In the weeks leading up to Parliament's Easter break, we were witness to a surlier than usual House of Commons, with weeks of filibusters at the Procedure and House Affairs committee, and innumerable privilege debates and dilatory motions in the chamber while a mounting number of bills go without seeing any debate.  While it's not uncommon for tensions to rise in the last few weeks of any sitting particularly as MPs get squirrelly as sittings stretch out to four and five weeks without breaks in May and June, those same tensions have already been felt before we've reached that point on the calendar.

Thus far, Government House Leader Bardish Chagger has refused to give ground when it comes to offering guarantees that her ideas for how to "modernize" the House of Commons' operations won't be unilaterally imposed.  She's couched this in the language of refusing to give a veto to the Conservatives on changing the very tools that they abused while in government, whether it's things like omnibus bills or prorogation, to which the Conservatives have outwardly stated that they agree any changes to the Standing Orders should be done by way of consensus with all parties rather than be imposed.  I'm not sure that Chagger would find this reassuring, however, as agreeing to consensus just allows the opposition parties to stall and block the proposals (which, to be fair, they should be doing for most of them because they're terrible).

It's the fact that Chagger has been so ham-fisted about this whole debate, and has in fact doubled down on her position, that doesn't fill me with a lot of hope that we'll see any resolution to this situation when the spring sitting gets underway next week.  The fact that the Liberals have been agitating to have these "discussions" around the Standing Orders completed by June 2^nd  an overly ambitious timeline given the magnitude of what is being proposed (not to mention the fact that the vast majority of said proposals miss the mark in terms of what they're supposed to be addressing), will only make the next few weeks even more fraught.  And in terms of that ever-increasing stack of bills that aren't seeing any debate?  Well, you can bet that Chagger is going to start wielding the hammer of time allocation to try and start moving it along.

If anything will make the surly feelings worse, it's the "guillotine" of debate.  Expect weeks of snap votes in protest, yet more dilatory motions, bitter debates and accusations of rank hypocrisy that the government promised they wouldn't use these same tactics that the Conservatives did when they were in government.  All of it, of course, is self-inflicted for Chagger, who didn't need to be so insistent on these changes, and could have pulled Liberal MP Scott Simms aside at any point to have him withdraw his motion at the committee to have this debate completed by June.

The possibility does exist that Chagger has been this ham-fisted deliberately, looking to provoke a crisis on the Order Paper in order for her to justify ramming through changes to the Standing Orders around programming motions or the likes, claiming the need to get those bills moving after weeks of delays.  It would be a gamble, hoping that the public will side with her and find the opposition tactics to be childish and obstinate rather than with the opposition and their apocalyptic talk about this being the death of democracy in Canada (only the eleventieth time that this claim has been made), but one that could succeed, especially as the opposition has not been walking their own talk on things like Friday sittings.  Chagger also has precedent on her side, given that the opposition overplayed their hand after the Elbowing and lost all sympathy from the public.  If this is indeed Chagger's ultimate goal, then it would be a sign that this Liberal government is not only far more cynical than their "sunny ways" branding would have us believe, but that they are also bent on centralizing power to a greater extent than previous governments through far more underhanded tactics than we've seen in the past.

Meanwhile, the only two viable proposals in Chagger's discussion paper prorogation and omnibus bills are almost certainly going to be misread by people who don't understand the difference between legitimate and abusive uses of each mechanism, and it's going to inevitably lead to leading to yet more tears and recriminations whenever the debate around these measures gets underway.  You can bet that we'll see opposition demands to both outlaw omnibus bills in any recognizable form (a mistake given that they have perfectly legitimate uses, especially given that most budget implementation bills are by their very nature omnibus given the fact that they will touch on several Acts as a matter of course), and to try to turn control of prorogation over to the House of Commons in defiance of our constitutional conventions (which rests that power with cabinet as a Crown prerogative), and that the bulk of our nation's columnists, ignorant of the actual workings of a Westminster parliament, will side with them when Chagger tries to push through the  more palatable options of empowering the Speaker to break up abusive omnibus bills and to codify rules around restoring prorogation ceremonies.  If this is one area where Chagger would be willing to show flexibility in order to blunt some of the criticisms and look like she's listened, then we'd be left with the worst possible outcomes rather than get at least one or two decent outcomes in a package of bad ones.

This insistence by the government that they bully though these changes is mystifying, but so is their continued cultivation of such bad feelings among the opposition.  Unless Chagger is sincere in saying that she'll come to a decision on the next steps of this voyage of the damned when she "takes the temperature" of the Commons upon their return and backs away when she finds the hot tempers unchanged, we could be in for one of the most deservedly acrimonious spring sittings in years.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post