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New Democrat MP Daniel Blaikie spoke to reporters Monday morning about his proposal that he said aims to give the House of Commons more say in decisions of confidence votes and prorogation so that it is harder for prime ministers to abuse power.
“Perhaps one of the most important powers that the prime minister has is the ability to dissolve or prorogue Parliament at will. What that means is the prime minister can call an election at any time that he wants and at any point. If he’s not happy with what’s going on in Parliament, he can tear up all that work, stop Parliament with a prorogation and have Parliamentarians have to start from scratch,” he said.
Mr. Blaikie said this system doesn’t make sense in a 21st-century democracy because Parliament is meant to hold the government to account and so the head of government should not decide when Parliament meets and on what terms.
Debate began on Friday and he said the Bloc Quebecois supported his motion. Mr. Blaikie said the Liberals have not taken a position yet. The NDP MP spoke at length about how Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has “chosen to blink instead of putting some meaningful constraints on this otherwise unfettered power of the prime minister.”
The NDP agreed to a supply and confidence agreement with the minority Liberal government in March 2022. The deal involves the NDP agreeing to support the Liberals on confidence votes in exchange for action on a list of NDP policy priorities, such as dental care.
This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, usually written by Ian Bailey. Janice Dickson is filling in today. It is available exclusively to our digital subscribers. If you’re reading this on the web, subscribers can sign up for the Politics newsletter and more than 20 others on our newsletter signup page. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
TODAY’S HEADLINES
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LOOKING AT STRIKING HISTORICAL CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS FOR VAGRANCY - Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino is looking at adding convictions for vagrancy to a list of “historically unjust offences” that people can apply to have struck from their criminal records. Story here.
PIERRE POILIEVRE FACES FIRST BIG ELECTORAL TEST IN UPCOMING BY-ELECTIONS - Four by-elections will take place on June 19 in what pollsters are saying is the first big electoral test of Pierre Poilievre and his campaign team since becoming Conservative leader. Story here.
OTTAWA’S MORTGAGE BOND PROPOSAL DRAWS CONCERNS FROM BAY STREET - Bay Street bond dealers and investors are raising concerns about a proposed change to Canada’s housing finance system that would transform the $260-billion Canada Mortgage Bonds market and see the federal government financing a significant portion of the country’s mortgage lending out of its own borrowing. Story here.
B.C. CLINICS STRUGGLE TO KEEP UP WITH DEMAND FOR IUD INSERTIONS - Weeks after B.C. made prescription birth control publicly funded, women are flooding health care clinics requesting IUDs, leading to waiting times of several months because of a shortage of clinicians available to insert them. Story here.
THOUSANDS MORE EVACUATED IN NORTHERN ALBERTA AS WILDFIRES RAGE - Thousands more people were ordered to evacuate their homes in Northern Alberta on Sunday, as raging wildfires continued to burn homes, vehicles and thousands of hectares of forest, all the while straining the firefighting resources of local communities. Story here.
THIS AND THAT
TODAY IN THE COMMONS - Members of Parliament are scheduled to vote Monday afternoon on a motion from Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet on immigration targets. The motion calls on the House to reject the target of increasing Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100, which has been put forward by an independent organization called the Century Initiative.
The organization’s target has become a hot topic in Quebec in recent days. The motion says “tripling Canada’s population has real impacts on the future of the French language, Quebec’s political weight, the place of First Peoples, access to housing and health and education infrastructure.”
The Liberal government has said it is not a formal target of the federal government.
“Let me be perfectly clear. The Century Initiative is not a government policy,” Liberal MP Marie-France Lalonde said in the House of Commons Friday. Ms. Lalonde is the parliamentary secretary to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser. “The government does not endorse the findings of this independent group. The government does not have a goal of increasing Canada’s population to 100 million people.”
THE DECIBEL
The World Health Organization declared the end of the COVID-19 emergency on May 5. But what does that mean about how we should be thinking about the COVID virus and what kind of risk we are exposed to? Decibel host Menaka Raman-Wilms spoke to Lisa Barrett, an infectious diseases specialist at Dalhousie University and a practicing clinician, about how we can manage COVID now and where the disease could go from here. Listen here.
PRIME MINISTER'S DAY
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will meet with members of the Canadian Armed Forces who are assisting in wildfire relief efforts in Alberta. He will later depart for Seoul, Republic of Korea.
LEADERS
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh will participate in Question Period and will later meet with the TransLink Mayor’s Council.
There was no schedule released for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
OPINION
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on two solitudes emerging on immigration in Quebec: “Quebec sovereigntists were buzzing last week as if they’d found an issue to breathe new life into their cause: the federal government’s expanded immigration targets. Actually, it’s not really new: Ottawa’s plan to increase the number of immigrants to 500,000 a year by 2025 was released more than six months ago.
Todd Hirsch (a former Calgary-based chief economist of ATB Financial and the author of The Boiling Frog Dilemma: Saving Canada from Economic Decline) on four day work weeks: “The idea of a four-day work week is once again being bandied about, after the pandemic opened up whole new concepts of what, where and when work should be done. The notion of a legislated shorter work week for the same pay isn’t new – it’s been around for decades. Research shows that it would make workers happier, more productive and healthier.”
Chris van Tulleken (an infectious diseases doctor and an associate professor at University College London) on how the ‘food’ we eat causes harm by not really being food at all: “In the spring of 2019, a paper was published in the medical journal The Lancet with an unremarkable-sounding title: “Health Effects of Dietary Risks in 195 Countries, 1990–2017.” It soberly presented associations between food and health from most countries on Earth. But buried on Page 9 of the analysis, there was a startling finding: Poor diet is responsible for more deaths globally than any other cause, including the previous No. 1 risk – tobacco.”
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Janice Dickson