Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rises to vote in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Sept. 25.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Over the course of the fall session, the Liberal government has treated Parliament with naked disdain.
The most outrageous show of contempt has been the government’s months-long refusal to hand Parliament a complete set of documents that they were ordered to produce in a motion passed by the House last June.
The Liberals argue that the production order goes too far, because it asks that the documents in question be given to the House law clerk and then be handed over to the RCMP.
It’s an unusual request, to be sure. Giving the police access to possibly incriminating documents not obtained through normal judicial processes could indeed have an impact on the admissibility of any evidence contained in it – a concern raised by the RCMP itself.
But the RCMP does not have to accept the documents and is under no obligation to look at them, which effectively moots that concern.
More importantly, one has to suspect that, were the reference to the RCMP not in the order, the Liberals would find other excuses not to hand over documents about Sustainable Development Technology Canada – or to release only some of them, with heavy redactions, as it has done so far.
That’s because the federal Ethics Commissioner and the Auditor-General both found dozens of cases where SDTC handed out grants totalling tens of millions of dollars without following conflict-of-interest guidelines.
Those documents risk embarrassing the Liberal government, which was forced to suspend SDTC’s activities based on its own internal investigation of the agency.
But the government has no choice but to turn them over. The House has the absolute power to order the production of government documents, and only it can decide if the order has been respected – as the Speaker ruled on Sept. 26.
There is no precedent that allows the government to weasel its way out of a House production order; its only alternatives are to prorogue Parliament, a doubling down on disdain that the Harper government resorted to in a similar case in 2009, or simply refuse to comply and be found in contempt of Parliament, an extremely rare occurrence that the Harper government inflicted upon itself in 2011, and which can lead to a non-confidence motion.
In both those cases, the Liberals, then in opposition, rightfully slammed the Conservatives for their lack of respect for Parliament’s conventions.
The power to order the production of documents is essential to Parliament’s role as a check on the government. Without it, it cannot do the work it was created to do. The Liberal government’s efforts to subvert that power is a direct attack on Parliament and a show of contempt for the institution.
The government is also displaying a lack respect for Parliament with its refusal to explain why it took 54 days for former public safety minister Bill Blair to sign off on a CSIS warrant to wiretap Michael Chan, a powerful Liberal organizer who became a national-security target over alleged links to the Chinese government.
Neither Mr. Blair nor his former chief of staff have explained the bizarre delay, although Mr. Blair says he signed the warrant as soon as it landed on his desk.
The Liberals are also now trying to shut down, or severely limit, the work of a parliamentary committee that investigates Canada-China relations. The government introduced a motion last week calling for the committee to end its weekly meetings and be limited to meeting over “urgent matters.”
You may recall that the House of Commons exists to represent the interests of constituents, spend their tax money wisely, table and adopt legislation in keeping with those first two things and, above all, hold the government to account.
You may also be aware that, in the past 50 years, successive governments of all (well, both) stripes have eroded the independence of MPs and concentrated power in the Prime Minister’s Office. MPs on the government side now serve only the PMO, voting as ordered and speaking from prepared statements; their role as the people’s oversight of the government is but a fiction.
The Liberals are exploiting this devolution by ignoring an order to produce documents, stonewalling on a matter of national security and trying to shutter a committee that could embarrass it. It’s the culmination of the casual disdain for Parliament that governments have cultivated for decades. It might be good for them; it’s terrible for democracy.