On obstruction

The Globe and Mail reports that the overall timeline wasn't the only area where the Libs went out of their way to stall the committee working on environmental legislation:

While the Question Period rhetoric is sure to carry on for some time in this vein, the real battleground over the coming weeks will be in a Commons committee room. Parliamentarians on a special legislative committee decided yesterday to wrap up their work on the government's Clean Air Act on pollution and climate change no later than March 30.

The committee met yesterday, and while it was devoted primarily to logistics, the political dynamic in the room quickly took shape.

The NDP and Conservatives often agreed and both parties frequently accused the Liberals of delaying tactics...

(W)hen the Bloc Québécois suggested a timeline for the committee, one of Mr. Baird's officials quickly met in the back of the room with an NDP aide. Moments later a joint NDP-Tory counterproposal emerged.

"Clearly they've cut a deal," grumbled Liberal MP David McGuinty...

The NDP's environment critic, Mr. Cullen, denied that he has struck an alliance with the Conservatives. He said he attempted to create working relationships with the Liberals and Bloc Québécois, but they weren't interested.

Throughout the 2½-hour meeting, the Tories and NDP made various proposals to fast-track the committee's workload, but faced persistent opposition from the Liberals.

It was the Bloc's environment critic, Bernard Bigras, who frequently played a mediating role between the two sides.

The committee's timeline essentially puts off the hard questions until after the March break. Only then will MPs be able to put forward amendments, and observers say it is hard to see where the NDP and Conservatives can come to terms.

Sadly, the article (spurred on by McGuinty's whine) tries to paint the cooperation on process as something more - despite the fact that it's the opposition parties who continue to agree that the short-term goal of any legislation should be to meet Canada's Kyoto targets, and despite the absolute certainty that the NDP's view on process would (and should) be to cooperate with whichever other party or parties was willing to try to get something accomplished without the distraction of a budget in between. If anything, it should be an embarrassment to the Libs that they're the one party most determined to prevent anything positive from coming out of the committee.

That said, it's not too late for the Libs to start cooperating. If their immediate goal is merely to find some excuse to claim that there's a "deal" between the NDP and the Cons, then hopefully the machinations over the committee's process will allow them to be less standoffish when it comes to the substance of the bill. But if the Libs really are more interested in trying to score political points against Layton than in working toward results on greenhouse gas emissions, then they (and any other party trying to ride their coattails) could lose any claimed credibility on the environment in a hurry.