There was a reason the Liberals promised during the 2015 election campaign that there would be no more grab-bag omnibus bills.
By pulling together unrelated elements of public policy into one giant piece of legislation that MPs have to swallow whole, omnibus bills — in the Liberals’ own words — “prevent Parliament from properly reviewing and debating” the measures.
That’s especially important nowadays, when the government is running a deficit. There’s an implicit understanding that, for the public to trust the government to spend more money than it brings in, the government needs to demonstrate that its deficits are essential and worthwhile.
Fast forward to Monday evening, when Finance Minister Bill Morneau tabled the bill that is meant to implement all the measures announced in last month’s budget.
At 392 pages, this year’s was less than half the length of last year’s 800-plus-page opus magnum. But, as has become the custom with both Liberal and Conservative governments, it rolls together numerous pieces of legislation touching a wide range of issues that have little to do with the spending of government money.
The Liberals will argue that every line of the bill is linked to something announced in the budget, and no rules have been broken. But since budgeting has morphed well beyond fiscal policy to become a full-blown public relations exercise on the government’s broad agenda, the budget implementation act is large and diverse. It will be examined by several committees.
This year, a quick read of the first instalment of the budget bill shows it contains new rules to prevent people who have claimed refugee status in another country from making a similar claim in Canada — clearly targeting asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Canada border.
It also contains changes to the Food and Drug Act allowing the minister to designate certain products as food or cosmetics, regulating therapeutic products and clamping down on the marketing of diet foods.
The bill also officially sets up a new department for Indigenous services and changes the borders of national parks.
It’s not at all obvious how these bits and pieces are integral, or even tangential, to the way the federal government uses its powers to tax and spend. And the chances of them being aired out in full, and subject to MPs “properly reviewing and debating,” is difficult to imagine.
By putting them into a large and multi-faceted bill, the Liberals have taken their prettily wrapped budget package and fastened it together with a shiny bow, essentially asking parliamentarians to pass it without opening it up and letting the contents spill out.
We already know how budgets passed without proper scrutiny turn out. Just look at the SNC-Lavalin controversy, and the years-long wrangle to have a reliable process to approve pipelines. Both of those are the direct results of budget omnibus bills that parliamentarians never had a chance to examine in detail, and passed without full buy-in.
The SNC-Lavalin debacle has its roots in last year’s budget bill, in a provision to allow corporations to negotiate remediation agreements rather than face criminal charges. SNC-Lavalin lobbied hard for the provision, but parliamentarians didn’t see it coming. They balked at first, but eventually passed it in order to get the broader budget bill through the House efficiently.
Similarly, the uproar over the framework to allow pipelines and natural resource development had its beginnings in the huge budget bill of 2012, when Stephen Harper undid the Navigable Waters Act. Now, the Liberal government is trying to restore parts of it in Bill C-69 — proposed legislation that makes Western Canada blind with anger for the way it would handle resource development.
But even though budget omnibus bills make for accountability that is skin-deep and can lead to intractable problems for the governing party, there’s a reason why governments find them so convenient — especially at this point in the electoral cycle.
The Liberals have just a few weeks to get legislation through the House before it rises for the summer, and then an election campaign begins. They don’t have enough time to have every measure on their list scrutinized separately.
That’s where logic breaks down. The government knew full well that the election would be this fall, the budget would be this spring, and the Senate was in a mood for wrangling. An omnibus bill was not inevitable.
With proper planning, the government could have dealt with asylum-seekers and foods that cure all ills and any other Trojan horse the budget may be hiding with separate pieces of legislation well in advance of the budget bill coming out and steamrolling over informed debate.
Heather Scoffield is an economics columnist based in Ottawa.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2019/04/09/omnibus-bill-shows-its-still-politics-as-usual-for-trudeau-government.html
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