Stuck in neutral

Following up on last week's Star report, the Hill Times discusses the opposition parties' options in bringing the amended C-30 before the House of Commons. (See final headline link.) But unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's yet much commitment to move the issue forward:

Mr. Cullen said the Conservatives have lost credibility on the environment and will work to implement stronger targets. He said the NDP will negotiate with the other parties at the Environment and Sustainable Development committee and work through legal parameters to include parts of C-30 in C-377. "This one has been accepted by the House in principle and that allows us to have some certainty as to when it will be delivered back and compel this government who's lost what little credibility they had, [to act]. Canadians just don't trust them on this file. So that means we have to find another route to get there."...

Liberal MP David McGuinty (Ottawa South, Ont.), his party's environment critic, said the Liberals are also looking at possible ways to bring C-30 back to the House. "We will not let the government walk away from Bill C-30," he said.

Unfortunately, one of the more obvious possible routes - namely a private member's bill based on the agreed C-30 framework - still doesn't appear to have surfaced either before Parliament or in the discussion from either Cullen or McGuinty. And one would think that this and other possibilities would at least be worth mentioning as examples of the "routes" or "ways" which the opposition parties have presumably been looking for since C-30 was first amended.

Meanwhile, it also seems that the Bloc has already missed one opportunity to bring C-30 to the forefront, and nobody else has given any indication of doing any better:

The NDP wrote a letter to both the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois on April 27 asking them to use their opposition days to try to force the government to call the report of the legislative committee on Bill C-30 for debate. The Liberals had an opposition day last week, but used it to call on the House to apologize to aboriginal Canadians who suffered in residential schools. This week, the Bloc have their opposition day on Tuesday and will use it to discuss the rising gas prices in Quebec. Mr. Bigras said he had put in a motion to call on the House to debate the C-30 report, but the party chose gas prices as their supply day topic. The Liberals have a supply day on Thursday, but it's unclear what the party will choose to debate. Mr. Cullen said the NDP's opposition day is still too far away to commit to a topic.

None of the opposition parties said they were willing to use their opposition day to try to defeat the government on the environment.

The latter point is understandable given the potential for other means of getting results from the current Parliament. And indeed brinksmanship probably isn't the best way of moving the issue forward.

But even if a confidence vote isn't in the cards just yet, there doesn't seem to be much reason for any opposition party to hold off on a motion calling on the Cons to bring C-30 forward. And the longer the opposition parties let the issue slide without even a preliminary step toward keeping the environmental focus in Parliament, the more likely the Cons will be to get away with nothing more than their own sad excuse for a plan.