As the end of the spring sitting of Parliament draws near, and the final vote on the bill to legalize recreational cannabis is now over with some 46 amendments being sent back to the House of Commons, it's time to start fretting about the "ping-pong" of bills between the two chambers. And we've seen instances of this before, both with the budget implementation bill last June, and just a few weeks ago with Bill C-49, the omnibus transport bill.
One of the defining changes we've seen in the new "independent" Senate is the fact that there are a lot more amendments coming from the institution than there have been in the past decade. While several commentators have tried to equate this with the greater number of Independent senators that are in the chamber in the past, it's a bit of a specious comparison because it largely ignores the fact that the current government has signalled its openness to amendments whereas the previous government did not. And once the Conservatives made up the majority in the Senate and were able to carry out the government's wishes largely unopposed, it was up to opposition senators to find new ways of expressing their caution about bills, which wound up being largely by way of Observations appended to bills rather than amendments that were going to be shot down.
This having been established, a pattern has been emerging when it comes to the way in which amendments are treated by this government. On the one hand, prime minister Justin Trudeau has made a big deal about valuing the now "independent" Senate, and he makes all kinds of encouraging noises about letting them do their work and respecting what they have to say. And he has been far more hands-off with the Senate in many (but not all) respects, it's true. On the other hand, however, oftentimes when amendments come back to the House of Commons, the government finds ways to diminish them. Last June's clapback about amending a budget implementation bill as being somehow improper, with Trudeau himself saying that the Senate can't amend money bills was false. Constitutionally, the Senate can't initiate money bills, and he seemed to very deliberately confusing the two in order to get his way.
What was especially interesting there is that when the Senate's amendments were went back from the Commons, none of them accepted, it was under the rubric that it somehow infringed on the rights and privileges of the Commons. No explanation was given for what that meant, even when Senators asked Government House Leader Bardish Chagger that very question when she appeared before them in ministerial Senate Question Period. To this day, nobody has an answer for just what rights or privileges the Senate allegedly has been impacting on. You may recall that, despite the fact that they passed the bill rather than insist on the amendments again, senators did send a message back to the Commons to remind them that yes, they absolutely can amend any bill they please, and that the Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder's desire to play the hero had him sign off on this message despite the fact that it put him in a conflict with the very government he is there to represent. So that was fun.
What is important to remember from that particular exercise is that Senators felt that the lack of a substantive response that they got from the government was a slap in the face and it was a substantial concern that they had because it had to do with the escalator clause on alcohol taxes, and there was a matter of principle that any tax increase should go before parliament before it's enacted. For the government to shrug it off with what was essentially boilerplate language was not only a bit of an insult but was certainly indicative of the ham-fisted way in which Chagger has tended to manage the Order Paper (though I will admit that she's gotten a bit better in the past year).
In the time since, we've seen the Senate become a little more assertive when it comes to insisting on amendments, and the fact that they sent back two amendments to the Commons that were first rejected on the transport bill was instructive. Why? Because they wanted a substantive reason as to why the Commons would reject these amendments, which they considered to be important matters particularly for the Maritimes, in that particular case, given that one of the Senate's primary roles is to be a voice for the regions, and they felt these changes disadvantaged rail users in those provinces. What they got from the government was a message saying that they "respectfully disagreed," and that was it. There was no substantive reason, and no debate on the issue in the Commons. Just a whipped vote, and back it went.
I bring this up because of the 46 amendments to the cannabis bill that passed. While twenty-nine of them were technical amendments that came from the government itself, and will be adopted with little problem, some of the other amendments may be trickier, and I know for a fact that there are many senators who will want substantive reasons from the government as to why they're rejecting those amendments (and we can pretty much guarantee that some of them will be rejected) because of the amount of time and energy that was spent on this whole process in the Senate. And if the government says "thanks but no thanks," or "we respectfully disagree," you can pretty much guarantee that senators are going to send at least some of those amendments back. And the government can avoid this ping-pong between the chambers, on this bill or any others, by actually showing respect to the work of the Senate and having the debate in the Commons on the amendments like they're supposed to, or by sending a message with some actual reasons. It's not hard, and it has the virtue of putting money behind where Trudeau's mouth is when it comes to his respect for the work of the "independent" Senate. Otherwise it's inviting more back-and-forth between the chambers, and more unnecessary drama.
