With Parliament now risen for the summer, The Canadian Press decided to take a look back at the rise in obstruction tactics by the opposition in the last couple of months, and some of it is blatant obstruction for the sake of obstruction. And while a number of the usual pundits decried the piece, I think there are a few things to drill into here – not because I don’t think that there are legitimate uses for opposition obstruction and filibusters (because there certainly are), but what it says about the tone of this current parliament.

There are a few examples cited in the piece about opposition tactics that don’t make sense – the insistence on running out the clock on a six-hour marathon of speeches over the Senate public bill about Latin American Heritage Month that all parties supported (though I’m unsure how, procedurally, a Senate public bill got that many hours of debate because it should have really gotten two under private members’ business), the vote-a-thon tantrum that was cynically designed to simply kill Friday hours rather than make any meaningful points about the Estimates that were being voted upon, or the hours of concurrence debates on committee reports that all parties agreed upon. The piece makes the point that there are concerns that these tactics were designed to force the government to bring in time allocation on more bills in order to get them through, so that they could turn around and accuse them of acting in bad faith after they came in promising not to use time allocation (despite the fact that it’s a defensible tactic under most circumstances).

To a certain extent, this is the government’s fault for coming in trying to play nice and operating under the rubric that all parties can be reasonable and agree to debate timetables. That hasn’t always proved true, and when Bardish Chagger’s proposals around scheduling motions like they use in the UK got shot down (legitimately – it’s not something I would have really supported because it means automatic time allocation of all bills), she warned that time allocation would be used more frequently, and it certainly appears that the opposition parties have dared her to do so with their tactics. But I do find it frustrating as a parliamentary observer that good faith attempts and allowing more debate gets abused in order to try and embarrass the government rather than making parliament work better, and then they can complain when the government has to play hard(er) ball. We already know that the rules in which we structure debate here are broken and need to be overhauled to ensure that our MPs are actually debating rather than simply reciting speeches into the void, and that they in fact can encourage this kind of dilatory behaviour. The measures that Chagger proposed to make Parliament work better wouldn’t have actually done so, but I don’t think it’s illegitimate to shine a light on delay for the sake of delay because it does highlight that there are problems with the rules at present. But we need to get over the kneejerk reactions that calls to do so are about partisan purposes rather than about the health of our democracy.

Good reads:

• All three major party leaders were in Quebec for St. Jean Baptiste/Fête Nationale. Trudeau and Singh then went to Toronto Pride, while Scheer didn’t.
• Jim Carr says that as soon as Kinder Morgan starting balking about the Trans Mountain expansion that he knew the federal government would have to step in.
• Ralph Goodale says that the government will look at pardons for past cannabis use once the new law takes effect.
• General Vance and a dozen troops arrived in Mali to lay the groundwork for our year-long peacekeeping mission. Vance says it’s “messier” than other missions.
• Good news, everyone! The CRA has reduced the number of people it mistakenly lists as dead on the tax rolls!
• CBC got a look at Mélanie Joly’s briefing materials in advance of her meeting with Google officials last year.
• The previous Chief of Defence Staff says that the Canadian military isn’t ready to build its own space force – not that we should be weaponizing space anyway.
• More than 100 diplomats in Canada claimed asylum over the past two years after regime changes or fear of persecution upon their return to their home countries.
• The Alberta and Saskatchewan governments plan to continue railing about equalization despite the fact that the formula was renewed last week. Politics!
• Jagmeet Singh admits it’s going to be a challenge to keep the NDP’s Quebec seats.
• Erin Weir has completed his anti-harassment training and hopes to be able to run for the NDP again. He apparently doesn’t realise he was Mean Girled out of the party.

Odds and ends:

Navdeep Bains wrote about why he attended Toronto Pride for the first time.

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