Canadian Democracy - Takes another hit under Harper
Andrew Coyne: Bill C-38 shows us how far Parliament has fallen | Full Comment | National Post
You know, this is the sort of thing people used to make quite a bit of a fuss over.
Bill C-38, introduced in the House last week, calls itself, innocuously, “An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures.” The bill does implement certain budget provisions, it is true: for example, the controversial changes to Old Age Security. But “and other measures” rather understates matters — to understate the matter.
The bill runs to more than 420 pages. It amends some 60 different acts, repeals half a dozen, and adds three more, including a completely rewritten Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. It ranges far beyond the traditional budget concerns of taxing and spending, making changes in policy across a number of fields from immigration (among other changes, it erases at a stroke the entire backlog of applications under the skilled worker program), to telecommunications (opening the door, slightly, to foreign ownership), to land codes on native reservations.
The environmental chapters are the most extraordinary. Along with the new Act, they give cabinet broader power to override decisions of the National Energy Board, shorten the list of protected species, and abolish the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act — among “other measures.” For much of this the first public notice was its inclusion in the bill.
So this is not remotely a budget bill, despite its name. It is what is known as an omnibus bill. If you want to know how far Parliament has fallen, how little real oversight it now exercises over government, this should give you a clue.
Omnibus bills are not unknown: indeed, every budget is a kind of omnibus bill, bundling a range of different measures under the general rubric of “supply,” the ancient prerogative of Parliament to approve or withhold funds to the Crown to carry out its program of government. The omnibus crime bill, likewise, collected a number of different pieces of the Conservatives’ law and order agenda under one heading.
But lately the practice has been to throw together all manner of bills involving wholly different responsibilities of government in one all-purpose “budget implementation” bill, and force MPs to vote up or down on the lot. While the 2012 budget implementation bill is hardly the first in this tradition, the scale and scope is on a level not previously seen, or tolerated.
Not only does this make a mockery of the confidence convention, shielding bills that would otherwise be defeatable within a money bill, which is not: It makes it impossible to know what Parliament really intended by any of it. We’ve no idea whether MPs supported or opposed any particular bill in the bunch, only that they voted for the legislation that contained them. There is no common thread that runs between them, no overarching principle; they represent not a single act of policy, but a sort of compulsory buffet.
To be sure, a government with a majority would likely have little difficulty passing them separately, so obediently do MPs now submit to the party whip. But there is something quite alarming about Parliament being obliged to rubber-stamp the government’s whole legislative agenda at one go.
Moreover, it utterly eviscerates the committee process, until now regarded as one of the last useful roles left to MPs. How can one committee, in this case Finance, properly examine all of these diverse measures, with all of the many areas of expertise they require, especially in the time allotted to them?
My point is not that any of the bill’s provisions are good or bad in themselves (that’s the kind of thing committee hearings and debate often help to clarify). Nor is there anything unlawful in any of this, so far as I’m aware. According to House of Commons Procedure and Practice, “it appears to be entirely proper, in procedural terms” for a bill to amend more than one act; Speakers have generally refused appeals to divide them.
But there’s a limit. What is lawful may nevertheless be illegitimate, especially where fundamental issues of Parliamentary government are in play. For, in combination with so many recent abuses, from prorogation to the F-35s, that is what is at stake here.
That Parliament has lost control of the public purse is now a commonplace. Governments routinely spend billions more than they were budgeted. Estimates are voted through without serious scrutiny. Funds that were approved for the construction of, say, border infrastructure end up being spent on, say, gazebos hundreds of miles away.
But the increasing use of these omnibills extends Parliament’s powerlessness in all directions: it has become, if you will, omnimpotent — a ceremonial body, little more. What is worse, it cannot even seem to rouse itself to its own defence.
Once upon a time such insults could be relied upon to produce unruly scenes in the House, obstruction of government business and whatnot. The packaging of several pieces of legislation into one omnibus energy bill in 1982 provoked the opposition to refuse to enter the House to vote. The division bells rang for nearly three weeks until the government agreed to split the bill. The insertion of a single change to environmental legislation in the 2005 budget bill, a note from the Green Party reminds us, so enraged the then leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper, that he threatened to bring down the government.
But today’s Parliament is so accustomed to these indignities that it barely registers. It has lost not only the power to resist, it seems, but the will.
