Roundup: The vacuous pleas to change the Standing Orders

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As the procedural warfare over the government’s proposed changes to the Standing Orders drags on, my patience for the government’s digging in their heels and insisting on “modernizing” things are increasingly absurd. To wit, Liberal MP Scott Simms – who is behind the motion to fast track this study, which touched off this warfare in the first place – tried to defend his positon last night, and I just want to bang my head into a wall for a while over the vacuousness of his justifications.

You say that now, but Trudeau has long promised that he wants to be out glad-handing among Canadians instead of being in the Ottawa bubble, so you’ll excuse me if I treat this with suspicion. Meanwhile, there’s nothing stopping him from answering all of the questions one day a week if he wants without needing to change the Standing Orders to do it.

If there is one bit of discourse that I would ban from Canadian politics, it’s the insistence that we can always come up with some new Made in Canada Solution™ to any problem that vexes us. It’s a bullshit sentiment, especially because in this case, the system is already made in Canada and fits the unique circumstances of our parliament as it differs from Westminster. Trying to import other Westminster-isms and mapping them onto our parliament and calling it “Made in Canada” is a fool’s game at best, because our political cultures are quite different. Sure, PMQs sounds like a good idea, but they don’t have desks, don’t use scripts, have a more generous timer, and they have a debating culture that can use wit and self-deprecating humour rather than constant unctuous sanctimony and robotic reliance on scripted talking points like we get here. You can’t just map PMQs here without recognizing the cultural changes. That likely applies to their scheduling motions, while the problem in Canada is more that we have House Leaders of dubious competence as opposed to unworkable rules.

This is specious. If government wants to get their bills passed, they need to convince the Commons. That’s how it works. Meanwhile, the fact that they didn’t get much passed without time allocation (which is not closure, and I want to smack people who confuse the two) is again due to inept House Leadership, not the rules.

Meanwhile, as the Conservatives froth at the mouth at the idea of a once-a-week PMQs, they not only forget that it was all Harper could bother to show up for toward the end of his mandate, and the fact that they voted for Michael Chong’s proposals around exploring this very idea. Oops.

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/845063148197593089

https://twitter.com/aaronwherry/status/845071914079043586

But you know, they have some more outrage to perform.

Good reads:

  • Anti-Islamophobia motion M-103 easily passed yesterday, with only Michael Chong and Bruce Stanton voting in favour of it from the Conservative ranks.
  • A Liberal MP made a tasteless joke about a Conservative MP being a stripper based on her ringtone, and now everyone is howling about the PM’s feminism.
  • Rona Ambrose thinks all of the “new taxes” in the budget will drive talent to the States. Because apparently she’s paid zero attention to the political climate there.
  • Uber is getting pissy because the budget will force them to charge GST just like other taxis do.
  • Out of the budget was a retroactive tax credit for fertility treatments.
  • Canada has been green-lit to join the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which the government promises will lead to jobs and opportunities.
  • A think tank report says Canada should give up Supply Management to get concessions on softwood lumber, and MPs are already up in arms over it.
  • Senator Don Meredith has a new lawyer who says he won’t play the race card.
  • Paul Wells talks to Bill Morneau about his latest budget.
  • David Reevely reminds us that the now-cancelled tax credit for bus passes was indeed useless.
  • If you’re following the Andrew Potter debacle, here are columns from Chris Selley, Don MacPherson, and Scott Gilmore (plus radio from Emmett Macfarlane).

Odds and ends:

Tristin Hopper found a catalogue of Canadianisms, and shared a few highlights.

It’s the inaugural edition of Kady O’Malley’s new Ask Kady Anything column for VICE.

3 thoughts on “Roundup: The vacuous pleas to change the Standing Orders”

  1. The whole “the Government has the right to get its bills through” mantra is so wrong (and it’s even stronger at Queen’s Park). As Prof Tony Wright said before the UK Procedure Committee last parliament, the government has the right to get its business before the House — nothing more.

    I do love how programming motions are used in the UK but they would only work here if we also totally revamped our approach to 2 reading as well (as in, stop wasting so much time on it). Programming motions are (ideally) negotiated between the gov’t and off’l opposition, and if a programming motion is put forward unilaterally by the government, it usually fails to be adopted by the House. And when that happens, the gov’t will either agree to terms the opposition wants and try again, or just abandon the bill (as was the case with the House of Lords Reform bill in the 2010-15 parliament). The whole point of them is to avoid the government simply ramming its business through the various stages.

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