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As the government's bill to legalize recreational cannabis winds up debate in the House of Commons and prepares to head over to the Senate for some requisite sober second thought, the bill's sponsor in the Upper Chamber is looking to shake-up how the bill gets debated.  The problem is that the proposal is a bit overzealous for the nature of the bill.

Independent senator Tony Dean has proposed that the bill get the same kind of treatment that the assisted dying bill did having the relevant ministers before the whole Senate in Committee of the Whole to answer questions about it from all senators, followed by a managed debate process, which is largely unlike how the Senate tends to operate otherwise.  Said proposal is unlikely to get traction because the Conservatives don't appear to be in favour of it, and I suspect that he won't be able to get the Senate Liberals on board either, but the whole thing does give me a bit of pause because it's indicative of some problematic attitudes that are developing amongst newer senators.

But let's start by deconstructing what exactly is being proposed here, because already there are some pretty significant differences between how Bill C-14 on assisted dying went down, and the current cannabis legalization bill, C-45, is proceeding.  For starters, the whole pre-legislative process didn't happen in nearly the same way.  For C-14, there was a joint committee with MPs and Senators who dug into the issue and presented a report to the government, and once the bill was tabled, there was definitely a government response to what they had heard.  With C-45, the initial consultative process was done with a panel headed by former Liberal deputy prime minister Anne McClelland, and it didn't have the same parliamentary input.  Likewise, when C-14 was before the House of Commons, a Senate committee engaged in pre-study, which aims to do its work before the Commons committee has wrapped so that Senate suggestions for amendment can be implemented at that stage.  That did not happen with C-45, so already the ways in which the study of the bill could be hastened have been limited.

A major factor with C-14 was the fact that there was a looming deadline from the Supreme Court of Canada to change the law a deadline that had been extended once already, and it wasn't likely that the courts were going to grant another one, given that they set a deadline with the intent to light a fire under Parliament in order to get them to move on it something that the previous government wasn't motivated to do in the lead-up to the election.  Why it's important to note that deadline is because they had determined that there was a violation of Canadian's Charter Rights in being denied access to medical assistance in dying, which is certainly not the case with recreational cannabis.  The only deadline here is a political one that the government wants this in place by July 1st (despite the objection of some provinces), but that doesn't necessitate the Senate rushing a bill through the process.

And then there's the real crux of why Bill C-14 required a particularly different process for contemplation by the Senate, which is that it was a deeply moral issue for most Canadians, and parliamentarians were no different.  Senators in particular were motivated by this issue because it did seem to be a little closer to home for many of them, and that meant that there was going to be a need for a process that would allow for more buy-in from the chamber as a whole, rather than the usual study and drill-down that happens at committee not that every intervention in the Chamber was stellar, mind you.  But the fundamental issue itself under consideration with C-14 was vastly different than the issue with C-45 no matter what how you may feel about either recreational drugs or the ongoing criminalization of youth for simple possession.

Part of the problem with the process of C-14 is that it has set up a lot of terrible expectations on the part of the new senators and indeed, the general public who don't normally pay attention to what goes on in the Senate, and who got a glimpse when they decided to televise the appearance of the two ministers during Committee of the Whole.  We keep hearing, over and over again, from Senator Peter Harder in his attempts to bend the rules of the Senate to his way of thinking that C-14 was this pinnacle of achievement that needs to be kept as the Platonic ideal of Senate debate and that's a mistake.  What happened with C-14 was in response to a very particular set of circumstances that will probably never be replicated again, and people need to keep that in mind.  It's an exception and not the rule for a reason.

In an interview with the Hill Times, Dean expressed frustration with the way in which debates happen in the Senate, where often there are only one or two speakers before the debate gets adjourned for another day, and on it goes until debate collapses.  But trying to fit a management approach to debate in the Senate is ultimately a bad idea because it erodes the individual freedoms of senators in favour of the control of a very small group of actors who decide on how things will be managed, and it's why I oppose Harder's proposal for a Senate business committee to manage debate going forward.  There are ways to speed debate along, and to limit the adjournments, and he could move a motion to that effect, or have Senator Harder invoke time allocation, if he thinks he can get the votes to make it happen.  But aside from that, there is simple negotiation between the various caucuses in the Chamber to set timelines it used to happen on a frequent enough basis, before Harder came in, and everyone I've talked to has said that he tends to eschew the actual negotiation part instead of presenting wish lists as to when he wants bills passed, and it's partly why there is a growing backlog of bills on the Senate's Order Paper.  If Dean wants to establish timelines, he's free to negotiate with the other caucuses to do so.  But trying to replicate the C-14 process is unnecessary, overzealous, and a sign that he still is maturing in his role as a senator. 

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