Opposition turns to obstruction
CONSERVATIVES, NDP UTILIZING OBSTRUCTION TACTICS TO STALL WORK OF PARLIAMENT
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 hyperpartisan 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.
And then there were copious points of order and questions of privilege that chewed up more time.
The most notable was a point of order last month by New Democrat MP Daniel Blaikie, complaining about a $7-billion reserve fund — or “slush fund” as the opposition calls it — in the government’s spending estimates. After 25 minutes, Commons Speaker Geoff Regan interrupted to say he’d heard enough and that there was nothing he could do about the matter since it was still before a Commons committee.
An uproar ensued, with NDP and Conservative MPs banging their desks and bellowing that they had points of order about Regan’s interruption as the Speaker vainly called for the House to come to order.
The uproar continued as government House Leader Bardish Chagger introduced a motion to extend the sitting hours of the Commons until midnight for the duration of the sitting, in order to give MPs more time for debate on the government’s heavy legislative agenda. Conservatives would later argue that the motion wasn’t actually introduced because no one could hear Chagger.
While Blaikie raised a valid issue in his point of order, former Commons procedural clerk Thomas Hall says Regan’s ruling was correct and the ensuing fuss suggests to him that the entire episode was really intended to delay introduction of the extended hours.
“If they could keep the government from doing extended hours, it means that some of the government bills wouldn’t get through, so in a sense it’s just general opposition again,” Hall says.
In his view, it’s legitimate for opposition parties to use procedural devices to slow down legislation they believe is flawed or to draw public attention to an issue. But he frowns on tactics with no apparent objective other than to disrupt proceedings.
“There doesn’t seem to be any message attached to it, so in that sense I don’t think it is helpful democratically,” Hall says, adding that opposition MPs’ behaviour after Blaikie was cut off by the Speaker “was completely unparliamentary because it was just to disrupt.”
John Brassard, the Conservatives’ deputy whip, counters that all the procedural manoeuvring was in fact aimed at shining a light on important issues.
The voting marathon was a bid to draw attention to the government’s refusal to disclose how much its carbon pricing plan is going to cost Canadians — and it worked, Brassard contends.