There is a ticking clock looming over the 41st Parliament, and no, it's not the Peace Tower. There are now less than ten sitting weeks left before MPs rise for the summer, and the election in the fall, but there is still a lot of legislation left on the Order Paper to deal with, not to mention a budget that hasn't been tabled yet, let alone its enabling legislation likely another omnibus bill. And yet, the government has still been tabling new bills, promising yet more to come, and is trying to rush through what's already there. None of this can come to any good.
We're seeing this race to the finish line with the hearings on Bill C-51, where the government is cramming as many witnesses as they can into as few hearings as possible, despite the fact that there was a willingness by other MPs on the committee to hold hearings during last week's constituency break. No dice. In many ways, it's a bit of history repeating where the government had such an urgent timetable to pass the prostitution bill that it rushed along witnesses and made committee testimony pretty much meaningless because the government had its mind made up, declared that the bill was perfect, and nothing any of the witnesses said was going to make any difference. Kind of like how they're treating C-51, with its own deadline of wanting to be passed the Commons by Easter.
Looking at the Order Paper, there are still 18 government bills that have not been passed (not including the First Nations Education Act, as that's now a dead letter) plus another five government bills that started life in the Senate that have not passed. Add to that the need for a budget and its implementation act, and the Supplementary Estimates, and that's a lot of work to cram into those last few weeks, where momentum will be broken up by constituency weeks, particularly the two-week break at Easter.
With such a full plate and such a short window of time, the question becomes how much scrutiny will any of this get? Some of it is contentious, like the Citizen Voting Act, and some of it will require a lot of study, like the Safe and Accountable Rail Act, but with so little time to get it passed not only in the Commons but also through the Senate are we going to see even less debate than we get now, and fewer committee hearings? We know for sure that we'll see even more time allocation coming from the government, and even more time for debate will be lost in the constant debate and votes on time allocation rather than the bills themselves another blow to the amount of scrutiny we'll see. Add in a committee filibuster or two, and you can write off another chunk of time that will not be spent doing the work of accountability.
And then there's the budget. In Question Period a couple of weeks ago, Liberal MP Scott Brison raised the notion that the government's decision to push a budget off to April at the earliest note the last three words that both Joe Oliver and Stephen Harper have stated it means that there is less time for scrutiny and debate, which is pretty critical for a pre-election budget. Add in the implementation legislation, which could be hundreds of pages with hundreds of different statutes being affected with maybe six or seven weeks for it to be debated and passed it's little wonder that there is scepticism and even cynicism as to the amount of time that they plan to devote to this process.
Of course, part of what this comes down to is the expectation by this government that legislation can and should be rammed through with as little debate as possible. After all, they have a majority, and the particular sense of themselves that they don't get things wrong never mind that it has been proved time and again that this is emphatically not the case so why not just pass everything and be done with it? And it's more than just the current government and the Conservative backbenchers spinelessly following orders rather than doing their jobs of holding government to account. It's the culmination of years of MPs giving up their oversight and accountability roles so that a government like the current one no longer feels it needs to give parliament the time it needs to do its work.
Remember the Estimates? They're the authorization that parliament gives to the government to spend the money to run the civil service. It used to be that MPs could hold it up if they didn't like what they saw, and then in 1968, the government amended the rules so that Estimates are deemed to be adopted by a certain date whether parliament has had a chance to look at them and debate them or not. And it's not like the opposition is blameless with this lack of fiscal oversight either. Right after the 2011 election, in that three-week mini-sitting that was largely spent on the Canada Post filibuster, the Commons adopted the whole of the Estimates over a period of a couple of hours. No oversight, no scrutiny, no committee examination, no questions to the government as to their suspending plans. Just votes to adopt. And it's not like they've spent that much time on them since.
The ways in which we've diminished the role of oversight and accountability by parliamentarians, is it any wonder that the current government is trying to speed the process along so that it becomes unnecessary? We're mere steps away from replacing MPs with drones that will simply read speeches into the record and vote according to the whip's instructions. And until MPs start standing up for their roles and their rights to exercise them, there is little doubt that whoever forms government in the next parliament will continue this very same practice of steamrolling through their agenda.
