In the weeks leading up to Parliament's Easter break, we were witness to a surlier than usual House of Commons, with weeks of filibusters at the Procedure and House Affairs committee, and innumerable privilege debates and dilatory motions in the chamber while a mounting number of bills go without seeing any debate.  While it's not uncommon for tensions to rise in the last few weeks of any sitting particularly as MPs get squirrelly as sittings stretch out to four and five weeks without breaks in May and June, those same tensions have already been felt before we've reached that point on the calendar.

Thus far, Government House Leader Bardish Chagger has refused to give ground when it comes to offering guarantees that her ideas for how to "modernize" the House of Commons' operations won't be unilaterally imposed.  She's couched this in the language of refusing to give a veto to the Conservatives on changing the very tools that they abused while in government, whether it's things like omnibus bills or prorogation, to which the Conservatives have outwardly stated that they agree any changes to the Standing Orders should be done by way of consensus with all parties rather than be imposed.  I'm not sure that Chagger would find this reassuring, however, as agreeing to consensus just allows the opposition parties to stall and block the proposals (which, to be fair, they should be doing for most of them because they're terrible).

It's the fact that Chagger has been so ham-fisted about this whole debate, and has in fact doubled down on her position, that doesn't fill me with a lot of hope that we'll see any resolution to this situation when the spring sitting gets underway next week.  The fact that the Liberals have been agitating to have these "discussions" around the Standing Orders completed by June 2^nd  an overly ambitious timeline given the magnitude of what is being proposed (not to mention the fact that the vast majority of said proposals miss the mark in terms of what they're supposed to be addressing), will only make the next few weeks even more fraught.  And in terms of that ever-increasing stack of bills that aren't seeing any debate?  Well, you can bet that Chagger is going to start wielding the hammer of time allocation to try and start moving it along.

If anything will make the surly feelings worse, it's the "guillotine" of debate.  Expect weeks of snap votes in protest, yet more dilatory motions, bitter debates and accusations of rank hypocrisy that the government promised they wouldn't use these same tactics that the Conservatives did when they were in government.  All of it, of course, is self-inflicted for Chagger, who didn't need to be so insistent on these changes, and could have pulled Liberal MP Scott Simms aside at any point to have him withdraw his motion at the committee to have this debate completed by June.

The possibility does exist that Chagger has been this ham-fisted deliberately, looking to provoke a crisis on the Order Paper in order for her to justify ramming through changes to the Standing Orders around programming motions or the likes, claiming the need to get those bills moving after weeks of delays.  It would be a gamble, hoping that the public will side with her and find the opposition tactics to be childish and obstinate rather than with the opposition and their apocalyptic talk about this being the death of democracy in Canada (only the eleventieth time that this claim has been made), but one that could succeed, especially as the opposition has not been walking their own talk on things like Friday sittings.  Chagger also has precedent on her side, given that the opposition overplayed their hand after the Elbowing and lost all sympathy from the public.  If this is indeed Chagger's ultimate goal, then it would be a sign that this Liberal government is not only far more cynical than their "sunny ways" branding would have us believe, but that they are also bent on centralizing power to a greater extent than previous governments through far more underhanded tactics than we've seen in the past.

Meanwhile, the only two viable proposals in Chagger's discussion paper prorogation and omnibus bills are almost certainly going to be misread by people who don't understand the difference between legitimate and abusive uses of each mechanism, and it's going to inevitably lead to leading to yet more tears and recriminations whenever the debate around these measures gets underway.  You can bet that we'll see opposition demands to both outlaw omnibus bills in any recognizable form (a mistake given that they have perfectly legitimate uses, especially given that most budget implementation bills are by their very nature omnibus given the fact that they will touch on several Acts as a matter of course), and to try to turn control of prorogation over to the House of Commons in defiance of our constitutional conventions (which rests that power with cabinet as a Crown prerogative), and that the bulk of our nation's columnists, ignorant of the actual workings of a Westminster parliament, will side with them when Chagger tries to push through the  more palatable options of empowering the Speaker to break up abusive omnibus bills and to codify rules around restoring prorogation ceremonies.  If this is one area where Chagger would be willing to show flexibility in order to blunt some of the criticisms and look like she's listened, then we'd be left with the worst possible outcomes rather than get at least one or two decent outcomes in a package of bad ones.

This insistence by the government that they bully though these changes is mystifying, but so is their continued cultivation of such bad feelings among the opposition.  Unless Chagger is sincere in saying that she'll come to a decision on the next steps of this voyage of the damned when she "takes the temperature" of the Commons upon their return and backs away when she finds the hot tempers unchanged, we could be in for one of the most deservedly acrimonious spring sittings in years.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

Among the many items in the government's new budget implementation bill are provisions that would create an independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, freed from the constraints of the Library of Parliament, and the constant threats of having his budget cut in retaliation for speaking truth to power by the government of the day.  But included in that legislation is also a narrowing of the new Office's mandate, which has caused no end of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the nation's column inches, without anyone really underscoring the fact that empowering the PBO too much might actually be a bad thing.

And this is the part where most people get their backs up.  Why wouldn't we want a non-partisan body to crunch those numbers and provide an independent analysis of government projections or costings of bills or proposals?  We need more people to hold the government to account, after all.  Why isn't this the answer?

The reason why an empowered PBO is not the answer is because it further weakens the role of MPs, and most especially the official opposition.  For decades now, our parliament has slowly been divesting itself of its responsibilities, which is supposed to be holding the government to account.  Instead, that accountability is falling to an increasing number of independent Officers of Parliament, from the Auditor General, to the Commissioner of Official Languages, to the Information Commissioner, the Privacy Commissioner, and more recently the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, and Lobbying Commissioner.  A newly independent PBO swells those ranks even further.

While it cannot be argued that in many of these cases, there are areas of expertise that most MPs don't possess that these Officers are able to provide a reasoned watchdog role therein, it also shouldn't be argued that their proliferation has hollowed out the capacity of the Opposition in Parliament.  Instead of putting their resources and research dollars toward doing the critical policy work that are supposed to define their role, the opposition now simply waits for the reports of these officers to use as both the cudgel for their criticisms of the government, but also the shield by which they hide their attacks behind.

"Don't take our word for it," they insist.  "The independent, non-partisan PBO says this is true, therefore it must be and the government is terrible!"  They don't provide their own analysis, and really, don't do their own homework.  Why bother, when they have all of the independent officers that they can fob it off onto, who can make their arguments for them?

And this is where a overly empowered PBO starts to become a problem.  As it stands, the PBO has an overly broad mandate for such a small office, and I do have genuine concerns about the proposal to have that office start costing party platforms during an election campaign, which will further politicize an office that is already used for doing partisan homework.  It would also involve the PBO in the bickering about just how transparent those platforms are, which also starts to encroach on the job of the media.  Remember how the NDP released their first "costing" documents in the 2015 election that had these broad categories of items like "Helping Canadians" and "Supporting families" and other such meaningless headers with no actual breakdown of what those actually entailed?  Those of us in the media roasted them for it, which is our job.  I'm not sure that it should be the PBO's job to get involved there.

The other major problem with this proliferation of independent officers is that they essentially have no accountability, barring gross misconduct that can have them removed for cause.  MPs are held to account by their electorate, but independent officers have no such mechanism, and I do worry about officers who showboat, because I do see signs of that happening, not only with the first PBO, Kevin Page, and some of the fights that he picked, but I've also seen elements of that with other officers, including the Auditor General.

So who is supposed to hold the watchdogs to account?  The media?  Would that it were the case, but most of the time, the media are far too deferential to the independent, non-partisan expertise of these officers that they are blind to the problems in some of their work.  Most emblematic of this was with the AG's report on the Senate, which was riddled with problems and arbitrary determinations for which expenses were legitimate that did not stand up to a legal analysis conducted after the fact when the Senate's internal economy committee had to decide whether to pursue prosecutions for those senators which did not repay amounts identified in the AG's report.  Did the media say anything about it, or were they critical of the quality of the report with these flaws out in the open?  Of course not.  The AG is not to be questioned, while senators raising the objections were treated as being self-interested and looking out only for their own entitlements.

The other problem with this lack of accountability for these officers is that it is also weakening our system of Responsible Government.  We don't live in a technocracy, and it should not be up to the bureaucracy to do the job of holding government to account by virtue of their non-partisanship, and yet that is in essence what we are demanding when we would see that work offloaded onto these officers.  And while it's true that financial documents have become far more complex in recent decades and parliament's own Estimates cycle has become disjointed from the budget and the public accounts, the answer should not be offload the work of scrutiny to other officers.  Instead, MPs should be the ones to demand clarity in reporting and in documentation, so that they can do their own jobs, rather than simply passing those jobs off onto others.  Creating new officers only serves to further the decline of parliament — it is not a remedy for what ails it.

Over the past several weeks, we've watched filibusters, privilege debates and procedural gamesmanship pile up as the opposition parties continue to protest the government's plans to "modernize" the Standing Orders in a vain attempt to turn the House of Commons into a "21^st century workplace" as though it were an office job, like a law firm or PR agency, which it most emphatically is not.  As is often the case with these sorts of things, we have been treated to all manner of apocalyptic language about how the government is trying to run roughshod over the opposition, and how this is an expression of Justin Trudeau's "admiration for the basic dictatorship of China" and his love of the Castro family, and how our very democratic rights are imperilled in Canada.  The sky is falling around our ears.

Amidst these proclamations of doom are the assertions that this is all a ploy by the Prime Minister to get Fridays off, and that he's looking to avoid accountability in the House of Commons by only showing up one day a week.  While these two examples that they are highlighting in order to create a visceral response with their voting public are weak at best the more problematic proposals are around things like scheduling motions and limiting committee speaking times these very opposition parties are acting in a completely hypocritical way around them.

The assertion that ending Friday sittings are an extra day off is baffling to me, because if you dare suggest to an MP that a constituency week is a "break week" or gods forbid a "holiday," they will quickly rebuke you and rail about how hard they work in their ridings.  And they do I certainly wouldn't want to have to deal with a non-stop line-up of constituents asking me to help them with the problems they're having with the federal bureaucracy, or listening to their complaints (which likely are directed at another level of government), or needing to be at every community event and shopping mall opening to show their support.  So why they're suggesting that the governing party would treat a non-sitting Friday as a "day off" is beyond me, because it's a talking point that backfires against them.

And then there are the complaints about QP.  To start with, there is a pronounced historical amnesia about Stephen Harper's poor attendance record (toward the end of his time in government, you would be lucky if he'd show up one day a week and only answer the questions of other leaders, not including Elizabeth May), which they were always quick to defend with protestations about how busy he was prime ministering.  Apparently, however, they've decided that Trudeau is not similarly busy prime ministering and is just swanning about taking selfies because that's the narrative they're trying to push, no matter how specious it really is.  But their own party leaders (interim or otherwise) also can't be bothered to show up five days a week presumably because they're busy party leadering, which starts to make their concern trolling a bit suspicious.

This past Friday, we had an event which demonstrated why Friday sittings are necessary, which was the reaction to the US bombing in Syria in the wake of those chemical weapon attacks.  Trudeau could very easily have simply put out a press release and left it at that, or if he felt really exercised, simply walked down to the microphone in the House of Commons Foyer to say his bit and then retreat to his office.  But instead, he chose to attend Friday QP, make his statement in response to opposition questions on the subject, and answer other questions as he normally would on any given QP, and then have his minister use a ministerial statement spot after QP in order for opposition critics to give a chance to make statements in response.  In other words, he was respecting Parliament as a place to speak to the nation.

What we did not see, however, were any of the other leaders, or in fact, very many opposition MPs, to respond to this unfolding situation.  If you believed their apocalyptic rhetoric, you would think that they would be making a demonstration to show Canadians just how important Friday sittings were, and why any talk about cancelling them was unconscionable but they haven't been.  Friday attendance by opposition MPs hasn't improved since they started this hue and cry, while I've actually seen more Liberal MPs in attendance.  (Note that Government House Leader Bardish Chagger has also mused that they might turn Fridays into a full day instead of the current half-day so as to get more work done rather than simply redistributing Friday hours elsewhere in the week).

Similarly, if the opposition were so concerned about Question Period as being the time and place to hold the prime minister to account, you would think that they might make a greater effort to, well, actually hold him to account in QP.  Instead, the constant line-up of faux outrage with no flow or follow-up, or actual debate when Trudeau responds in banalities, would seem to demonstrate that they're not really taking the accountability part seriously either.  If they were, they might be pressing Trudeau or his ministers when they don't get proper responses, or engaging in some actual cut-and-thrust in the course of their questions.

Instead, nothing has changed.  QP remains a wasteland of disjointed scripts designed to serve as a buffet of media clips, which serves no accountability function because it's not encouraging the public to tune in.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  If this is the opposition's way of demonstrating that the government is wrong to press for these "modernizations," they're not walking their own talk.  Instead, Trudeau showing up on Friday, and taking all questions last Wednesday, is showing that he's savvy enough to beat them at their own PR game.  If the opposition is looking to do their job and preserve the way our parliament works (more or less), then they'd better step up their game, because right now, they're well on the way to doing Trudeau and Chagger's dirty work for them.