Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands)
2020-09-29 17:06 [p.264]

Madam Speaker, it is my first time putting a question forward in this format.

I would agree with the member for Malpeque, in earlier debate today, that this was not a prorogation of the kind that challenges our constitutionality and our Westminster traditions, but it did not need to be weeks long.

I have asked the parliamentary secretary if it is not the case that stopping the work of committees is the key question that has offended us in the opposition ranks. It is not that we lost days of debates in July and August, when, I agree with him, they were not typical, but we did have all the work on committees stopped. How does he justify that?

Kevin Lamoureux (Winnipeg North)
2020-09-29 17:07 [p.264]

Madam Speaker, the former leader of the Green Party seems to imply that she would have been okay with the prorogation if the committees had been able to continue. The tradition of the House of Commons is that when a prorogation takes place, committees stop. Maybe that is something that could be talked about going forward as we look at changing the rules.

At this point in time, I believe it was appropriate, given the nature of the pandemic, that we prorogue. It allowed us to bring in a new throne speech and to set a path for the next months, and possibly years. That was essential.

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These town halls are an opportunity for Elizabeth to meet her constituents and hear about their concerns and priorities. As well, she updates constituents about her actions and work in the House of Commons on their behalf.

These clips are from Elizabeth’s town hall on Pender Island in January 2013.

Prorogation

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Participatory Democracy

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The Environment and Idle No More

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Fixing Parliament

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Cooperation

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More on Cooperation

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In essence, elements of Westminster parliamentary democracy are being changed to a more American model. The centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s office actually exceeds anything possible in the United States, due to the checks and balances in the US Constitution. In Canada, the legislative and executive branches are essentially the same, and when a Prime Minister denigrates the role of the House and runs rough-shod over the opposition, the PM’s powers to do so are unconstrained by anything other than tradition and respecting the supremacy of the House.

The Harper government has introduced greater partisanship throughout the workings of the House of Commons. House committees have been contaminated by the use of filibusters. Conservative Chairs of committees have been instructed by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to control proceedings in the partisan interest of the governing party. The chairs have been instructed that if a witness is potentially embarrassing the Conservative Party of Canada, the chair should throw down his pencil and storm from the room. This move leaves the committee in a procedural quandary and ends the hearing.

Increasingly toxic partisanship is also infecting electoral politics. The use of attack ads outside of any election period are also new to Canada, starting with the memorable ‘not a leader’ series used to undo Stephane Dion. By the time the Conservatives ran the ‘ just visiting’ ads targeting Michael Ignatieff, Canadians seems to have accepted that politics was now permanently nastier.

Since the book came out last spring, things have gotten even worse. We had the second, astonishing, prorogation.

We had the conflict between the PMO and the House over access to the Afghan detainee documents, settled by an historic ruling by the Speaker in favour of the rights of the House over the PMO. This was quickly followed by further PMO thwarting of House authority by refusing to allow senior members of the PMO staff to appear before House committees; a situation that was unresolved as the House rose for summer recess.

‘Omnibus’ Bills Abuse of Power

Add to this litany a gross abuse of process. It started in spring 2009, when the budget implementation bill, normally a small and procedural piece of legislation to make the budget vote operational, was replaced with a bill larded with other non-budgetary measures. In 2009, the budget changed the definition of ‘navigable’ in the Navigable Waters Protection Act, weakening a law on our books since 1867; removed the right of women in the federal civil service to pay equity; and raised the threshold for review of the foreign take-over of Canadian corporations. The changes went through with only independent and Progressive Conservative Senators standing on principle to oppose the use of the budget to change unrelated laws.

The attraction of including these things was clear. In the House, budget bills are confidence measures, but as Senator Lowell Murray, former member of Mulroney’s Cabinet argued, the Senate has the right to remove those non-budgetary matters without triggering an election. His arguments fell on deaf ears—the bill passed with hardly a murmur.

We did not have to worry long about whether a precedent had been set; in 2010, the budget implementation bill was far worse. The numbers tell the story. The length of budget implementation bills, on average from 2001-2008, was 139 pages. In 2009, the first year of real abuse, the bill came to 580 pages. Distinguished Professor emeritus Ned Franks of Queens University has pointed out that at 580 pages, the 2009 budget measures constituted 32% of all the House business in that session. All with no House committee review, no debate on the substance of the changes. In 2010, the budget bill, titled the ‘Jobs and Economic Growth Act, Bill C-9,’ weighed in at 883 pages—or approximately half of the work of the House in the last session.

As Professor Franks wrote,‘These omnibus budget implementation bills subvert and evade the normal principles of parliamentary review of legislation.’ (‘Omnibus bills subvert our legislative process’—Globe and Mail, July 14, 2010) On July 6, I testified before the one legislative body that paused to examine the budget bill, the Senate Finance Committee. In a series of rushed hearings, the Senators heard about the changes found in those 883 pages: removal of lucrative business for Canada Post, potentially weakening our national public carrier; pre-approval for sale of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, without a public review of the questions of who will be responsible for the long-term management of high-level nuclear wastes; changes to the EI system; new taxes for airline travel; and, most appalling, the gutting of the environmental assessment process.

After my testimony, the Liberal Senators decided to join with independents to insist on splitting the bill to remove the non-budgetary matters. Combined, the Liberals and independents had just enough votes to split the bill and send the non-budgetary matters back to the House. Senator Doug Finley, Harper’s campaign director, threatened an election, but rather than continue sabre- rattling, on July 9, the Prime Minister appointed one more Conservative partisan to the Senate. The whole 883 page bill passed into law.

Some may see this as an outrage against environmental law, and it is. However, even more egregiously, it is an assault on democracy. It is further evidence that Stephen Harper is bent on undermining fundamental principles of Canadian government.

Elizabeth May, Order of Canada, author of seven books, including Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy (McClelland and Stewart, 2009), is leader of the Green Party of Canada and federal candidate in Saanich-Gulf Islands.

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Six years ago, that untried Conservative Party leader led a fledgling party (created by the merger of Progressive Conservatives and Alliance party) into an election. In that 2004 election campaign a tenuous minority government went to the Liberal Party.

But within 18 months, that same Conservative leader took his party to government with a well-focused, disciplined campaign with one core message: ‘demand accountability.’ Stephen Harper’s election in 2006 owed much to the surfacing of the Liberal sponsorship scandal.

Ironically, Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin’s reaction to the sponsorship scandal—anger at former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien on whose watch it had taken place— contributed to his defeat. Had he shrugged the scandal off he might have survived the election. But Martin was so outraged at the discovery that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been diverted to Liberal ad agencies and kick-back schemes under Jean Chretien that he established an investigation headed by John Gomery, focusing the nation’s attention.

Accountability Since 2006

Those who had hoped for real accountability—reduced access to lobbyists and a real commitment to meet electoral promises— have been gravely disillusioned.

The Federal Accountability Act was passed in Parliament, but omitted about 30 key measures that had been in the Prime Minister Harper’s 2006 campaign pledge. In fact, the bill, once passed, actually removed the ‘duty to act honestly’ which had previously been in place for senior bureaucrats and Cabinet members.

Accountability has been since been ducked by ignoring bills passed by Parliament which the government never wanted (the bill to demand climate action) or which the government initially wanted and then found to be inconvenient (the fixed election date law).

Why Prorogation Again?

The most recent prorogation of Parliament has been linked by many to the government’s wish to shut down the hearings into allegations of torture of Afghan detainees.

Richard Colvin, that singularly decent federal civil servant, appeared on a subpoena to the committee. As a trusted and high-ranking member of Canada’s foreign service in Washington, he hardly fits the ‘whistle-blower’ profile. He told the Parliamentary committee that those handed over by Canadian military to Afghan authorities were not necessarily combatants. They were taxi drivers, farmers, men at the wrong place at the wrong time. He testified it was a virtual certainty they would be tortured and that he passed this information to Ottawa. Last week his lawyer accused the government of seeking reprisals by refusing to pay his legal bills.

The full truth is even stranger and more Machiavellian. It turns out that when Colvin was first subpoenaed, a Justice Department lawyer offered to be his counsel. Knowing that his personal legal interests and those of the government might diverge, he immediately refused the offer.

Subsequently, justice lawyers claimed that, since he was once a client, all communications with Colvin going back to when he sent emails warning of torture were ‘privileged.’ So the production of the documents to prove Colvin was telling the truth is being blocked by the bogus claim that it would violate his solicitor-client privilege.

Still Using Taxpayer Money To Promote Political Parties

Let’s return to the kind of scandal where government misspends taxpayers’ dollars to boost their electoral fortunes. This is an area where Stephen Harper’s tactics make the Sponsorship Scandal look like a Sunday school picnic.

The abuse of MP householders, mailings paid for by the taxpayer, is being used to bombard voters with partisan propaganda. Giving up at getting some veto over the Conservative use of these fliers, the federal Liberals are now doing it too. Millions upon millions of federal dollars were also spent last fall to urge voters not to allow the government’s stimulus programme to be slowed—as if an election would do that. There has been zero accountability of the amount of money spent on advertising.

The level at which accountability is currently being evaded would shock traditional conservatives. Demands to know the amount of money being spent to advertize the wonders of the stimulus programme fall on deaf ears. Martha Hall-Findley, Liberal MP, charged that the spending to orchestrate the last stimulus package update in September was one million dollars for one day alone. No government member rejected the claim.

Stimulus Creating Structural Deficit

Last week I met with Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer. He has, quite rightly, pointed out that Canada faces a serious structural deficit. The Harper government denies it despite the fact that it is undeniable.

Nonetheless, the government stimulus package is being rolled out without any mechanism to trace if money is being spent on its intended goals. Meanwhile, in the US, President Obama created web sites for the citizenry to trace every single project. When asked how Canada was tracing the flow of the billions, Transport Minister John Baird rejected calls for accountability. Incredibly, he stated that it was not the role of ‘big government’ to trace how the money was spent. How can it not be the role of government to make sure taxpayers’ dollars are spent appropriately? Yet, relying on message over sense, he demonized the call for government accountability as ‘big government’ intrusiveness.

This is something of the tip of the iceberg. No doubt there have been other politicians whose actions in office would have earned their contempt when they were in Opposition. But Stephen Harper’s cynical rejection of accountability has taken such hypocrisy to new heights.

Elizabeth E May, Order of Canada, is the leader of the Green Party of Canada and candidate in Saanich Gulf Islands.

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