{"id":15478,"date":"2012-06-14T00:02:43","date_gmt":"2012-06-14T05:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15478"},"modified":"2012-06-13T20:46:41","modified_gmt":"2012-06-14T01:46:41","slug":"what-is-at-stake-in-the-amendment-process-to-the-omnibus-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/06\/14\/what-is-at-stake-in-the-amendment-process-to-the-omnibus-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"What is at stake in the amendment process to the omnibus bill"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Andrew Coyne<\/a> points out, if nothing else the stack of amendments the opposition have proposed does accomplish something (even if none of the amendments are accepted):<\/p>\n

The House of Commons was to begin voting Wednesday night on several hundred amendments to Bill C-38, the 425-page monster known as the omnibus budget implementation bill. The voting was expected to go on all night and all day Thursday.<\/p>\n

Viewed one way, the whole thing is quite silly. Given the government\u2019s majority, none of the amendments is likely to pass, nor is the bill itself in any danger of defeat. Viewed another way, however, this is an important moment. For the first time since the last election, the opposition is putting up a serious fight against the abuses this government has visited upon Parliament: not only the omnibus bill, which repeals, amends or introduces more than 60 different pieces of legislation, but the repeated, almost routine curtailing of debate by means of \u201ctime allocation\u201d; the failures of oversight, misstating of costs, and abdication of responsibility in the F-35 purchase; and the refusal to provide basic information on spending to Parliament or the Parliamentary Budget Officer \u2014 to say nothing of the stonewalling, prorogations and other indignities of the minority years.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the point? Once, as in the famous \u201cbell-ringing\u201d episode of 1982, the point would have been to hold up parliamentary business until the government relented: not on the substance of the bill, which a duly elected government is entitled to pass, but on the principle that the bill should be split, that Parliament is entitled to vote on each of its several major parts separately, and to give each the kind of informed scrutiny and debate it warrants. Again, that is not only in the opposition\u2019s interests, or even Parliament\u2019s, but the nation\u2019s: it makes for better legislation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Andrew Coyne points out, if nothing else the stack of amendments the opposition have proposed does accomplish something (even if none of the amendments are accepted): The House of Commons was to begin voting Wednesday night on several hundred amendments to Bill C-38, the 425-page monster known as the omnibus budget implementation bill. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,9],"tags":[697,458],"class_list":["post-15478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-law","tag-budget","tag-parliament"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-41E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15479,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15478\/revisions\/15479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}