The House has already lost more than a fifth of the 122 sitting days scheduled in 2024. If this goes on to the end of the year, Canadians could see half of Parliament’s sitting days erased from the board. A Canadian flag is backlit atop the East Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Oct. 31.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
From the outside, Parliament probably looked like nothing was out of place on Monday: the flag atop the Peace Tower flapping in the November breeze, MPs returning after a week off during which the House of Commons wasn’t sitting, tourists taking pictures …
It was an illusion, though. In Canada’s legislature, no legislating is getting done. The country’s 44th Parliament is dead on the inside. It’s a farce that needs to end for the good of the country.
The nominal cause of death is a filibuster launched by the Conservative opposition in late September. But the actual cause is the Trudeau government’s contemptuous refusal to hand over an unredacted set of documents that the House ordered it to produce in a motion passed in June.
After the Speaker ruled on Sept. 26 that the government’s bad faith amounted to a prima facie case of privilege, the Conservatives tabled a motion to refer the matter to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee for investigation.
The Conservatives then set about filibustering their own motion, knowing that, by continuously debating it, all government business would come to a halt. A debate on a privilege motion takes priority over all orders of the day, including government orders and private members’ business.
Translation: Other than the debate over the privilege motion that has eaten up 26 sitting days and counting, the only other business that has taken place in the last seven weeks is Question Period and mundane proceedings like ministerial statements and the presentation of petitions.
The Conservatives say they will continue their filibuster until the government hands over the documents that the House ordered it to produce.
All legislation is on hold as a result. The House has already lost more than a fifth of the 122 sitting days scheduled in 2024. If this goes on to the end of the year, Canadians could see half of Parliament’s sitting days erased from the board.
There are a few ways this could end. But there is only one right way, and that is for the Liberal government to respect the will of the House and hand over the documents. Anything else would be a disgraceful blow to Parliament’s ability to hold governments to account.
The House has, as established through the Constitution, the absolute power to order the production of government documents – in this case, documents related to the disgraced Sustainable Development Technology Canada agency.
The Liberals argue that because the production order says the House should hand the documents to the RCMP, it goes too far.
It’s true that the House would be giving potentially incriminating evidence to the Mounties that didn’t go through normal judicial channels. But nothing forces the RCMP to accept the documents.
And besides, it’s not hard to suspect that, were the reference to the RCMP not in the order, the Liberals would find other excuses not to hand over documents that might well embarrass them. The federal Ethics Commissioner and the Auditor-General both found dozens of cases where Sustainable Development Technology Canada handed out grants totalling tens of millions of dollars without following conflict-of-interest guidelines.
The Liberals say that the Conservatives should end their filibuster and send the matter to the Procedure and House Affairs Committee. But even if the committee ruled the government had committed a violation, the upshot would still be that the Liberals were able to thumb their noses at the House’s right to demand the production of government documents.
It’s telling that neither the NDP nor the Bloc Québécois seem to have much interest in helping out the Liberals. Either one could support a motion to end debate, another way that the House could be brought back to life, but so far they haven’t.
The Liberals are isolated on this issue. Their legislative agenda is stalled, and they don’t seem to have any friends willing to help them out.
It’s no way to run a country. Yes, there are other means to end the filibuster, and maybe at one point an opposition party will break out the defibrillator.
But the Conservatives are not the bad guys in this scenario. Only the Liberal government, with its refusal to respect the will of the House, is responsible for Parliament’s paralysis.