Construction cranes on Parliament Hill as the Canadian provincial and territorial flags blow in Ottawa on March 29, 2021.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
A year ago about this time, after it had decided the novel coronavirus posed a serious risk to the public but before it had decided to do anything to stop it, the government attempted to shut down Parliament for two years.
Well, not shut down, exactly: Parliament would have still sat, as it does now – fitfully, in a weird hybrid format, some MPs seated in the chamber, others beaming in from remote locations. But it might as well not have sat at all, for all the good it could have done.
As originally drafted, Bill C-13, the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act, would have allowed the government “to spend all money required to do anything” it saw fit to deal with the pandemic – to borrow, to tax, even to change the legislation, all without Parliament’s approval. For two years.
It never came to that, thank heaven. The opposition kicked up a great fuss, the government relented, and the bill was amended to stipulate that the government’s emergency powers would be in effect only until Sept. 30.
All the same, the episode was revealing of a certain habit of mind – that Parliament is at best an afterthought, a tiresome formality that prevents ministers from getting on with the job. It seems to infect all governments, but none more than this one.
Just now the government is refusing to let certain senior advisers to Justin Trudeau and his ministers appear before a committee of Parliament looking into the WE Charity scandal: the awarding of a contract to manage a near-billion dollar program to an organization that, among other personal and political entanglements, had previously hired the prime minister’s mum. The refusal is in defiance of a motion of the House of Commons, passed last Thursday, demanding they appear.
Much effort has been invested in obscuring just who decided what in this affair. The prime minister at first insisted, against all experience, that the decision had been made by senior civil servants, only latterly admitting that he had personally signed off on it – but only because they insisted!
Various bits of information have since surfaced to suggest that while the proposal may have carried the civil servants’ fingerprints, the initiative for it came from inside cabinet, if not the prime minister’s office. So it would seem a matter of some importance to nail this down. It’s bad enough that the prime minister, together with his former finance minister, approved awarding a no-bid contract to an organization that had been so personally helpful to them and their families. But if the whole program was cooked up between them, it takes on an even darker hue.
If the Commons ethics committee considers it helpful, then, to hear directly from staffers in various ministers’ offices, that is all there is to it. Parliament’s power to send for “persons, papers and things” is undoubted and largely unrestricted.
The government’s rationale for this bit of obstructionism, to the effect that allowing staffers to testify would be a violation of ministerial responsibility, is obvious bilge: the principle is that ministers should not hide behind staffers, not that they should keep them hidden from view to prevent them from ratting. That, however, is neither here nor there. Whatever its objections, it is not up to the government to decide whether it wishes to be answerable to Parliament. Yet that is what it appears to believe.
This is, after all, not the first time we have seen this. The prime minister prorogued Parliament in August, you’ll recall, rather than let the same committee do its work, then threatened to dissolve Parliament shortly after its return, when it was proposed to strike a special committee to look into this and other instances of alleged “misuse of public funds.” The government has unilaterally censored (“redacted”) public documents related to the affair. It has filibustered committee hearings. If it has nothing to hide, it is certainly going to great lengths to hide it.
And yet the issue here has long since ceased to be the original scandal. It is the government’s continuing refusal to submit to the scrutiny of Parliament, and more, Parliament’s inability or unwillingness to induce its compliance. We saw how roughly this government handled Parliament while it had a majority – roping masses of legislation together to form giant omnibus bills, truncating debate, stonewalling Question Period, all the things for which it rightly excoriated the previous government, and which it promised it would never do.
But that it should be able to get away with worse even after it has been reduced to a minority – refusing even to present it with a budget – shows how completely Parliament has surrendered its prerogatives. It might as well not sit.
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