On unelected opposition

It's probably for the best that Lib senators are planning to actually review the Harper/Ignatieff budget rather than complaining that it's pointless to even try. But the contrast between the Libs' unelected Senators and their elected MPs looks to be an important one:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff are both threatening a spring election, but the chair of the Senate National Finance Committee says he won't rubber stamp Bill C-10, the $258.6-billion budget bill and $40-billion stimulus package, by rushing it through in two days. Instead, he wants the government to split the 500-page piece of legislation into two.

"The bill amends 42 statutes, it's over 500 pages long. The Senate will not deal with that in two or three days. We will not," said Liberal New Brunswick Senator Joseph Day, who chairs the National Finance Committee.

Sen. Day said that the committee still has to deal with last year's budgetary measures such as the $3.9-billion supplementary estimates 'C', the $236.1-billion main estimates that were recently tabled, interim supply for the public service to continue operating and doesn't expect the committee to get to Bill C-10 until after the new fiscal year starts on April 1. He said that "if the government tells us it's not a priority for them to have money to run the civil service," the committee could look at the bill before then, "but we're not going to rubber stamp anything."
...
Sen. Day said he has asked the government to separate some of the "non-budgetary" items in Bill C-10, such as changes to the Navigable Waters Act, the Competition Act, and pay equity issues in order to be able to focus solely on the budget items. If the government did that, he said he would "make every effort to get the other portions through absolutely as soon as possible."

"I have given them an option of how we can handle this, lift the non-budget items out of them and we will go right at the front and deal with the non-budget things later, go to the budget items first," he said. "Absolutely it's urgent [but] they surely don't think it's very urgent if they've put all this non-budget stuff in there, that's pages and pages long. People are writing to me from all over Canada saying you can't just pass that, that requires amendment and study and we want to speak on it. We can't turn our backs on those people. The government knows that, get it out of that bill. Split the bill."

Needless to say, Day's position raises some serious questions about what the Libs in the House of Commons have done with precisely the same bill. After all, any rightful concerns about "rubber-stamping" and "turning...backs on people" affected by the bill can only highlight just how ineffective the Lib opposition in the House has been.

And while it's for the best that at least one set of Libs on Parliament Hill sees some point in doing its job, the fact that the elected Libs chose not to do so has once again put the Senate in the position of having to do a first review of a bill that didn't receive proper scrutiny at the House level. Not to mention that by leaving it to the Senate to make the kind of offer that Ignatieff should have made personally, the Libs have once again allowed Harper to once again turn the topic of discussion to the nature of the Senate rather than keeping the focus on the more toxic parts of the budget.

In sum, Ignatieff's decision to follow in Stephane Dion's footsteps by ordering his MPs roll over and play dead while leaving the job of opposition to the Senate can only make the Libs' elected members look ever less useful. And given that we're less than a year away from the point where a Senate opposition strategy will no longer have a chance of slowing down the Cons, it's long past time for the Libs to recognize the need to actually start doing their work in the House of Commons.