TOP STORY
Although the issue has gone almost entirely unnoticed among the general public, next week the House of Commons is set to mark two months in which it hasn’t actually done anything.
MPs are showing up to work, petitions are being tabled and quips are being lobbed during question period, but bills aren’t getting passed, votes aren’t being held and legislation isn’t being debated. In other words, the House of Commons isn’t doing any of the actual things that it’s traditionally tasked with doing.
It’s not quite a filibuster and it’s not quite a government shutdown; most media accounts are referring to it as a “gridlock” or a “quagmire.” But it’s severely handicapped the ability of Justin Trudeau's Liberal government to do anything — and if it keeps going past Christmas it could potentially throw the country into a snap election.
And it’s all because, since September, the Trudeau government has been refusing to hand over a dossier of potentially incriminating documents related to the so-called “green slush fund.”
That would be Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), a federal agency that was rolled up by the Liberals within hours of a scathing Auditor General report alleging that it had been used as a conduit for tens of millions of dollars in unauthorized payments.
Auditor General Karen Hogan found $59 million of SDTC payouts that failed to meet the agency’s own eligibility requirements, and another $76 million that were handed out despite conflicts of interest. One of the most obvious being a $217,000 grant awarded to NRStor Inc., a Toronto-based energy storage company whose CEO, Annette Verschuren, was also SDTC’s board chair.
“Significant lapses in governance and stewardship of public funds,” was the auditor general’s summary.
But what prompted the current gridlock was a demand by the opposition parties — all of them — for the Trudeau government to hand over SDTC’s entire paper trail for possible investigation by the police.
In a motion that passed 174 to 148, every single email, meeting agenda, and briefing note was ordered to be handed “forthwith” to the RCMP.
There’s ample evidence they’re allowed to do this. Since Canada’s 1867 founding, Parliament has retained near-absolute powers to “send for persons, papers and records.” Technically, Parliament can even arrest citizens to be hauled in for questioning.
In the words of one constitutional scholar, it is “one of Parliament's undoubted privileges.” And it’s even in the manual. “The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers,” reads page 985 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice.
But thus far, most of the SDTC documents the Liberals have turned over have been severely redacted; whole passages have been blacked out, and hundreds of pages withheld.
In September, Speaker Greg Fergus told the Trudeau government outright that this was against the rules: The House of Commons was owed unredacted documents.
“The House has the undoubted right to order the production of any and all documents from any entity or individual it deems necessary to carry out its duties. Moreover, these powers are a settled matter, at least as far as the House is concerned,” Fergus said on Sept. 26.
When the Liberals continued to refuse, the Conservatives responded by seizing the wheels of the House of Commons.
They did this by tabling a motion to refer the issue to a committee — and then they’ve simply been endlessly debating that motion for nearly two months.
MPs get up, they deliver a speech slamming the government over SDTC, the Liberals stand up to denounce the Conservatives for holding the House of Commons hostage, and the Bloc and the NDP pipe in occasionally to denounce everybody.
And all of this — hours of it — gets recorded in the House of Commons record as a never-ending debate over the “Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.” Since it’s a debate over an issue of Parliamentary privilege, it takes precedent over absolutely everything else — including more than a dozen pending bills that haven’t been touched in two months.
The Bloc Québécois or the NDP could stop it by tabling a motion to end the debate — but they haven’t.
Either party could end up being shaken out of their reverie by a Liberal proposal to declare a GST holiday over the Christmas season — the approval of which would require the House of Commons to return to its usual business.
But as it stands, with no routine supply bills being approved, parts of the federal government could start running out of money as early as Dec. 10.
That’s according to Treasury Board President Anita Anand, who tabled a $21.6 billion supply bill on Monday that — predictably — is simply mouldering on the order paper with everything else.
