Liberal bills are getting hung up by Senate
Gender identity protections stalled with two other bills in Red Chamber
There was a time — not so very long ago, in fact — when the government’s bid to extend full federal human rights protection to cover gender identity and expression seemed set to become the law of the land before MPs headed home for the holidays.
But despite an informal crossparty agreement to fast-track the bill through the Commons in just five sitting days, the legislation seems destined to be left to languish on the Senate to-do list until February, if not longer.
It’s not the only government initiative to make it through the red curtains only to hit a wall of benign but relentless resistance in the upper house.
As of press time, two other high-profile bills are similarly stranded at second reading: C-4, which would undo the controversial changes to union financial disclosure rules brought in during the last days of the previous administration, and C-6, which would perform a similarly sweeping rollback of the Harper government’s bid to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals convicted of serious offences.
According to the official record, C-4 arrived in the Senate on Oct. 20 and has since been spoken to by four senators, most recently on Dec. 1.
C-6 has spent even longer in the procedural limbo — it was passed by the House in June and began second reading on Sept. 27 with seven senators rising to speak on it since then.
Unlike House debate, which automatically ends as soon as no MP rises to speak, the Senate takes a more, not leisurely, necessarily, but relaxed approach to such discourse. Unless a bill is truly time-sensitive — a supply bill, for instance, or as a recent example the court-required rewrite of Canada’s laws on physician-assisted dying — it’s rare for more than one senator to speak on a bill during one sitting.
Instead, senators are permitted — encouraged, even — to hit the pause button by requesting that debate be adjourned in their name so they can speak at a later time, although there’s no strict deadline on when that has to take place.
Like most parliamentary rules, it makes perfect sense in context — in this case, the Senate’s charmingly anachronistic practice of going through the entire order paper or scroll every day, rather than follow a pre-determined schedule, thus requiring each item to be debated or “stood.”
Technically, an adjournment request requires unanimous consent, which can be denied, but that has rarely, if ever, happened in practice — and even if it was, such a challenge would trigger a separate debate that another senator could ask to have adjourned and so on and so on, ad infinitum — or at least until the end of the session.
Unless, of course, the government of the day gets fed up and invokes time allocation — which is, admittedly, slightly more complicated a process in the Senate than it is in the Commons, but has the same basic effect of keeping the legislative trains running on time.
It would also be seen as a declaration of war by the Opposition — and, indeed, not infrequently even by those aligned with the party in power as the Senate, as a rule, does not take well to being hurried.
Of course, in normal circumstances, that theoretical government of the day would have more than three senators on whose votes they could reasonably rely on to back up such a move, which is very much not the case under the current configuration.
It’s a good bet that some — possibly even most — of the evergrowing independent contingent might be able to be brought on side, as might a few Senate Liberals, but that’s still not a guarantee, which may in part explain why the increasingly harried-seeming Sen. Peter Harder has yet to test out that power — and, indeed, why the government he represents has apparently not suggested he do so.
It could also be seen as a shot across the bow of an institution that has been exploring the limits of its constitutional independence — and an admission, however tacit, that the prime minister’s vision of an arm’s-length, autonomous upper house might not be turning out exactly as he had hoped.
In any case, it’s too late now: without a last-minute burst of cross-aisle holiday spirit, no bills are going to make it out of second reading before the Hill shuts down until the new year.
When the Senate reopens for business in February, however, it may be time for the government to figure out how, exactly, it intends to get its agenda through to Royal Assent without taking a more aggressive approach to clearing its path in the Senate.