Opposition parties tying up work of Parliament with obstruction tactics

Anyone watching the televised proceedings in the House of Commons one night earlier this month might have thought they’d mistakenly tuned in to a travelogue. One after another, dozens of members of Parliament - primarily Conservatives - stood to wax eloquent about the geography, history, culture and cuisine of Central and South America. Among other things, observers learned that Latin America consists of 20 countries - each one helpfully enumerated by a number of MPs - that it’s “part of our hemisphere,” that its culture is “diverse and rich” its food delicious, its natural landmarks “stunning,” and its dances often “incorporate a lot of hip movement as well as quick steps and spins.” As each MP strove to fill his or her 10 minutes of allotted speaking time, observers were regaled with descriptions of the various signature dishes of each country and even the list of ingredients that go into Argentina’s “go-to condiment,” chimichurri. And they heard all about every Latin American baseball player who has ever contributed to Major League Baseball in Canada. The government had planned for MPs to debate its landmark legislation to legalize marijuana. But, at the instigation of the Conservatives, they ended up instead talking about a private member’s bill - first introduced by late Conservative Sen. Tobias Enverga - to designate October as Latin American heritage month. And talk they did. For six hours. On a bill that was unanimously supported by all parties and could have been approved in minutes. It was just one of a number of procedural tactics the Conservatives, and occasionally New Democrats, employed during the waning days of the spring parliamentary sitting to eat up time and prevent the government from proceeding with its legislative agenda. In Green Party Leader Elizabeth May’s view, it was the worst example of what she sees as a disturbing trend among opposition parties to obstruct the work of Parliament just to make the government look bad - an echo of the hyper-partisan dysfunction that has paralysed the U.S. Congress. “There’s nothing that will score higher for absurdity, that’s for sure,” May says. Among other procedural timewasters, Conservatives and NDP MPs repeatedly moved concurrence in months-old committee reports, prompting an hour-long debate in each case. The Conservatives also forced an all-night voting marathon, moving to delete each clause in the government’s spending estimates, line by line, and keeping the voting going just long enough to ensure that the next day’s proceedings had to be cancelled - or “flushed,” in parliamentary parlance.