It's not an uncommon story in our Parliament, but one that we've seen play out again in recent weeks, and we're about to see play out yet again in the weeks to come.  That story is the tendency of MPs to avoid scrutinizing bills because of popular backlash, and instead, they offload that job onto the Senate.  After all, senators don't have to worry about re-election, so why not let them catch all of the abuse?

Where this is playing out right now is on Bill C-16, which deals with enshrining protections on the basis of gender identity and gender expression.  The bill sailed through the House of Commons with little debate, and in committee, it only heard from the justice minister and from department officials.  There were no voices from either supporters or dissenters, with the exception of a small number of written submissions.  Instead, when the bill was hastily handed to the Senate, it became incumbent for those senators to hear from the diversity of voices on the subject.

While most people think this bill should be a no-brainer and is in fact long overdue there are concerns raised from various corners, some of them socially conservative, others radical feminists, who think that the bill will have implications for free speech, or that by not referring to a trans person by their preferred pronoun (and most especially with those who prefer either a singular "they" or something like a "ze" or "zir") will somehow be criminalized.  They're wrong by any definition of what's in the bill, but these are pervasive attitudes that the lack of scrutiny in the House of Commons has completely glossed over.

The lack of substantive hearings on issues on the Commons side often leads to the Senate needing to pick up the slack, and there is a genuine sense of frustration from senators that I've spoken to that they are the ones who get left holding the ball.  And when it's a bill like this one, where there is a very committed activist community who want to see it pass, it means that when there are senators who have concerns that bring them to committee, things start to get nasty.  This has played out with C-16 over the past two weeks, with the witnesses that have been brought to committee.  Never mind that nearly every senator on the committee pushed back against the purveyors of disingenuous concerns or outright strawmen with regard to the bill the Senate as a whole was lambasted by the self-righteous over social media.

"Dear the Senate, This is why we don't take your seriously, Sincerely, Journalists," tweeted VICE's Justin Ling during some of those proceedings, apparently oblivious to the fact that Parliament has an obligation to hear from all sides so that there is a record, and since the Commons couldn't be bothered to do so, it was left up to the Senate.

Why does a record matter?  Because whenever legislation gets challenged in the courts and that happens quite a lot courts are usually left to try to determine what Parliament's intention was when they passed the bill.  If the arguments being put before them were thoroughly debunked in committee like these current ones are then the courts know that the issues have been addressed and can act appropriately.  And while the supporters of the bill may not like to hear what their detractors have to say, we do live in a democracy and views should be aired, especially so that they can be challenged (and they very well were in this particular case).

But while MPs shuffle off this work onto the Senate to avoid any blowback against themselves, most of us don't realize how exhausting this is for Senators who have legitimate inquiries about the bill but who are being attacked for simply asking questions.  But while they will admit to being frustrated and exhausted by having this dumped solely on them, some of these same senators will also acknowledge that they have sympathy for MPs who don't want to have to take on these touchy bills, and it's one of the reasons why we have an appointed upper chamber with tenure so that they can have the courage to ask tough questions when MPs can't.

But where does this leave our democracy if we can't trust our elected representatives to have enough intestinal fortitude to deal with tough issues?  I say that because this is a repeated pattern C-16 is only just the latest example.  There have been some pretty spectacular ones in recent history, such as the Federal Accountability Act in 2006, when the then-opposition Liberals spinelessly let their Senate counterparts handle all of the amendments to a very problematic piece of legislation because they didn't want to look like they were trying to avoid additional ethics burdens being placed upon them in the fallout of the Sponsorship Scandal.

In the current parliament, we've not only seen this level of abdication from the Commons with C-16, but we're also seen it with the national anthem bill (rammed through in order to see it passed before its sponsor, Mauril Bélanger, succumbed to his illness), and just this week, we're seeing it yet again with Rona Ambrose's bill on mandatory sexual assault training for new judges, which had no debate at second or third reading, and was studied at the status of women committee which treated it sympathetically instead of the at the justice committee, despite the fact that it deals with the justice system and will have an impact on judicial independence, which is a crucial component of our democracy.

If MPs are going to forgo their responsibilities of scrutiny and accountability because a bill is either popular or because asking questions on the subject matter is deemed too sensitive, then we have to ask ourselves about the value of the elected chamber when they keep fobbing off the hard work onto appointed bodies, whether it's the Senate, the Supreme Court of Canada, or independent Officers of Parliament.  What good is a democracy if our representatives are only there for the stuff that covers them in glory and not the hard work?