Roundup: Fobbing off your work to the Senate

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With MPs having gone home for the summer to start the campaign in earnest (well, not including the one in six who aren’t running again), the Senate is still hard at work to get through the last of the government’s agenda before they rise. Included in this are three bills that were passed at all stages in the dying days. Now, none of these are controversial so far as we can see, but the fact that they were all rammed through on a voice vote with zero debate is not exactly an encouraging trend. More to the point, it forces the actual due diligence onto the Senate, which is their job, but once again, it seems that they’re doing the work that MPs can’t be bothered to do because they’re too busy doing things like holding concurrence debates on nine-month old Health committee reports on the dangers of marijuana (never mind that said report was a sham rammed through the committee thanks to the government’s majority, and that it ignored the bulk of witness testimony) in order to try and hammer the Liberals on their pot policy. Because that’s an effective use of time. It’s also extremely ironic that the NDP insists the Senate does no valuable work ad should be abolished – and yet they once again fobbed off their work to the Senate to deal with because they couldn’t be bothered. There is no such thing as unflawed legislation, and it’s the job of MPs to scrutinise it in order to hold the government to account. But for a party who believes so strongly in the infallibility of the House of Commons that they don’t want an upper chamber, they gave bills a free pass with zero debate. Wow. Way to go there, guys. Really showing that you’re taking your jobs seriously, and that you’re doing the job of accountability like the official opposition is supposed to. Kind of like how they’ve taken to fobbing off their homework to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. It’s behaviour like that that undermines the NDP’s whole argument for Senate abolition – not that I mind. But MPs should be embarrassed when they pass any legislation with zero scrutiny. You’re just making the case for your own growing irrelevance, which serves nobody’s interests.

Good reads:

  • Conservative Senator Diane Bellemare is trying to kill an anti-union bill put forward by a Conservative MP, and hopes this work will help redeem the Senate’s image.
  • MPs have been spending thousands of dollars to fly family across the country on business class, but it’s the Senate that’s the problem…
  • Apparently there is a civility problem in the public service, particularly among management levels.
  • The government gave Irwin Cotler a bunch of non-answers to Order Paper questions about why they cut funding to an effective sex offender rehabilitation programme.
  • Scott Gilmore gives a stinging indictment of our broken military procurement system.
  • Les Whittington excerpts from his book on Harper to talk about the marginalisation of the media.

Odds and ends:

The NDP have joined the game of data-mining on the back of holidays, this time with Father’s Day.

The Bloc and the PQ both launched new sovereignty-focused campaigns this weekend.

The government introduced legislation to ban face-coverings at citizenship ceremonies, presumably because they want another Charter challenge.