The Canada Votes newsletter is your weekly tip-sheet as we count down to Oct. 21
The 2019 election campaign is already underway — the CBC News Canada Votes newsletter is your weekly tip-sheet as we count down to Oct. 21.
School’s out: looking back at an eventful year in Parliament
Vassy Kapelos, host of Power & Politics
It’s that time of year – that glorious time of year when we can all take a breath again.
The House has risen.
MPs have fled Ottawa, the federal political news cycle is winding down and our show has started panicking over how to fill two hours.
It’s a time to look back on the sitting that was and review what the government did and didn’t do – which pieces of legislation became law, which ones disappeared into the ether.
Some big stuff passed. Tanker bans, a new process for reviewing pipeline projects, pot pardons, national security laws. Despite the occasional ping-pong battle between the House and the Senate, at the end of the day it got done. Mostly.
(And in case you’re keeping score – the Liberals passed 88 bills during this term, while the previous Tory government passed 122 bills over the course of its last majority mandate.)
Meanwhile, bills that would have mandated sexual assault training for judges, implemented the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and banned “unhealthy” food and beverage marketing directed at children failed to cross the finish line.
Are they gone for good? That’s where the election comes in.
The chances are that some of the bills that died a painful death will be resuscitated after the upcoming election campaign. In some cases, political parties already have pledged to do so.
According to former Conservative Party interim leader Rona Ambrose, who was behind the bill to make sexual assault training mandatory for federally-appointed judges, the Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats and Greens have all promised to re-introduce her bill as government legislation, should they form the next government.
Politically, that isn’t surprising. Ambrose’s bill passed unanimously in the House of Commons. It then headed to the Senate where it sat for two years and ultimately fell victim to Senate shenanigans. (We could have a long discussion about said shenanigans and the efficacy of the Senate, but I’ll save that gem for another edition of this newsletter.)
The UNDRIP bill is another big one. This was a private member’s bill, sponsored by NDP MP Romeo Saganash. It would have aimed to harmonize federal laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The bill was hotly contested in the Senate because of a provision that calls on states to obtain “free, prior and informed consent” before approving activity on Indigenous land, including natural resources extraction. Conservative senators said they feared the bill would amount to an Indigenous veto over major resource projects.
The government was criticized for not introducing the bill as its own, which might have allowed it to escape the fate suffered by other private member’s bills. Once it became clear the Saganash bill wouldn’t pass, the Liberals decided to add it to their fall election platform.
Other policy pitches, meanwhile, didn’t even make it to the legislation stage during this mandate. Pharmacare and guns come to mind. The government tasked an advisory panel with looking into pharmacare and in the end it recommended a universal program. New Democrats already have said it’ll be in their platform, Liberals haven’t yet made the promise.
On gun control, another study was done, but it’s not clear what the Liberals will promise – a full ban on handguns, or more powers for municipalities to do so?
Either way, all is not lost on the legislative floor, and we have some clues to what the fall will bring.
