![]() If you can’t enact your agenda without trampling on some ancient Parliamentary prerogatives, possibly you need to rethink your agenda. Omnibus bills are usually defended on the grounds of necessity - how else are we going to get all of the legislation we have planned through Parliament? But this has the democratic cart before the omnihorse. That these legislative coup d’etats are typically enacted by governments with a mandate from fewer than 40 per cent of the voters, each claiming the right to undo the work of its predecessors on the basis of a swing of a few percentage points, only compounds the offence. More to the point, they did not attempt to micromanage every corner of the economy, still less smuggle the whole of the government’s agenda, fiscal or otherwise, through an unwitting Parliament. The refugee provisions in the current bill, for example, were barely mentioned in the budget: a single line near the end advised of the government’s intent to propose “legislative amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to better manage, discourage and prevent irregular migration.” In the first place, what is required to make a bill “related” to the budget is thin indeed. The notion that a bill that contains literally dozens of other bills is not an omnibus bill so long as it merely implements a budget of even greater length may be taken as a sign of the degraded state of politics in this country. Introducing his first budget bill in 2016, the comparatively svelte (179 pages) Bill C-15, Finance Minister Bill Morneau protested that it was “absolutely not an omnibus bill.” The grounds for this extraordinary claim? “Every measure in the budget implementation act is related to our budget.” To be fair, the two situations are entirely different: for where the Harperites made no effort to disguise their use of omnibus bills, the Liberals have adopted the innovative technique of passing omnibus bills while denying they are doing so. Being Liberals, however, they cannot admit, even to themselves, that they could ever sink so low as to imitate their hated Conservative predecessors, even as they have adopted the Harper government’s standards on everything from the growth rate of health-care transfers to carbon emissions targets. ![]() ![]() Needless to say, they have carried right on with this undemocratic practice - indeed, last year’s budget implementation bill, at more than 700 pages, was the largest ever. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. ![]()
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