The Star was provided with more than 3,200 pages of correspondence the public sent to the office of the finance minister on the subject of Bill C-38 in the two days leading up to the marathon voting session that began just after midnight on June 15.
Not a single email or letter was in favour of the legislation, which squeezed sweeping changes — affecting everything from environmental assessment to employment insurance reform — into one 425-page budget implementation bill.
“This omnibus bill is made simply to confuse the average Canadian. They have no idea what you are up to. This is not democracy,” one person wrote on June 13.
The Star obtained the documents in response to an access-to-information request; the names and addresses of the senders were blacked out.
Some people who wrote to Flaherty said that while they did not necessarily oppose every measure contained in the bill, trying to push everything through together did not provide for enough scrutiny.
“Perhaps some of the environmental changes may even be legitimate,” one person wrote on June 14. “Except that, by doing something so incredibly petty and — arguably — a little sneaky, you somehow managed to turn off someone like me, who would be willing to look at the proposed amendments with an open mind and the benefit of a background in environmental and agricultural economics.”
Others noted how the Canadians who did not like this process were ideologically diverse.
“I have not run across anybody that I know that supports this bill — right or left ... Canadians of all political stripes are very unhappy with the manner in which your government is proceeding with this,” someone wrote on June 12.
The vast majority of correspondence — about 3,150 pages — involved some version of a form letter delivered via the website LeadNow.ca. It crafted a text that allowed Canadians to urge 13 Conservative MPs to come forward as “pro-democracy heroes” by joining opposition parties to vote against the omnibus bill, or in favour of amendments.
That is not to say that every ready-made letter was without feeling, as one correspondent pointed out: “Though this may be a form letter, it is still something that deeply concerns me. (Prime Minister Stephen Harper) is pushing his agenda through in an extremely unparliamentary fashion.”
On Wednesday, Flaherty did not specify the content — or the size — of the next budget implementation bill, which will be tabled on Thursday.
“It’s as big as it needs to be. The budget was published in the spring. Everybody’s had months and months to read it. There are no surprises,” Flaherty told reporters outside the House of Commons following question period, during which he said the next bill would be about job creation and economic growth.
New Democratic Leader Thomas Mulcair said he would wait to see what was in the budget bill before deciding whether to support it, but did not rule out using parliamentary tactics to bring more attention to its contents and delay its passage.
“We will do our jobs as parliamentarians and use the parliamentary tools made available to us to carry out the most in-depth study possible so the largest number of Canadians possible can understand what’s in that bill,” Mulcair told reporters on Wednesday after the weekly NDP caucus meeting.
“You can be sure that we will be doing that again if indeed they surprise us by not having a budget bill that deals only with job creation,” Mulcair said.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Joanna Smith
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