We are now debating what is going on in the Prime Minister’s Office. It is in the Conservatives’ interest to say that the Senate is still the problem.

I want to ask my colleague if she agrees with me that questions remain with respect to the possible criminal involvement of the Prime Minister’s Office.

Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe: Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for that clarification.

In fact, we are not just facing one problem here; we are facing two.

Basically, some senators made claims for inappropriate expenses, which is one of the issues before us. However, there is another issue that is related but not the same, and that issue is the involvement of the Prime Minister’s Office in a Senate reimbursement and expenses scandal.

Therefore, this is not just a debate about senators who made claims for inappropriate expenses. It is also a debate about this Prime Minister’s involvement and his inability to provide transparent and coherent answers to questions about the situation.

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The problem with most of the questions is that they start a bit later in the scenario than they should.

First up, was Mike Duffy promised a Senate seat if he worked really hard to sabotage the Liberals in the 2008 election?

I had been interviewed by Mike Duffy and known him for years.  I was fond of him.  I never thought he was biased one way or the other – until his coverage of the 2008 campaign.  Some may recall me taking him on in a live interview when his introductory set up for Peter MacKay (interviewed just ahead of me) was so outrageous that I accused him of a lapse in journalistic ethics.  When the interview was over, I remember thinking, “Well, I will never be on Mike Duffy Live ever again.”  And when he was appointed to the Senate right after the election, I knew I was right as the show ceased to exist.  His lapse of ethics was more spectacularly evident in broadcasting out-takes from the Atlantic bureau’s interview with Stéphane Dion.  Opportunities to do “re-asks” are not uncommon and they are never broadcast.  Doing so, when Dion’s team had been told they could ask the questions over again, was outrageous.  It clearly impacted the election results.

The other questions also matter.  Did the Prime Minister promise Duffy he would fix the financial and legal mess created by false claims for a housing allowance?  Why would the Prime Minister do such a thing?  Does Duffy have anything he can hold over the PM, such as proof of the Senate seat for journalistic shilling in an election campaign?  Did the Prime Minister ask his Chief of Staff to write the cheque?  Frankly, I can see no other reason why a smart person like Nigel Wright would do something so obviously wrong, unless he was directed to do so by the Prime Minister.

Normal people are asking questions like “who has $90,000 in their chequing accounts?  Who has $90,000 in their chequing account and they have it to spare in case someone needs it?”

None of these questions matter as much as why is it that no reporter has been able to get a response from anyone in Harper’s administration about the chemistry of the atmosphere now being dangerously altered.  The news that we have hit 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere makes Mike Duffy’s expense account scandal look like the petty criminality it likely is.  And, of course, there are approximately 1% as many words in our press about the 400 ppm news as there is about the Mike Duffy scandal.

The big crime continues to hide in plain sight while Stephen Harper continues his looting of our children’s future.

UPDATE: Just received news that Nigel Wright has fallen on his sword for the PM and become the literal fall guy. All questions still stand.

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It also occurred to me that the process of intending to leave the country could become a terrorist act. In conjunction with that, if we look at clause 83.23, we then have by association others drawn in, “A person who knowingly harbours or conceals any person who they know to be a person who has carried out a terrorist act or facilitates it”.

By extension, if planning to leave the country to go overseas for what is alleged to be a terrorist activity, such as camp training, would this sweep bring in others who, in normal context, would be seen to be doing an innocent activity?

Craig Scott: Mr. Speaker, that, in fact, was discussed a little in the Senate hearings.

The general principles of the Criminal Code that connect one offence to other acts, such as complicity, various forms of aiding and abetting, they all apply. The question of a broader circle of people being drawn into the criminality that these new provisions would enact is very real.

The official government witnesses before the Senate committee tiptoed around this. They acknowledged that it was a real issue but there was a sense that we did not really want to criminalize other’s assistance.

Now, of course, all the intention standards would have to be there. If one innocently helps a person leave the country by helping out with the person’s passport but does not know why the person is leaving, then there is no connection. However, the moment one knows why, one would absolutely be drawn into the orbit.

One of the witnesses, I believe it was Mr. Fadden but it might have been another witness, commented along the lines that we should not be naive about how many people actually do assist others to leave for this purpose.

The idea of a wider circle beyond the person leaving does appear to be in contemplation.

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This is a complicated matter. It is not as simple as saying that we do not like the Senate, so we should end it.

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We have constitutional issues embedded in how it is structured, and I share the view of the member for Beaches—East York and his caucus that there are significant problems with Bill C-7 as put forward by the government.

Having worked with the Senate over the years, I have seen the Senate take its own initiative and do some very good work, and we have seen examples here this morning. For instance, I point to the decision to not put bovine growth hormone into our milk. That was a done deal until the Senate committee, under Senators Mira Spivak and Eugene Whelan, subpoenaed scientists from Health Canada who were being muzzled and in that way made it possible for the information to get out.

Would the best way forward not be to have a real public consultation on the fundamental problems within our democracy, including the extreme power of the Prime Minister’s Office, the lack of sufficient role for individual members of Parliament, the proper balance between the House of Commons and the Senate and the question of whether the Senate should survive or not?

How does the hon. member feel about taking this to the people before we make it legislation?

Mr. Matthew Kellway: Mr. Speaker, as it is a multipartite question, I will approach it this way.

It is clear that good work has come out of the Senate in the past. A recent report about poverty in Canada comes to mind; many worthy recommendations came out of that report.

As my colleague for Vancouver Kingsway said in answering a very similar question previously, this is not an issue of whether the Senate ever does good work or whether senators have worthy opinions on matters of great importance to Canadians.

Like so many issues, this issue is reducible to simple issues. At the beginning of my speech, I spoke to some fundamental principles. That is what we are wrestling with. The fundamental principles are that we have a chamber here in our parliamentary institutions that is undemocratic. It has the power to block legislation. We have seen that happen with some very worthy representation that this elected House passed on to the Senate.

In response, I would say that at times the appropriate approach is to reduce matters to fundamental principles. If we look at an issue in those terms, it often becomes starkly simple. The starkly simple fact is that the upper chamber, the Senate, is not a democratic institution and should therefore be abolished.

The post Senate Reform Act appeared first on Elizabeth May.

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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