After a brief return by a skeletal sitting of the House of Commons, it looks like the near-term future of what parliamentary democracy looks like in a pandemic is set, and it's certainly not the "respect for parliament" that the prime minister likes to claim. The governing Liberals have decided that instead of ensuring that the actual work of parliament carries on during this global crisis something that it has managed to happen for 153 years, in spite of two world wars and a fire that destroyed the original Centre Block they would instead prefer a kind of facsimile of House of Commons operating in a truncated way, and pretending that it's doing the work that parliament is supposed to be doing.
According to the Liberals' motion that, barring any miracles, will have been adopted by the time this is published, the plan is to carry on with meetings of the special COVID-19 committee a quasi-Committee of the Whole where all MPs are members and can participate for the duration of the spring sitting of the Commons, and on June 17th, the House will reconvene to pass the Estimates in one fell swoop, after the government takes some questions in Committee of the Whole. These are some of the most important deliberations in Parliament, and form the backbone of the job of the institution in controlling the public purse that the government relies on to carry out its programs, and it will be pushed through without any debate, without committee study, and even more unusually, without the framework of a federal budget by which to provide guidance. And while I get that the government doesn't want to provide a budget that offers any kind of forward guidance given that there are way too many uncertainties for the document to be of any particular value, but you would think that would mean that there should be even more parliamentary oversight for those figures, not less.
Beyond June 17th, the plan outlined in the motion is for the Commons to be recalled on July 8, July 22, August 12 and August 26 for additional one-day committee sessions, and then not resume until September 21st, which was the originally planned date for the Commons to reconvene after the summer break. At that point, the COVID-19 committee will cease to exist, and MPs will have to start over again in figuring out how to go forward as we continue to live in the "new normal" of the global pandemic until a vaccine is found and distributed and the potential for a second wave of infections as flu season kicks up again.
But wait there's more. In order to ensure that they have the appropriate trappings of parliament, the motion proposes that rather than the committee-by-Zoom two days a week and the committee-in-person on Wednesdays, that they instead hold "hybrid" committee meetings four days a week in the Commons Chamber, but with new video screens so that members who aren't there in person can still participate by Zoom or whatever system they plan to use for this format. Everyone points to how Westminster accomplished this temporarily the current Tory government ended the practice this past week without pointing to the fact that the UK's "hybrid" model was limited to 120 MPs participating virtually out of their 650, so it certainly wasn't quite the solution that people here seem to think it is and it remains to be seen if it could effectively scale to the bulk of our 338 MPs, minus those in the Chamber, because the special committee has not run as smoothly as people seem to think.
The government will point to these trappings and say that they're respecting Parliament. Trudeau likes to say that Parliament is even more important in these times, but he has a strange and indeed cynical way of showing it. Why it's cynical is because it pretends that this is what Parliament is all about asking questions to the government. To that point, Trudeau and his House leader will patronizingly point to the fact that these special committee sessions are longer in the course of a week than the combined question periods every week would be, and during the actual QP on Monday, Pablo Rodriguez gave an overblown statistic of how many more questions were asked over the past week of the special committee than the number of questions typically asked in a week of Question Periods (when we had them five days a week), and tried to pass that off as an improvement.
Why this is so infuriating is because Question Period is not the be-all and end-all of what happens in Parliament. It's 45 minutes out of the day, even if that's what gets all of the media attention. Meanwhile, we have seen five emergency bills pass that have doled out billions of dollars without proper legislative oversight, without witnesses being called at committee, without opportunity for public scrutiny or input, without the transparency of daylight on any of the proceedings in favour of backroom negotiation. We're about to see tens of billions of more dollars go through another truncated Estimates process, and I have no doubt there will be even more emergency legislation to come (including a bill from the justice minister on extending the statutory and regulatory deadlines that courts are being faced with). This is the work that MPs are supposed to be doing not simply asking performative questions to ministers for two hours a day and calling it accountability.
It is likely to get even worse. With the move to "hybrid" proceedings in the Chamber, the Procedure and House Affairs committee being charged with the task of coming up with a secure electronic voting system for MPs to use from a distance by the end of June something that has already been signalled will be insisted upon being made permanent after this is over. Canadians are being asked to blindly swallow the poison pill that will be the death of our parliamentary system in the name of the pandemic, and all the while, this government will pat itself on the back for ensuring that Parliament "matters" at a time like this, when all they've done is hollow it out and pretty up the outsides.
Photo Credit: CBC News
