Andrew Coyne: Bill C-38 shows us how far Parliament has fallen
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So this is not remotely a budget bill, despite its name. It is what is known as an omnibus bill. If you want to know how far Parliament has fallen, how little real oversight it now exercises over government, this should give you a clue.
Omnibus bills are not unknown: indeed, every budget is a kind of omnibus bill, bundling a range of different measures under the general rubric of “supply,” the ancient prerogative of Parliament to approve or withhold funds to the Crown to carry out its program of government. The omnibus crime bill, likewise, collected a number of different pieces of the Conservatives’ law and order agenda under one heading.
But lately the practice has been to throw together all manner of bills involving wholly different responsibilities of government in one all-purpose “budget implementation” bill, and force MPs to vote up or down on the lot. While the 2012 budget implementation bill is hardly the first in this tradition, the scale and scope is on a level not previously seen, or tolerated.
Not only does this make a mockery of the confidence convention, shielding bills that would otherwise be defeatable within a money bill, which is not: It makes it impossible to know what Parliament really intended by any of it. We’ve no idea whether MPs supported or opposed any particular bill in the bunch, only that they voted for the legislation that contained them. There is no common thread that runs between them, no overarching principle; they represent not a single act of policy, but a sort of compulsory buffet.
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But the increasing use of these omnibills extends Parliament’s powerlessness in all directions: it has become, if you will, (omn)impotent — a ceremonial body, little more. What is worse, it cannot even seem to rouse itself to its own defence.
Once upon a time such insults could be relied upon to produce unruly scenes in the House, obstruction of government business and whatnot. The packaging of several pieces of legislation into one omnibus energy bill in 1982 provoked the opposition to refuse to enter the House to vote. The division bells rang for nearly three weeks until the government agreed to split the bill. The insertion of a single change to environmental legislation in the 2005 budget bill, a note from the Green Party reminds us, so enraged the then leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper, that he threatened to bring down the government.
But today’s Parliament is so accustomed to these indignities that it barely registers. It has lost not only the power to resist, it seems, but the will.
