In the News April 26
In the Parliament
House Proceedings Confirm Parliament Is
Incidental to Decision-Making
The House of Commons resumed sitting on Monday, April 25, following a two week break. The Senate will resume on April 26. Both the House and the Senate have about nine weeks remaining before the summer break. For the next three days, the House of Commons will deal with the Liberal budget.
Proceedings in the House continue to show that as far as decision-making goes, the participation of elected members is incidental. Major and minor decisions, policy proclamations, distribution of funds, as well as deliberations on policies are routinely declared and established by executive powers, with Ministers preferring to speak directly to the press rather than the House.
The much lauded “committee role” of members of parliament, where it is said they have a real opportunity to thrash out legislation and to make recommendations based on their study of problems, is becoming an outsourced service.
Both of these trends were on display when the Ministry of Heritage announced that it was handing over the issue of how to regulate “online harms” [1] to a 12-person expert advisory group. Several similar expert panels have been created, breaking with the tradition of experts appearing before parliamentary committees as witnesses to present their opinions to members of parliament who, in turn, were expected to ask questions pertinent to the problem at hand.
Even the appearance of the executive being accountable to the elected members is being thrown out the window. With press conferences becoming the preferred announcement venue, the traditional post-announcement scrums have lost primacy. Such was the case with the release by the Department of National Defence of the Final Report of the Minister’ Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination in the Military on April 25.
The disempowered character of elected members is also revealed by the pretence involved in the “deliberations” and vote on the Liberal 2022-23 military-spending dominated budget, which was tabled on April 7. It is already known that the budget will be adopted because of the “Supply and Confidence Agreement” entered into by Liberal and NDP leadership, without consultation with the NDP and Liberal members, let alone the caucus members who were said to have been presented with a fait accompli. Nevertheless, the budget will be subjected to the fraudulent appearance of an approval process being exercised by MPs.
The Globe and Mail reported on April 25 that Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux is sounding the alarm about $15 billion of “unexplained military spending buried.” The Globe and Mail reports that both Giroux and his predecessors “have long been concerned about whether MPs and senators have sufficient details overall of budgets and spending estimates to be able to scrutinize and approve, or oppose, government expenditures.”
The Globe and Mail quotes Don Drummond, a former Department of Finance official, who described the $15 billion as a “black hole,” that raises the possibility that “the government has quietly set aside billions of dollars more in defence spending than what it’s already acknowledged to Canadians.” Drummond says, “It could be money associated with continuing to fund existing activities. Or it could be a gigantic slush fund. Both are possible,” Drummond is quoted as saying.
Giroux explains that the Department of National Defence 2022 departmental plan sets out spending of $77 billion between fiscal years 2022-23 and 2024-25. However, he says, the defence numbers in the 2022 budget, unveiled April 7, are roughly $23 billion higher for the same three-year period.
The Globe and Mail writes, “The government’s budget plan talked about $8 billion of new defence spending over this period. But, Mr. Giroux said, there is no explanation or details on how the remaining roughly $15 billion will be spent” and concludes that “There could be bigger demands for defence spending coming soon. Earlier this month in the budget, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the government would undertake a “swift defence policy review” to determine what additional military gear is needed “to equip Canada for a world that has become more dangerous.”
Drummond told the Globe and Mail that “disclosures to date suffer from a lack of accountability and transparency.” “It’s money that is being budgeted and we don’t know what it’s being budgeted for,” he said. Former budget officer Kevin Page was also interviewed and told the Globe that “the public and Parliament deserve better.”
Nevertheless, three days have been set aside for the foregone conclusion to be played out, which is that nobody can hold the government to account.
Canadians are left hanging, not knowing if it is a real problem or merely raised to underscore the impotence of the Parliamentary Budget Officer and others who are arguing along the same lines he is in the press, not in the Parliament where Canadians are supposed to expect there is no corruption. Nonetheless, when the Parliamentary Budget Officer talks publicly about “$15 billion of “unexplained military spending buried” and a former Department of Finance official says the government is possibly running “a gigantic slush fund,” it certainly underscores the wretched current state of affairs of what are called the democratic institutions. It certainly does nothing to raise the prestige of politics, the House of Commons or the government. It does nothing to sort out the problems of how the institutions can be reformed to hold governments to account, or to make sure Canadians are empowered to make the decisions which affect their lives or manage their own affairs in a manner which is accountable to the polity.
What ensued merely reduced the problem to a mockery. The Conservative Official Opposition introduced an amendment to the motion to approve the budget by deleting the budget in its entirety and replacing it with the words:
“the House not approve the budgetary policy of the government since it fails to:
(a) rein in spending in order to control inflation;
(b) provide Canadians with tax relief; and
(c) take immediate action to increase housing supply.”
The Bloc Québécois added a sub-amendment stating that the amendment be amended by adding the following:
“(d) increase health transfers as unanimously requested by Quebec, the provinces and territories;
(e) increase the old age pension for those aged 65 to 74;
(f) take concrete action against climate change;
(g) offer solutions to the rising cost of living for individuals and their businesses; and
(h) consult and respect the jurisdictions of Quebec, the provinces and territories.”
The sub-amendment was defeated at day’s end April 25 by a vote of 148 to 178. It is said “debate” will continue on the Conservative amendment to delete the budget, with a vote scheduled to be held no later than April 27. The fact is that all the cartel parties treat the problems frivolously. There is no serious debate. There is no enlightened or enlightening opinion of any kind.
The people’s demands are what should be implemented to change the direction of the economy in their favour, not in favour of the rich and the U.S. war economy.
Renewal Update, posted April 26, 2022.
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