Government backs down on Parliament rule changes

OTTAWA— Facing a stalemate in Parliament and dug-in opposition parties, the Liberals are backing away from reforms they say would “modernize” the House of Commons.

Government House leader Bardish Chagger sent a letter to her Conservative and New Democratic counterparts Sunday evening saying the Liberals were abandoning a number of paarliamentary reforms.

The reforms, while somewhat ar- cane, became a flashpoint in the House of Commons in recent weeks and threatened to derail the Liberals’ agenda only two years away from their re-election campaign.

“We offered these ideas in good faith to foster a dialogue on additional ways that we could modernize the operations of the House of Commons,” Chagger wrote, in an email circulated to several news outlets.

“The government does not intend to move forward on these items at the present time. . . . I sincerely hope that we can all work together to improve the tone in the House of Commons, and find new ways of making it more effective at addressing government and private members’ business.”

The Liberals had suggesting eliminating the sparsely-populated and rarely eventful Friday sittings of the House of Commons, where backbenchers debate each other in the morning and fly home in the afternoon — in favour of adding hours to Monday through Thursday debates.

But controversially, the reforms floated — put forward in a “discussion paper” unilaterally by the majority Liberals — would have limited the oppositions’ ability to delay legislation, and set limits on how long a piece of legislation could be debated.

Conservative House leader Candice Bergen said the Liberals backing down on the eve of Parliament’s return after a two-week break, suggests the government was taking heat and was in “panic mode.”

Bergen called the Liberals “hypocrites” for trying to unilaterally change the rules of Parliament. Instead, she proposed an all-party discussion about how to reform the House of Commons. NDP House Leader Murray Rankin said the Liberals may still plan to “force through” changes to the way Ottawa works.

“Discussion (with the opposition parties) was always just a pretence — it just took them a while to admit it,” Rankin wrote in a statement. “It’s clear now that the emperor has no clothes.”