As expected, the Speaker ruled yesterday that he didn’t have the jurisdiction to police whether or not the different party caucuses adhered to the Reform Act additions to the Parliament of Canada Act, and thus Jane Philpott’s complaints will fall on deaf ears (just as Erin Weir was hoping to belatedly make the same complaints about his own expulsion from NDP caucus). And then we immediately got another wave of self-righteousness over the Twitter Machine about how terrible it was that MPs couldn’t even follow their own laws just after they passed them.

Does this mean that the Reform Act was, while noble in goal, a functionally unworkable and inappropriate addition to the Parliament of Canada Act that only passed because it was too awkward to reject it? Yeah, pretty much.

— kady o'malley (@kady) April 11, 2019

To recap the whole Reform Act saga: It was a dubious prospect from the very start because it was utterly misguided in what it was trying to accomplish, which was to nominally weaken the power of the party leader and strengthen the power of MPs. Everyone was treating this as a rebuke of the “dictatorial” Stephen Harper, so it became this big optics battle, never mind that it would have done nothing about the Conservative caucus and their mood, since the vast majority of them were still convinced that Harper walked on water. And while Michael Chong may have been noble in sentiment, he chose the wrong vehicle to make his proposed changes. The right vehicle would have been reforming leadership selection processes, which are the bane of our system, but he didn’t dare do that, so we got the Reform Act instead. And because no party actually wanted to do more than mouth the platitudes of the bill, they ensured it was so completely neutered in committee and made optional, with no enforcement, that we got the eventual garbage bill passed into law because it felt good to do so.

Here’s the thing: MPs didn’t need this bill to give them any more power. They already had all the power they needed, but they either choose not to exercise it, or don’t know about their own powers because, well, most of them don’t even know their own job descriptions. (This is why I wrote my book). And Chong’s garbage bill actually limited their powers under the guise of strengthening them. But would anyone articulate that at the time (other than me, howling into the void from the pages of the National Post)? Of course not. All of the hollow platitudes were siren song. And so once again, MPs passed a meaningless (but not actually harmless — the bill is actually democratic poison) bill into law with no intention of following through on it, because it felt good. And this kind of thing keeps happening because not enough MPs are serious enough about their actual constitutional roles. We need better informed MPs, or this kind of thing will keep happening.

Good reads: 

• Carolyn Bennett and David Lametti are calling on Conservative Senators to quit stalling on Romeo Saganash’s (sloppily drafted) UNDRIP bill. 
• Bill Blair’s consultations have apparently shown that there is not a critical mass of Canadians demanding a handgun ban (but he’s still considering it). 
• The Parliamentary Budget Officer says there are improvements to the Estimates process (short of a complete overhaul that would require merging Finance and Treasury Board).
• Because it came up in QP yesterday, here’s the story of the financial regulator’s report on banking practices, and accusations that it was watered down.
• Health Canada has restricted by not banned the use of certain pesticides because of their effects on bees.
• SNC-Lavalin claims its competitors have gotten DPAs for their misdeeds, but analysis shows otherwise. 
• Liberals on the justice committee quashed a move to investigate the leak of Supreme Court candidates’ names because it’s too political of a venue. (They’re not wrong).
• The Senate legal committee has amended the Access to Information bill to exclude judges’ expenses from disclosure for fear of impinging on their independence. 
• Andrew Scheer headed to Calgary to campaign with Jason Kenney.
• The NDP want Ralph Goodale to convince the RCMP to probe the coerced sterilisation of Indigenous women, even though he can’t actually direct them.
• The Bloc have paid for a billboard in Ottawa to warn the federal government from interfering with Quebec’s “secularism” bill. 
• Matt Gurney compares the Cabinet to what it looked like in 2015.
• Aaron Wherry thinks that Doug Ford and Jason Kenney could make good rivals for Justin Trudeau to play off of.

Odds and ends:

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