After the previous day's debacle in which government-sponsored amendments to the Cons' dumb-on-crime bill were ruled out of order, one might have expected at least some acknowledgment of fallibility on the part of the Harper Cons.
The Big Issue
But Wednesday, November 30 saw nothing of the sort, even when the Cons were questioned directly. Instead, Rob Nicholson responded to entirely valid questions by claiming that his party still supported "every measure in this bill" even after it had tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill. But Nicholson's general grasp on reality seemed to be lacking generally, as he railed against "(e)very time the opposition parties, in the last five years, got together and forced an election on the Government of Canada" - by which he presumably meant exactly once.
Meanwhile, Andrew Cash reminded Nicholson that there were plenty of non-contentious parts of the bill which the opposition would have been happy to have passed already if the Cons didn't insist on tying them to poison pills, while Alexandre Boulerice noted in particular that provisions to address worker exploitation shouldn't be lashed to evidence-free policy on drugs and other justice issues. And Cash and Megan Leslie discussed the racialization of both poverty and crime.
But in the end Peter Van Loan pushed ahead in yet again cutting off debate, with the Cons again forcing through both the cloture motion and the unamended bill.
In Brief
Nycole Turmel and Charlie Angus returned from Attawapiskat to demand that the Cons declare a state of emergency (or at least show their faces in the community). Don Davies listed off many more Con-connected appointments to the Immigration and Refugee Board than Jason Kenney was willing to admit the previous day. Christine Moore pointed out the latest Con misadventure in acronyms, as the Air Force's French acronym following the Cons' re-insertion of "royal" matched that of a Colombian terrorist group until somebody pointed out the association. Davies introduced a private member's bill to lower the voting age to 16, Chris Charlton proposed to allow Parliamentary staff to unionize, and Alex Atamanenko presented a bill to establish a Department of Peace. Olivia Chow noted that the imposed vote on C-10 was cutting into promised time for committee questioning on infrastructure. Jamie Nicholls polished his futurist credentials by successfully predicting that an adjournment question on G8 patronage would be answered with mindless talking points. And Guy Caron followed up on issues of corruption in corporate tax enforcement at the Canada Revenue Agency.
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