Over the past two weeks, we have seen two separate attempts by the Conservatives to weaponize parliamentary committees in an unprecedented way against the government, which should be concerning to Canadians if only they were being provided with an accurate picture of what has been going on. Instead, because we have a government that can't communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, a complacent media which is content to both-sides issues and credulously repeat the assurances that these are innocuous motions about committee studies, and opposition parties acting in bad faith with no regard for the precedent they're setting, we are setting the stage for long-term damage to how parliament functions.
We should be clear that Commons committees have been on the road to dysfunction for some time now, most notably with the Harper government's use of obstructionist tactics during their minority years, and subordinating committees into becoming branch plants of ministers' offices during the majority years. The current Liberal government walked back some of that subordination in their majority years, but with the re-imposition of parliamentary secretaries on committees in the current parliament, they have moved closer to the position the Conservatives left the committees in when they lost government. Witnesses who appear at these Commons committees will usually tell you that they're a fairly useless exercise in MPs either delivering speeches with rhetorical questions at the end, or in asking the witnesses to affirm the party's position on a topic. They don't have to be this way, and yet parties routinely use them for their ongoing clown shows.
What has been different with these weaponized committee motions over the past couple of weeks is the scope and breadth of what they are trying to demand unprecedented volumes of materials (unredacted) that would be impossible for the committee to actually read and digest, and unlimited powers to keep demanding more so that they can make indefinite fishing expeditions. While the "anti-corruption committee" motion was ham-fisted in this regard, the health committee order passed on Monday was only slightly subtler, but still demands an impossible scope of production three years' worth of emails on multiple files from multiple departments, within a month's time, with the ministers being on notice that they can be summoned to committee and compelled to testify at the whim of the committee.
Another worrying trend with these orders is the ways in which they are dragging in the Commons' Law Clerk to the fray, demanding that he do the redactions for these documents for issues of personal information, national security and commercial sensitivity things he doesn't necessarily have the expertise in, with the issue of Cabinet confidences in limbo (which is where the production of WE documents turned problematic). But we also see that when Conservatives got neutral public servants to redact documents it was fine, but not when Liberals abide by the same practice. This is not the job the Law Clerk is supposed to be doing, and given the volume and scope of document production, it's safe to assume that he and his office is going to be completely overwhelmed by this task. It's also no surprise that the companies that the government has contracted are concerned that commercially sensitive information could be leaked in this production order, when someone who isn't versed in the material is being given the task of making the redactions.
Despite this escalation in what is acceptable under the nominal rules of parliamentary behaviour, we're not seeing any actual pushback from those who should be doing so. Conservatives like Michelle Rempel Garner will claim that these weaponized orders are "non-partisan" and "reasonable," and that this is just part of the normal accountability process but they're not. And when you have Rempel Garner on one side saying this is perfectly acceptable, and the government saying these motions are "paralyzing" without bothering to explain how, reporters will simply both-sides the quotes and not bother to read the motion properly or understand why it's so procedurally dubious. As part of this government's inability to communicate, they rely on the good graces of the media to do the research when those reporters and pundits won't actually bother to. After all, the prevailing ethos of newsrooms is that nobody wants "process stories," and that means that these kinds of things go unexplained a complete dereliction given that democracy is process.
With Rempel Garner's motion now passed with the support of all opposition parties, it's going to be interesting to see just what gets produced and when. Given the impossible order, both in terms of scope, redaction, and translation requirements, I suspect that we'll be hearing complaints within the next few weeks that a motion that set the government up to fail will be upset that they did just that fail and that they will start courting a contempt of parliament motion. Any material that does get produced will be cherry-picked for anything that sounds vaguely suspicious without any proper context, and we've seen this play out time and again, most notably during the Double-Hyphen Affair hearings, when Jody Wilson-Raybould's taped phone call was decontextualized by reporters and pundits, and they read into it things that were not there. I expect we'll see plenty more of this in the weeks ahead. And because the government can't communicate or message to save its life, they'll just make the whole situation worse.
Throughout all of the drama in getting to this point, I have to wonder why none of the opposition parties stopped to worry about what kinds of precedents they are setting with these motions, and how they will be inevitably be weaponized against themselves in future parliaments. The decision to abandon parliamentary norms in order to satisfy partisan aims above and beyond what the usual process allows can only lead to a future arms race, and more rules designed to clamp down on similar overreaches, which in turn leads to a race for more loopholes. Institutional damage is being wrought, but everyone is too busy scoring points to care, and that should worry every Canadian.
Photo Credit: House of Commons
