The final spring legislative crunch has arrived in Parliament, and MPs are now sitting until midnight Mondays to Thursdays in order to start getting bills cleared.  Committees are buckling down to get some very big bills through the process, and the Senate?  Well, we'll see when the Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, can actually produce a list of bills he wants prioritized, but the caucuses there are trying to negotiate how best to get these incoming bills passed before they leave for the summer.

When the motion for midnight sittings happens, we are beset by the ritual complaints of the opposition about how terrible it is that the government is ramming through these bills, and how it's their own fault for leaving things until the last minute.  This is also usually the time of year where the government starts invoking time allocation on bills in order to keep debate focused, which brings another round of "They're bringing out the guillotine!" wails, despite the fact that time allocation is not closure (the actual legislative guillotine), and that time allocation is sometimes a necessary tool particularly given that we have developed some very bad habits when it comes to managing debates in the Canadian parliament.  The problem, however, is that some of the alternatives are even worse.

I will say first of all that the complaints that the government has left things until the last minute is rarely a fair argument (though in this particular sitting, the late introduction of the elections bill is quite possibly the case in point it was left late, and we're not really sure the reason why).  Most people fail to realize how tight the legislative calendar really is, given how many sitting days are devoted to Supply Days for the opposition, and other days are lost due to circumstances that happen.  It's life, but it starts to make the House Leader's job more difficult to try and get the agenda through.  Add to that, the number of days lost to opposition protests, like filibusters and vote-a-thons that failed to prove their actual point or were poor choices both tactically and procedurally (such as the one on the Estimates that the Conservatives forced to try and get traction on the Atwal Affairâ„¢, only to lose their own stomach for keeping it going and shooting themselves in the foot when they voted against line items like services for veterans).  Again, that's life in a democracy and you have to deal with it.

But in the grand scheme of things, what we need to take a good hard look at is how we're actually debating in our Parliament and what's going on isn't good.  We have utterly broken our system of debate because poor rules changes, and the need for central messaging has essentially gutted what those rules didn't.  MPs don't debate any longer in Canada they read twenty-minute speeches into the record with almost nobody paying attention, and in the time set aside for questions and answers, what we largely get are nothing but recitations of talking points, either from their own side to bolster their position, or non sequiturs in response to disingenuous questions from the other side.  Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but for the vast majority of MPs, this is how "debate" happens now.  And it's appalling.

Add to that, what MPs are purporting to debate is increasingly disconnected from what they are supposed to be debating.  Second Reading is a prime example of how things have devolved.  Second Reading is when MPs are supposed to debate the principles of a bill you're not looking at the details, but rather the broad strokes.  Does your party support the idea that this bill puts forward or not?  This is debate that shouldn't take days, and yet often that's just what happens.  Long speeches are read into the record, superfluously, and the pace of legislation crawls.  What should happen is that a handful of MPs should state the party's position, raise any concerns, and then move the bill onto committee where it will be studied in detail, and all of the clauses in the bill will get a thorough review.  That is how it's supposed to work, anyway.  But no, we get speechifying in to the void.

One only has to look at how Westminster handles this, where Second Reading debates generally take an afternoon. The Speaker sees how many MPs want to debate the bill and divides the allotted afternoon's time up so that MPs generally get around ten minutes each, and they actually debate.  There is no reading of long speeches into the record they make their point, they get interjections and questions asked throughout, and then it goes for a vote before heading off to committee.  This is how we should be dealing with it here, and yet we don't.

This being said, there are other Westminster practices that we should be wary of, which is the use of programming motions, which essentially time allocates bills from the time that they get Second Reading.  We saw Government House Leader Barish Chagger ham-fistedly propose adopting this in Canada a couple of years ago, which was withdrawn after weeks of filibusters, but this is certainly something that touted as ensuring that there is regularity and predictability to debates much like Senator Harder keeps pushing for a business committee in the Senate to do much the same thing, and time allocate all debates.

It's a good thing that we have the kind of flexibility we do in our parliament to give bills the time they need when they need them, but we have to stop pretending that the way we're debating things right now is okay.  It's not.  It suffocates substance under useless verbiage that some poor staffers spend all of their time writing with key messages from the leader's offices rather than actually dealing with the legislation that's before them.  That's why we need to change the rules to get rid of the twenty-minute speaking times, and we need to re-empower the Speaker to divvy up times by the number of MPs in the chamber who want to speak, and to restore to them the ability to actually debate with give-and-take throughout.  But we also need the various House leaders to realize that they don't need to fill Hansard with speeches nobody pays attention to, and start returning it to actual, manageable debate that people will follow.  We can and must do better if we're to keep Parliament relevant for Canadians.