Liberals drop most contentious proposals for House rules reform

OTTAWA — The Trudeau government is backing down from some of its most controversial proposals for reforming the way the House of Commons operates in the face of opposition filibustering that has tied parliamentary business in knots for weeks.

Government House leader Bardish Chagger has written to her opposition counterparts, announcing that she intends to proceed with only those reforms promised in the Liberal election platform — including having the prime minister answer all queries in one question period each week, as Justin Trudeau has already begun doing.

Chagger, who is MP for Waterloo, is dropping other more contentious proposals, which opposition parties have unanimously denounced as a bid by the Liberals to control the parliamentary agenda and hamstring their efforts to hold the government to account. That includes a proposal to adopt the British practice to use “programming motions” to set in advance the amount of time to be devoted to debate and committee study of each bill introduced in the Commons.

Also being abandoned is a proposal to limit MPs’ speeches during committee hearings to 10 minutes, short-circuiting their ability to filibuster.

However, Chagger warns in her letter that without those reforms the government will be forced instead to impose time allocation to limit debate and get legislation passed.

“Canadians elected us to deliver an ambitious agenda, so it is with regret, but full transparency, that I want to inform you that, under the circumstances, the government will need to use time allocation more often in order to implement the real change we promised,” she says.

Chagger is also dropping a proposal to test electronic voting, rather than forcing MPs to stand in the Commons for all votes.

And she’s deferring a proposal to eliminate sparsely attended, half-day Friday sittings of the Commons, asking opposition parties to consult their respective MPs on the idea of reallocating the time now spent on Fridays to other days or weeks in the parliamentary calendar.

Almost from the moment Chagger proposed the reforms in a discussion paper released in early March, opposition parties have been expressing outrage over what they described as a power grab by a dictatorial prime minister.

Chagger’s retreat comes as the Commons prepares to resume Monday after a two-week break.