and then report back to the Finance Committee, is the same process the government used to rush a much larger budget omnibus bill through the House last year, but with even less time for scrutiny.
Government House Leader Peter Van Loan (York-Simcoe, Ont.) had already used time allocation in the Commons to cut short debate on the budget implementation legislation, Bill C-60. After only two hours of debate on May 1, the government majority passed the time allocation motion the next day, leaving only three days and 18 more hours of debate before a vote was forced this past Tuesday to send the bill to the House Finance Committee.
Parliament has only four days of sittings in the week the committee will deal with the bill after next week’s recess.
The House Finance Committee will hold hearings into the section on Crown corporations among other contentious areas and the five other committees—Foreign Affairs, Industry, Veterans Affairs, Human Resources and Citizenship and Immigration—will likely have time for only two hearings each because of a deadline to report back to the Finance Committee with any proposed amendments by Monday, May 27.
The government has given the House Finance Committee until midnight on Tuesday, May 28, to pass the legislation and to report it back to the House of Commons for third and final debate and passage.
“At most, these other committees might have two meetings. At best, and you’re talking pretty substantive changes, changes to the Investment Canada Act, and the proposed changes are pretty controversial, the temporary foreign workers, the changes are controversial, some are saying the changes are good, others say no, and business is quite divided on both these issues,” Ms. Nash said.
Committee motions from Ms. Nash and Liberal MP Scott Brison (Kings-Hants, N.S.) to either divide the bill up or extend the deadlines were defeated by the Conservatives.
Conservative MP Shelley Glover (Saint Boniface, Man.), Parliamentary secretary to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty (Oshawa-Whitby, Ont.), moved the government motion limiting the hearings, but told The Hill Times the opposition parties have had ample time to consider the legislation, and are free to write the government witnesses with any questions they did not have enough time to ask on Thursday.
She said the deadlines offer enough time to consider the bill thoroughly and get it back to the Commons. Ms. Glover suggested the government might be willing to adjust the calendar, but opposition MPs said they believe that is unlikely.
“Our calendar is always adapting, so as you’ve seen in the past, there have been times when we’ve changed it, so we’ve got a guideline in our calendar of four meetings,” said Ms. Glover, even though the deadlines were set out in the motion the Conservatives passed.
Ms. Nash said questions have been raised over another key aspect of the section that gives Cabinet the power to set bargaining mandates for Crown corporations.
The clause, overlooked in the controversy over potential political interference with the CBC, gives Cabinet the power to order a Crown corporation to get approval from the Treasury Board Committee of Cabinet ministers before it “fixes the terms and conditions of employment of its non-unionized employees who are not appointed by the [Cabinet].”
Ms. Nash said questions have risen whether that clause means the government could sanction Crown corporation executives for political reasons.
“One of the questions I wanted to raise today [with the government officials] is the Bank of Canada, for example, is one of these bodies that would fall under this provision, and what if someone was not covered by a collective agreement and they produced a report that found dis-favour with the government?” Ms. Nash said.
“Could the government arbitrarily reduce that person’s salary or punish that person in some way, transfer that person to a lower-paying job, how hands-on do they want to be?” she said. ““In terms of the independence and the integrity of these Crown agencies, it’s raising a lot of questions.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: TIM NAUMETZ
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