As expected, some of the sillier suggestions for avoiding future SNC-Lavalin-type Affairs have started cropping up, and yesterday, Policy Options hosted one from the head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. His suggestions? Splitting the role of Attorney General and Justice Minister, and to ban omnibus bills.

On the former, it’s clear that he didn’t actually read the McLellan report beyond the headlines, because he would have seen – as Paul Wells pointed out so ably in his own piece – that the guidelines that McLellan puts forward in the report would have prevented this whole sordid affair before it got off the ground. (Side note: It may not have prevented Jody Wilson-Raybould from being shuffled, given the lack of competence she had demonstrated in the role overall, and Scott Brison was going to retire regardless, so that likely would have happened, but the fallout may not have gone quite the same way). There is no reason given in the Policy Options piece for rejecting McLellan’s advice – just that the whole Affair has damaged the public confidence. So that gets a failing grade.

As for the suggestion to ban omnibus bills, he doesn’t quite grasp the magnitude of the suggestion. He claims, not incorrectly, that they exist for the sake of efficiency, but that efficiency is largely because there are many pieces of legislation every year, where if you introduced individual bills for each component – such as around technical changes in a budget implementation bill – Parliament would grind to a halt. There is a time and a place for omnibus bills – the difference is when they are being used abusively. The Conservatives stuffing changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act into a budget implementation bill? That’s abusive. The Deferred Prosecution Agreement provisions being put into the budget bill? It’s borderline, but it wasn’t hidden or snuck through – it was in plain sight, the committees in both Houses each saw it and dealt with them (albeit less effectively on the Commons side), and the Commons has new rules to deal with splitting up votes on omnibus bills. Ironically, if the DPA legislation had been put forward as a separate bill, it likely would have languished until swallowed up by an omnibus justice bill, as happened to several other criminal justice reform bills over the course of the last parliament (speaking of Wilson-Raybould’s ability to manage her own bills). But the suggestion to simply ban all omnibus bills is unserious and jejune, and a perfect example of the kind of knee-jerk suggestions we’re going to see plenty of in the days ahead.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau says that declining media revenues and the dominance of tech giants will be up for discussion at the upcoming G7 meeting in France.
• The government says that they have offered “very limited” consular services to “Jihadi” Jack Letts.
• Here is a tale of woe in Justice Canada as they tweeted out misleading information about the “two-hour rule” for impaired driving, and the internal drama around it.
• The federal government gifted a ten percent stake in a BC coal terminal to two First Nations, which could be a means of trying to gain other resource concessions.
• The RCMP have raided the home of an army reservist found to be associated with a far-right Neo-Nazi extremist group.
• Here’s a longread about the problem of falsified reporting of workplace incidents in the oil and gas sector, which is part of the culture of the sector.
• Maclean’s has announced their planned leadership debate (Trudeau yet to confirm), while the Commission debate has announced five moderators (one per segment).
• The Chief Electoral Officer put out a statement intended to clarify the confusion around issues advertising – but it hasn’t mollified critics.
• In case you’ve forgotten, the Commons ethics committee meets today to demand another investigation into the Double-Hyphen Affair. Expect peformative outrage.
• The Liberals and NDP have only managed to nominate six candidates apiece in Saskatchewan.
• Andrew Scheer re-promised to make maternity EI benefits tax-free if he forms government, but it’s a policy that disproportionately benefits the wealthy.
• The Conservatives’ candidate in Central Nova has pulled out for “personal reasons” weeks away from the election.
• The NDP have yet to nominate a single candidate in New Brunswick. No, seriously.
• Alberta plans to maintain their oil curtailment until 2020, but have falsely blamed Bills C-48 and C-69 for the problems.
• Lawyer David Hamer puts his concerns about the overreach in the Ethics Commissioner’s report into op-ed form.
• James Bowden spills some scalding tea about how the Greens in PEI are acting as a controlling force in the hung parliament in that province.
• Susan Delacourt is impatient with the false equivalence being thrown around in this Elections Canada advertising rules brouhaha.
• Heather Scoffield castigates Trudeau’s lazy reasoning for the Double-Hyphen Affair as “jobs” without really grasping Canada’s actual labour situation.
• My column explores whether more rules would really prevent another SNC-Lavalin-type issue in government, or if a broader culture change is needed.

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.