As the traditional pre-recess legislative blitz approaches, Government House Leader Dominic LeBlanc appears to be prepping the parliamentary paperwork to escalate his ongoing campaign to control the Commons space-time continuum.
On Tuesday evening, he filed notice of a motion that would put Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet in charge of deciding when and how the House goes about its business.
The proposed rewrite of the House rules – which goes under the deceptively innocuous title of Government Business No. 6 — would extend the daily sitting hours to keep the Commons candles burning until a minister or a parliamentary secretary moved to adjourn debate, which would be deemed adopted on the spot.
It would also impose stringent limits on opposition-initiated motions, which would effectively close off most of the procedural loopholes traditionally invoked by opposition parties to demonstrate their dissatisfaction by delaying regular House proceedings.
This would make it all but impossible to force a snap vote like the one that the Liberals very nearly lost on Monday morning,
The motion would even set the stage for House business to continue past the scheduled end date of June 23.
Under LeBlanc’s proposal, it would be up to a minster or parliamentary secretary to bring forward a motion to adjourn for the summer, which could be done with no notice, and would be automatically deemed adopted on the spot.
On the plus side, at least from the perspective of the opposition, is that the new rules would expire as soon as the House shut down for business.
It will be up to LeBlanc to decide when – or if – he should move it, which could happen as early as Thursday.
Given the increasingly acrimonious state of cross-party relations, this could be a shot across the bow of his counterparts across the aisle.
For more than a week, the parties have been unable to agree on how to proceed with the final rounds of debate on the physician-assisted dying bill. The Conservatives and the New Democrats have been pushing for extended but fixed-length sittings, which would see the debate adjourn at midnight, and resume the following day.
The Liberals, however, want to keep the House sitting around the clock until debate collapses, which occurs when no member rises to speak.
Under the proposed motion, that sudden-death rule would apply to all House proceedings, with the government having the sole power to blow the whistle on the parliamentary workday.
For his part, LeBlanc maintains that he’s simply trying to maximize the opportunity for MPs to speak while ensuring that House business can’t be interrupted by procedural delay tactics.
Not surprisingly, the parties on the other side of the House don’t see it that way.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday morning, New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair denounced it as “childish petulance” on the part of the governing Liberals.
“So this is something that no one who’s worked in Parliament has seen before,” he told reporters following the weekly caucus meeting.
“There are traditions, there’s a way of working that has to exist … There are things that require consent. A lot of the stuff, you know, it’s the tip of the iceberg that you use here. There’s a lot of the other parts of the work that have to be done working together collaboratively.”
LeBlanc’s “attempt to put a straitjacket on Parliament deprives Canadians of their most important democratic institution,” he warned.
Meanwhile, Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer — who, as one-time speaker, is no stranger to the procedural battlefield — confirmed that LeBlanc’s motion is unlike anything he’s seen before.
“It’s one thing for the government to use the tools that are available to it to implement its agenda,” he pointed out to reporters. “It’s another thing to take away tools from the opposition, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
He suggested that it might have been triggered by Monday’s near-miss vote when, as he put it, “their members weren’t here to work,” and pointed out that, contrary to what LeBlanc’s move might suggest, the opposition “has not unduly delayed any piece of legislation.”
In fact, he said, they’ve been “quite co-operative,” including agreeing to vote scheduling and legislative timelines.
“This [government] is now taking away the tools that are available to the opposition … changing it from having a government and opposition in the House of Commons to a government and an audience in the House of Commons,” he noted.
“And that is something that is extremely undemocratic.”
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Liberal MPs prep procedural hammer | Ottawa Citizen
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