There are a little over seven sitting weeks left before the House of Commons is due to rise for the summer, and there are a lot of bills left on the Order Paper because so few of them have been able to make it through the legislative process. Partisan gamesmanship and procedural shenanigans have meant that the implementation bill for the fall economic statement which was introduced in December didn't even make it to the Senate until April 15th, just before the 2021 budget was tabled. This is not a normal state of affairs, even in a hung parliament, and it raises questions as to how much of their agenda the government will be able to pass before they rise for the summer, bearing in mind the threat of an election in the fall.
Currently, there are about fourteen bills on the Order Paper under active consideration, some of whom have yet to see any debate. There will still be a budget implementation bill to come in the next couple of weeks, along with supply bills which will also need to be passed, and add to that another ten or so Supply Days, wherein the opposition parties get to choose the agenda for the day, and suddenly those seven sitting weeks start looking very, very short when it comes to getting through those bills. Time is a very underappreciated commodity in any parliamentary session.
There are a number of reasons why things have been as bad as they've become and some of them are structural. When compared to the mother parliament in Westminster, our House of Commons has grown to be really, really bad when it comes to how we treat second reading debate. Procedurally, this is the stage of debate where MPs are concerned with the general principles of the bill, but not the specifics, and it should be fairly quick, so that it can go to committee and the technical aspects can be delved into. In Westminster, this takes place over the course of an afternoon the Speaker sees how many MPs want to speak to the bill, divides the time up accordingly, and they each get their say extemporaneously with the ability for others to interject and ask questions throughout and then it heads to committee. Not so in Canada.
Here, we have come to set aside days for second reading debate, and because we have enforced speaking times in the Standing Orders, we are bound to listen to twenty-minute recitations of scripted material into the record and they must be twenty minutes or the House Leader's office gives the MP trouble and parties will put as many speakers up as they possibly can so that this drags out for days, for no reason. There isn't even any debate it's just reading speeches into a void.
When it comes to this particular parliament and the slow progress of bills, this is largely because we are in a hung parliament, and the government largely doesn't have the tools available to speed things along, such as time allocation, because they don't have the votes to do so, nor do they have willing allies in the Chamber under most circumstances. We did have a single incidence of closure a few weeks ago when the Bloc had agreed to vote with the government to get the assisted dying bill passed, as there was a court-imposed deadline that had already been extended several times, and they were eager to see it passed, while Conservatives in particular were dragging out final debate on that bill.
More to the point, there has been a propensity by the Conservatives over the past few months to use procedural tactics to forestall debate on bills. Instead of allowing debate to happen, they would force debate on committee reports some of them a mere three lines in length and because the NDP and Bloc would side with them (any chance to embarrass the Liberals), we went for weeks where we saw almost no actual legislative debate. Well, except for private members' business, because that has an allocated hour every day, and nothing can forestall it. That's why the government can't get progress on bills containing aid measures for businesses in the pandemic passed, but a bill on single sports betting has made it through the Commons.
When pressed, the Conservatives insisted that they weren't cooperating because the government didn't have a "coherent legislative agenda," which is nonsense. Several bills were priorities in there for very well-known reasons (such as the assisted dying bill), but that wasn't really the reason. A lot of these procedural shenanigans have been a sort of filibuster to punish the Liberals for what has been happening at committee, whether it's resisting allowing staffers to testify (which is an issue with constitutional implications), or because the Liberals had the temerity to oppose unreasonable witch-hunts or demands to produce unmanageable document production such as the absolute farce that has taken place at the health committee. They won't openly cop to doing it, but the motivation has been apparent if you've been paying attention.
So how can the government make any progress on the many, many bills on the Order Paper before they rise for the summer? It essentially boils down to how many deals they can make with opposition parties to make it happen. The NDP, for example, are very keen to make progress on the UNDRIP bill, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation bill, and the conversion therapy ban bill, and could strike a deal for time allocation on those bills to get them passed. The NDP or the Bloc might be persuaded to move along the environmental bills possibly in exchange for some tweaks. But some of the other bills, including the justice reform bills, may be tougher sells. The government also likely sees some tactical value in making those budget votes this week confidence votes when they normally aren't, so that they can say that the Commons obviously has confidence so it's time to move things along. Will it work? Probably not, but stranger things have happened.
