committees Archives - Loonie Politics

It’s that time of year again, where opposition parties start getting antsy for new means by which they can embarrass the government, and the best way to do that in the dog days of summer is to hold “emergency” committee hearings. If they can get one of the other opposition parties on board, no matter how dubious or indeed ridiculous the premise, then the committee has to recall and a vote be held as to whether or not they’ll hold a full meeting or series of meetings on the subject of the “emergency.” Mercifully, we had very few of those meetings last summer because the Bloc and the NDP were not in the mood to play ball with the Conservatives, but this year, they are starting up once again, in part because of the incentives at play, which are to harvest clips for their social media channels. Gone are the days when committees actually did serious work—everything is now a performance for the cameras.

One of the most important things to note off the top is that the committees in play right now are all those who are chaired by Conservatives. Under the Standing Orders, several committees are automatically chaired by members of the official opposition, and they include the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics committee, Government Operations and Estimates, Public Accounts, and Status of Women. This is to ensure that for committees with a more pronounced role of scrutinizing the government, that the government’s chair on those committees can’t use their power and influence to sway the studies away from topics that might embarrass the government. Each of those committees are implicated in these summer clip-harvesting exercises, starting with the Ethics committee’s July 17^th meeting to conjure up a supposed ethical breach by employment minister Randy Boissonnault where the Ethics Commissioner has already stated that one does not exist.

What garnered a lot of attention was the Status of Women committee meeting last week, where a couple of the witnesses walked out in tears after the meeting derailed, but much of the blame was put on Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld even though the whole exercise was a set-up from the beginning. The meeting was held under the auspices of “study of testimony related to the committee’s core mandate,” and no opposition party was given the ability to suggest witnesses, as is how things normally happen. And right off the start, these witnesses made their statements and had a round of questions from the Conservatives, before anyone else could object to the circumstances by which said meeting was convened. When she finally got a turn, Vandenbeld noted that they have done several studies already on gender-based violence, and pointed out that the Conservatives abused their position as chair in order to call this meeting in the way they had, which had the effect of playing on the trauma of the witnesses, before moving a motion that they would be better off considering the study on reproductive health that the committee has been sitting on since March 2022.

There is blame to go all around on this, starting with the Chair, Conservative MP Shelby Kramp-Newman, who abused her powers to summon witnesses without the input of any of the other members of the committee, and treating this like an emergency situation. She also sold a false bill of goods to those witnesses, which should be inexcusable. The intent by the Conservatives, as evidenced by a motion that Conservative MP Michelle Ferreri tried to move later in the meeting was to try and tie the Liberals to the (slight) increases in violent crime reported by Statistics Canada in their annual Crime Severity Index report, with the motion that “That the committee hold four more meetings on the impact of violent crime against women.” Clearly this was an attempt to try and catch the Liberals out and get clips of them badgering and hectoring the government about how they are the ones responsible for this increase in violent crime, but the Liberals weren’t about to play ball on that.

Nevertheless, Vandenbeld trying to move the committee back to the reproductive health motion, which is more specifically about ensuring national access to abortion across the country—because yes, there are plenty of places where access is not readily available because of the actions of provincial governments—came across as extremely crass. It’s no secret that the Liberals are trying to jam the Conservatives on the question of abortion rights, particularly given that they hope to capitalize on what happened with Roe v Wade in the US, and such a naked attempt at the committee when trying to avoid the Conservatives’ planned clip-harvesting dog-and-pony show saw not exactly sensitive to the witnesses, no matter that they were present under false pretenses. It’s a very real problem with committees these days that people wind up wasting their time coming in as witnesses only for the committee to devolve into procedural gamesmanship, and this was no different.

There is more of this to come. This week, the Public Accounts committee will be looking into the ArriveCan issue, but more specifically, the Auditor General’s report on it, because that’s the purpose of the Public Accounts committee, and I cannot fathom why this would merit an “emergency” summer meeting outside of the obvious example of this being solely about harvesting clips of Conservative MP Michael Barrett calling the government “corrupt,” and asking about RCMP investigations when that has nothing to do with the Auditor General’s findings—most especially because she didn’t make any findings related to the government in what happened. The week after, the Government Operations Committee is going to be looking into the purchase of the C$9 million Manhattan condo as the new residence for the Consul General in New York, for the sole purpose of performative hairshirt parsimony by all three opposition parties, even though this really isn’t something that this committee should be concerned with.

These committees are supposed to be doing serious work, but the fact that they now solely for the provenance of dog-and-pony shows for the benefit of the cameras is damaging to democracy. We need our MPs to take their jobs seriously, and simply harvesting clips for social media as if they were Millennial wannabe-influencers trying to juice their engagement numbers is not that. If we want to preserve our democracy from the authoritarian populism heading our way, we need to demand better from our MPs.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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When the toll of the pandemic on Canada’s parliamentary institutions is finally tallied, it will be hard to argue that some of its most devastating impacts have been on the Senate and the job that is has been neglecting to fulfil. For two years now, far too many bills have been rammed through both Houses in a fashion that is too quick and lacks scrutiny or study, settling for a couple of well-meaning speeches and then sending them on their way. It’s not how our Parliament is supposed to work, pandemic or no pandemic, and yet we’ve been allowing it to happen with increasing frequency. Political expediency rules the day, and the role of sober second thought is being eroded with each bill that passes where no committee study happens.

There once was a time where the Senate’s committees were the heart of what it did. Debates in the chamber itself were short and perfunctory in order to ensure that the bill got to committee as expeditiously as possible, so that the real work could begin. It’s one of the reasons why the Senate’s Order Paper and their sitting schedule is built vastly differently from that of the House of Commons—because it recognized that its value lay elsewhere. With the advent of the new “independent” era, this has started slipping away as more and more time gets spent on second reading debate, and since the pandemic and the advent of “hybrid” sittings to maintain some semblance of parliamentary oversight, committees have almost entirely fallen to the wayside, which is an incalculable loss for our institutions.

In the past three weeks, two pieces of government legislation saw almost no debate, and no committee study at all—Bill C-4, which was the ban on conversion therapy; and Bill S-2, which aimed to make changes to the Parliament of Canada Act with respect to making changes to how the Senate operates to codify some of the changes since the rise of the independents (and to give some new allowances along the way). This should never have happened, and it’s a complete abdication of the Senate’s responsibilities, not to mention the responsibilities of the Opposition, whose own motions sped these bills along in spite of their constitutional duties to scrutinize and hold government to account through the process.

With Bill C-4, there are live constitutional issues that should have received a full airing in both Chambers, namely the scope and breadth of the legislation. When the bill was first introduced in the previous parliament, justice minister David Lametti said that the bill had a loophole for “consenting adults” because that was the limit of how far they could go constitutionally—a complete ban would be face challenges that they were apparently not confident they could win. When it was re-introduced at C-4 in this parliament, however, that loophole was removed. When asked, Lametti said it was because they better understood the harms of this practice and that was why it needed a full ban, but because the Conservatives moved the motion to pass the bill in one fell swoop in the Commons, that never got explored in committee as it should have.

The Senate should have done that work, especially because MPs did not. These are live constitutional issues that got zero exploration from expert witnesses, and there is almost nothing on the record for judges to look to when it comes to future court challenges to this legislation. The Senate was where this should have received a full airing, and in a way that is not about partisan point-scoring at committee (unlike in Commons committees), and yet they did not. Why? Because the Opposition in the Senate claimed that they didn’t want the government to use this issue as a political wedge, thus abdicating their constitutional duties and responsibilities.

As for Bill S-2, these are big and important changes to the fundamental operations of the Senate, which have the potential to devalue the role of the Opposition in the Senate, and yet this never saw any committee study, either in the previous parliament when it was Bill S-4, or in this iteration. There were a handful of speeches, most of them in favour of the changes because there are enough senators who have a self-interest in doing so, but there was no study. And because there was no study, nobody apparently flagged that the bill was problematic because it was ostensibly a money bill being initiated in the Senate, which goes against the constitution, and the tricksy language used to get around that might not fly. Well, when this bill sailed through—once again because the Conservatives, who are opposed to the bill, didn’t want to “bog down” the Chamber—the Commons Speaker raised objections about its admissibility, and lo, the government had to withdraw it and re-introduce the Bill in the House of Commons instead.

There are a couple of problems at work here. One of them is the problem of second reading debate, where too many of the newer, independent senators feel compelled to make unnecessary speeches at second reading when the practice had been to simply have the sponsor introduce it, the opposition critic raise objections a few days later, once they considered the sponsor’s speech, and then send it off to committee. Now second reading debate is interminable, much like the House of Commons, and the Senate is slowly turning into what it shouldn’t—some kind of debating society (and the push to organize speeches for the sake of television will only make this worse).

The other, more serious problem, is that hybrid sittings have effectively destroyed the committees because they need to share IT resources and interpreters with the House of Commons, and the Commons gets priority on those resources. This left senators too afraid to use those resources for most committee work (coupled with the unwillingness to simply bubble in Ottawa where they could operate more freely in a protected environment), and hence very little committee study happened, to the detriment of Parliament as a whole.

These are very worrying changes for the Senate, and I fear that this will start setting patterns and precedents, especially among the newer senators, as we have too few of the old guard willing to ensure that procedure is being followed and ensuring that the Senate is fulfilling its role of sober second thought. Sober second thought is not just reading a couple of additional speeches into the record. It was the work in committee that did the serious work the Commons never could do, and that is now in danger of extinction.

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