Roundup: Marinating ideas or wasting precious time?

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As his weekend think piece, the CBC’s Aaron Wherry extolled the virtues of MPs who aim high with their private members’ bills, even if they don’t go anywhere. I am of particular mixed feelings about this, because while I can get behind the notion that sometimes the big ideas need to marinate in the public consciousness for a while, whether that was cannabis legalisation, single-event sports betting, or trans rights, we also need to be cognisant that a whole lot of private members’ business is, well, a giant waste of everyone’s time, particularly when you have MPs who table dozens of bills and motions in any single session that will never see the light of day, but consume time they should be spending doing their actual jobs of holding government to account, as well as media attention for something that is dead on arrival.

It’s hard not to conclude that PMBs aren’t being abused in the current iteration of the Standing Orders. We’re seeing a growing number of bills that need royal recommendations still get debated all the way up to the final vote, which essentially means that everyone’s time has been wasted because it’s not going to proceed, and that MP could have used their spot for something that could have gone somewhere instead, rather than hoping that the government was going to grant the recommendation that late in the game. There is a never-ending supply of bills to amend riding names and declare national days, weeks, or months about some ethno-cultural group or cause, individual tweaks to the Criminal Code that have distorted all semblance of proportionality in our sentencing principles, or attempts at tax expenditures that are a loophole to the prohibition against proposing spending (because the rubric is that you are forgoing tax revenue, as though that didn’t come with its own costs), and when you do get the big issues, I’m really not sure that two hours of scripted speeches being read into the void is really exercising the national consciousness on the issue.

Maybe I’m just horribly cynical, but I don’t see the benefits of this particular exercise like I would if there was an actual grassroots process to formulate policy that the party adopts (and I especially have a problem when MPs use their spots to put forward policy positions because it surrenders their rights and privileges as MPs for the party’s sake, most especially if it’s a stunt on the party’s behalf—looking especially at you, NDP). Time is one of the most precious resources in Parliament, and the amount of time and resources that gets wasted on these bills that will never see the light of day just makes a mockery of the process.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 221:

After being encircled by Ukrainian forces, Russians retreated from the city of Lyman, which has been a logistics hub for the Donetsk region. In the meantime, Russians have targeted humanitarian convoys, because of course they did. Meanwhile, ten torture sites have been found in Izium, which Russia controlled for six months, and at least thirty people found in the mass grave outside of the city bore marks associated with torture.

Good reads:

  • Northern Affairs minister Dan Vandal has appointed an Inuk chief of staff, the first Inuk woman to serve in the role.
  • The Chief of Defence Staff worries about operational readiness given the demands being placed on the Canadian Armed Forces these days.
  • The RCMP’s Civilian Review and Complaints Commission says the Mounties don’t take sexual assault seriously enough (but don’t the teeth to force change on them).
  • The federal civil service has demonstrated a very low take-up of training around Indigenous issues, and the RCMP is one of the lowest (surprising no one).
  • Here is a look at Jagemeet Singh’s first five years as NDP leader.
  • CBC catches up with some MPs who lost in the last election, and what they’ve been up to for the past year.
  • Former senator Don Meredith has been charged with three counts of sexual assault stemming from his time in the Senate.
  • Here is a look at how immigration has played a role in the Quebec election.
  • The Ontario government is weakening rules around federal childcare funding, which will undermine the system in favour of for-profit centres.
  • The Post has a lengthy profile of Danielle Smith, who may become UCP leader.
  • Paul Wells gives his big picture take on the Quebec Election and what comes after it with Trudeau and Poilievre.
  • My weekend column points out that for all the talk of Poilievre’s so-called ability to talk about the economy in “plain language,” it’s pretty much all lies.

Odds and ends:

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