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With two weeks left before the House of Commons rises for the Christmas break (and to decamp to the West Block), there remains a pile-up of government bills in the Senate that don't appear to be in any hurry to progress.  And this is before any last-minute push to get more bills passed by the Commons and into the Senate before that happens, and that includes the omnibus budget implementation bill (and all of the associated drama that goes along with it).  There is a crisis on the Order Paper in the Senate, but there appears to be a wilful stubbornness in terms of doing what it takes to get the job that they were appointed to do done.

By my count, there are currently 14 government bills on the Senate's Order Paper right now, not including the budget bill that hasn't passed the House of Commons yet, but likely will early next week.  Some of these bills still haven't passed second reading and been sent off to committee yet, while others are waiting for their spots at their assigned committees, some of which have growing lists of bills to get through and this isn't counting the numbers of private members' bills and Senate public bills that are also waiting for their time.  There is a lot of work to get through.  And because this is the "new, independent" Senate, the usual mechanisms used to get things through the Chamber are no longer there not because they've abandoned the whips, so to speak, but because the leaders that matter in the Chamber don't know what they're doing.

If things were functioning the way they should be, then the leaders of the caucuses err, "parliamentary groups" as they're now styling themselves, would work out timelines of bills during the morning "scroll meetings" in the Speaker's office.  This system worked for decades, and ensured that they could get timely passage of bills in the priority that they would work out according to their needs.  But you see, that involves the dreaded practice of "horse-trading," which both the current Leader of the Government in the Senate err, "government liaison," Senator Peter Harder, and the Independent Senators Group abhor.  In their estimation, horse-trading is "partisan" and therefore bad.  This is nonsense of course horse-trading and negotiation are how things get done.  But because they refuse to do so, we're at the crisis on the Order Paper that we find ourselves in.

As well, the Senate would traditionally sit Mondays and Fridays toward the end of each sitting, and for longer usually a week or so at Christmas and then another week or two in June and sometimes into July in order to clear the decks and get bills through to royal assent.  The "new independent" Senate hasn't done that, and Harder in particular has ensured that they rise when the MPs do, no matter that there are so many bills on the Order Paper that should be passed, and could have been passed or at least recommended amendments to before the Senate rose.  Remember the omnibus transport Bill C-49?  That should have been sent back to the Commons last Christmas, but because they rose when the House did, it didn't end up getting passed until May.  This is a problem.

Harder, meanwhile, not only insists that he doesn't horse-trade, and will simultaneously demand that bills get passed as-is while also praising the number of amendments that have been passed by the Senate this parliament (never mind that the vast majority of the amendments that have been passed are those recommended by the government itself after flaws were pointed out to them).  And because Harder won't negotiate the bills that he's supposed to ensure get through the Chamber that is literally his job we are yet again left wondering why he needs the $1.5 million office budget that he insisted on.  And I don't think I'm being too cynical when I suspect that one reason Harder is less bothered by the fact that there is a crisis on the Order Paper, because it gives him the justification he needs to push for a business committee.

Put briefly, a business committee is a bad idea because it gives the power to time-allocate all Senate business into the hands of a small clique.  Harder is also trying to sell senators on the notion that it will somehow alleviate the raft of bills that get sent to the Senate at the end of every sitting, but it most assuredly won't do that, given that it's how the House of Commons deals with business.  Negotiating among the leaders, whom Senators in their caucuses can hold to account, allows for the necessary fluidity and doesn't time allocate, which is important for the rights of senators to speak to any piece of legislation they wish to.

One other problem that is starting to creep in is the fact that a lot of the new Independent senators seem to want to spend a lot of their time on, well, extracurricular activities, meaning committees around special interests and taking the notion that the Senate is Parliament's built-in "think tank" too seriously.  Yes, the Senate has long engaged in the kinds of studies that have been extremely valuable to policy-makers in this country, but they did it while still getting bills passed.  The current crop hasn't been in part because they're new and figuring things out, but it's also because I think there's a bit of a romance setting in about how they see their roles that doesn't seem to include the timely passage of legislation.

The Order Paper is at a crisis level now, and there is an election on the way.  Sitting weeks get pretty sparse pretty quickly especially because up until May, Parliament tends to only sit one or two weeks at a time, and this government still has an ambitious agenda to get through.  The Senate has a lot of work ahead of it to get through those bills, and to leave time for any amendments along the way, and some of these bills are time-sensitive (like the one on election rules).  There is less time ahead of them than they think, and unless they start changing their tune about extended sittings and horse-trading, they will find themselves in a lot of trouble by June. 

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