Roundup: Items left undebated

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With the Commons now having risen for the holidays, there is another day or two left of work left in the Senate before they too head off for their holidays, but as Kady O’Malley points out, they are having a bit of a problem getting any bills that aren’t supply-related passed in any reasonable timeframe. The extent to which this is an actual problem just yet is up in the air – yes, fewer bills have passed to date in this current parliament, but some of them have been pretty major issues (like assisted dying), while we’ve also seen far less use of procedural tools like time allocation to ram through bills without sufficient time for debate or committee study. (We’re also not seeing massive omnibus bills being rammed through either, so points for that).

Part of the problem is simply that senators are letting items stand on the Order Paper in their name for weeks at a time, which is not uncommon in the Senate, but there has been little effort to move some of these pieces forward, and I’m not entirely sure why. In my own estimation, part of it has to do with the new normal in the Senate, where there is no longer a government caucus, and the Government Leader – sorry, “government representative” thus far hasn’t really been communicating much urgency on any particular bills so far as I can tell. Maybe I’m wrong, as I’m not privy to any discussions that he is having with other caucus leaders. Some of it I would imagine is delay engineered by some Conservative senators because they feel that measures were adopted too quickly by the House of Commons without what they would consider to be adequate scrutiny (which I would imagine the ostensible reason on holding up debate on the trans rights bill would be), while some of it is partisan stubbornness (like the bill to undo changes the previous government made to unions or citizenship revocation). Senator Peter Harder could start to invoke time allocation on those bills if he so chose, and with there now being enough non-aligned senators having been appointed to surpass the votes of the Conservatives in the Chamber, he may now be in a position to convince them that this is the way to go.

Time allocation is a tricky beast in the Senate, however, and while the previous government did not hesitate to use it in the Senate when they felt they needed to, it is a blunt instrument and Senators need to be careful that they’re not putting themselves in a position of being treated like backbenchers in the Commons. Part of what needs to happen is clear lines of communication between the government and senators who want to speak to bills so that they have timelines in mind (and to be fair, some of them may have a lot on their plates right now). But there shouldn’t be an expectation that bills need to be sped through the Senate just because they’re government bills – they already get priority in all aspects of the Senate process, but if there is a sense of urgency, that needs to be communicated.

Good reads:

  • MPs voted to clear the legislative decks, passing two bills before rising for the holidays. And yes, there was Xmas poetry to be had in the Commons.
  • Provincial health ministers are holding a conference call to determine if it’s worth agreeing to Jane Philpott’s invitation to meet about funding.
  • The Chief of Defence Staff is stepping up plans to boot those committing sexual misconduct out of the military.
  • Liberals subleased office space from Canada 2020 during the election, and now the opposition is up in arms over it.
  • The Privacy Commissioner is taking a look at the safeguards on the MyDemocracy survey.
  • Surprising absolutely no one, the PBO calculated that indexing the Canada Child Benefit after 2020 will cost billions.
  • Family sponsorship immigration cases will now be processed by lottery after they found the first-come-first-served system benefitted those who could pay more.
  • CSIS has backtracked on their promise to give data to the Senate on whether they were previously conducting surveillance on journalists.
  • The Joint Library of Parliament Committee hasn’t met at all this parliament despite some urgent matters to discuss, and nobody can say why.
  • Canada is exporting our private refugee sponsorship model to help other countries use it to meet their own resettlement goals.
  • The federal government has pledged to undertake public consultations on a trade deal with China.
  • Kellie Leitch’s latest boneheaded idea is a citizen referendum act. Because who needs representative democracy?
  • Maxime Bernier has settled a lawsuit with a former campaign worker who is now on team Kevin O’Leary.
  • Thomas Mulcair assures us that there will be NDP leadership candidates declaring themselves in the New Year.
  • Paul Wells goes through the marijuana taskforce report and divines the Liberals’ intentions and balancing act they’re trying to undertake.

Odds and ends:

Tristin Hopper has found a trove of images of the Japanese internment during WWII, and a chilling reminder of its populist roots.