On dysfunction

Following up on Michael Ignatieff's order that the Senate rush the budget through just as quickly as the House of Commons did, let's note just what combination of factors it took to bring about today's result.

For the moment, the main dispute between the Libs and the Cons seems to be as to whether or not the Libs should have been taken by surprise to find out about the back-dated EI benefits in the budget. And neither party comes out of that looking particularly praiseworthy: the Cons indeed decided to spring their latest excuse to demand immediate passage of the budget rather late, while the Libs would seemingly have no excuse for failing to figure out what the budget actually said.

But there's a more fundamental problem at play. After all, there's little reason to believe that any party disagreed with the concept of making increased EI benefits retroactive. So it would have seemingly been relatively easy to pass another bill extending benefits back to the beginning of March without ramming the entire budget through in the meantime using a single EI provision of C-10 as an excuse.

Unfortunately, that type of solution no longer seems to even occur to many of the players involved. The Cons have offered nothing but take-it-or-leave-it even when it comes to a 511-page monster of a budget bill, and the Libs haven't made even the slightest attempt to push the Cons to accept improvements.

Which is why we're now stuck with a package of poorly thought-out, ideologically-loaded legislative amendments which have never received a proper Parliamentary vetting as the Cons' price for pretending to care about stimulating the Canadian economy. And both responsible parties deserve nothing but blame for that outcome.