On rush jobs

Not surprisingly, the Cons are making up excuses as to why their dumpster bill should go unchallenged. But let's see just how well the excuse holds up to scrutiny.

Here's the Cons' spokesflack explaining why nobody should bother looking at 880 pages worth of Harper-driven legislative amendments, many of which have nothing to do with the budget they're tied to:

“The all-party House of Commons Finance Committee has scrutinized C-9 and passed it without amendment,” Mr. Chisholm noted.

So what actually happened at the Finance Committee, which covered those 880 pages in a grand total of seven meetings? Let's take a look to see if anybody can reasonably claim that concerns about the bill were actually given proper scrutiny.

The first meeting to study C-9 took place on April 22. On that day, the Finance Committee received approximately 80 minutes to ask questions about the first three parts of C-9, covering 97 sections of statutory changes. And Finance Committee Chair James Rajotte helpfully described the workload associated with the bill as follows:

Okay, it looks like we've finished 3 of 24 parts today.

I do want to very much thank the witness for being here.

Colleagues, you may want to hear this. We have 21 parts left of the bill. We have 62 witnesses who have been requested on this bill. There are some time sensitive issues here that need to be done, at least in the government's view, by June.

Not surprisingly, at least some opposition members were somewhat concerned with having to jam that many witnesses in along with the sheer size of the bill. But when NDP MP Pat Martin suggested splitting up the bill, here's what he was told:

Mr. Pat Martin:
My only observation, on the NDP's part, is that you could always split the bill as a third option. You didn't have to stuff in all of these controversial things that have really nothing to do with the budget, like the environmental assessment review, etc.

Break out the time-sensitive parts of this bill and I think it would pass speedily, and leave the controversial stuff for further analysis later on.

The Chair:
I appreciate that, but as you know from reading your O'Brien and Bosc book, a committee has to deal with a bill as sent to it by the House of Commons. So we have no choice as a committee other than to deal with the bill in its present form.

So in case there's any doubt as to whether the fact that the bill wasn't split up at the Finance Committee level means that anybody actually approved of having it rammed through all at once, the answer is a flat "no".

The Finance Committee's April 27 meeting, which lasted two and a half hours (including a forty-five minute break for a vote in the House of Commons), finished off only two parts of the bill. But since one of those parts was the massive Part 5 dealing with customs tariffs, the meeting made for MPs' lone opportunity to deal with a grand total of 1,548 sections of C-9. So shall we ask if anybody honestly believes that an average of four seconds of scrutiny per section is plenty of time to evaluate the Cons' budget legislation?

Thanks in large part to Rajotte's admonitions that MPs "be as brief as possible in our questions" and "try to get through...as many parts as we can today" as well as a decision to limit questioning to five-minute rounds, the Finance Committee's two-hour meeting on April 29 managed to breeze through parts 6 through 14 of the bill, covering 136 sections. (And they'd have made it further if the Vice Chair's attempt to simply declare five parts dealt with without any questions had succeeded.) As part of their effort to give the budget implementation proper scrutiny, MPs received helpful answers such as these ones dealing with the Cons' claim to have saved a bundle of money by eliminating positions which didn't actually cost anything:

Mr. Robert Carrier:
At how much do you estimate the real savings from the elimination of these positions?

Ms. Claudette Lévesque:
We did not evaluate that... It was not just a computing exercise, it was an exercise to try to evaluate the efficiency of the various boards and to ensure the best governance. If all 245 positions had been filled, we estimate that the costs — this is a very rough estimate that we did with Treasury Board — including the per diems, the honorariums, travel costs and everything associated with these boards, would be $1,000,000 to $1,250,000 for the 245 positions.

Mr. Robert Carrier:
That is assuming these positions would be filled. Is that a realistic assumption? Could these positions, even though 90% of them are presently vacant, be potentially filled or are these rather useless positions that you want to eliminate in the interest of efficiency?

Ms. Claudette Lévesque:
I am unable to comment. Obviously, these positions are filled by Governor in Council appointments. So this would be on the advice of the minister in charge of that portfolio. I could not say regarding any given position whether it could have been filled, but as a result of the assessment it was decided that they were no longer necessary.

At the Finance Committee's next meeting on May 4, Rajotte helpfully signalled that he wanted to be done dealing with the bill by the end of that week. The two-hour meeting dealt with Parts 15-19 of C-9 (266 sections in total), including the thorny issues of Canada Post and AECL.

Along the way, the Cons decided that any information about what effect the amendments might actually have on Canada Post had to be withheld from the MPs assessing the bill:

Mr. Thomas Mulcair:
As an elected member, I want to see those analyses that have been done by your department. Can I have them?

Ms. Katherine Moynihan:
I imagine the studies will be subject to the Cabinet confidence policy.
...

Mr. Thomas Mulcair:
The thing is, the Cabinet in question is asking us to vote for or against a bill, based on information we don't have. It is a great pleasure to meet you this afternoon, Ms. Moynihan, but you are giving me nothing that clarifies it for me and enables me to make that decision.

Mr. Ted Menzies:
I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

The Chair: Go ahead.

Mr. Ted Menzies: Having been a minister, Mr. Mulcair would know that there is cabinet confidentiality.

If you wish that information, rather than asking this witness, I would suggest that you ask the minister—
...
Mr. Thomas Mulcair:
We've just been told that studies and scenarios and modelling have been done as to the potential costs. The member of Parliament who is sitting in the corner over there decided that he knows that they're cabinet documents. We have no such information. If he has been given access to cabinet documents, we should be given the same access, because he's just a member of Parliament, as we are.

The Chair:
As the chair, I will make the request that if there are any documents that can be made available to the committee, please make them available to the clerk and they will be made available to all members.

The May 5 meeting began with Rajotte declaring his intention to complete the committee's review of the five remaining parts of the bill, including Part 20 dealing with environmental assessments, Part 21 making changes to the Canada Labour Code, and Part 23 amending Canada's telecommunications ownership laws. The committee didn't quite make it to the end, but managed to skim over Parts 20-23 (32 total sections) in two hours.

The two-hour May 6 meeting covered Part 24, then got started with the first six organizations on the committee's witness list. On May 11, a three-hour meeting dealt with 11 organizations' views on the environmental assessment and nuclear issues. On May 12, a 95-minute meeting dealt with a panel of six organizations on a grab bag of issues within C-9.

Finally, the May 13 meeting raced through votes on all sections of the bill in under half an hour - with a number of provisions passing thanks only to the chair breaking a tie in the absence of a full Lib slate. A statement by NDP MP Pat Martin made for the only substantive discussion - but it led to this response from Dean Del Mastro:

(A)s the member would well know, bills are often brought before the House. We don't presuppose at committee whether a bill would pass or not; that's why we have standing votes in the House of Commons.

The member presupposes that the absence of a given member is in fact determining whether these clauses or this bill would succeed or fail. I'd suggest that it's not fair to project onto anyone whether something would pass or fail if the membership were in fact somewhat different.

So in committee, the Cons told the NDP that it shouldn't worry too much about what happened there since the House would have its say. But now that the bill has passed committee, they're claiming that the House has no business doing just that.

To sum up, then, the 2208 sections of C-9 were dealt with in committee for a total of roughly 18 hours - meaning that on average 122 sections were dealt with per hour, or over two per minute of committee time. That amount includes questions to officials, outside organizations' presentations and comments from the MPs involved. And needless to say, the breakneck pace came due thanks in large part to the Cons' constant demands that the process be sped up and the level of detail pared down - and with the usual obstacles put in the way of other parties' attempts to gather information.

So the only available conclusion is that the Cons have been working at all turns to make sure that C-9 doesn't receive the type of scrutiny it deserves. And the fact that they managed to strongarm the Libs at a previous point in the process most certainly doesn't entitle them to declare that there's no point in changing that reality now.

(Edit: fixed wording.)