Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rises during a meeting of the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on June 9, 2020.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
One of the established facts about COVID-19 is that the disease is most dangerous for patients who have underlying conditions. Which is why we need to worry about the health of Canada’s Parliament during this pandemic.
The House of Commons started the crisis as an already weakened body, owing to governments that, over the past 50 years, have steadily leached it of its dynamism.
Elected members of Parliament are today treated by their parties as biological voting robots, programmed to speak and act as per the software installed in them by code writers in the Prime Minister’s Office.
Their role as overseers of government has been stolen from them by party officials who demand, and get, obedience on the combined threat of expulsion from cabinet or caucus, and the removal of the leader’s signature from their nomination papers in the next election.
Stephen Harper did it when he was Canada’s Conservative prime minister for a decade. Justin Trudeau has displayed the same appetite for total control since his party’s election win in 2015, and its return as a minority government last October.
But now there’s a new twist. Mr. Trudeau has used the cover of the COVID-19 epidemic to sideline Parliament during a crisis, when it is most needed. He is exacerbating Parliament’s existing comorbidities, and the results could put our democracy into intensive care.
As The Globe and Mail reported this week, since June 22 of last year, Parliament has only sat for 38 days.
Yes, there have been extenuating circumstances. Last year’s fixed-date election necessarily meant the House couldn’t sit in the fall, and the physical-distancing requirements of the pandemic might have curtailed Parliament under any government, at least initially.
But there have also been decisions by Mr. Trudeau that have contributed to Parliament having so few sitting days.
For instance, after the Oct. 21 election, Mr. Trudeau waited until Dec. 5 to recall Parliament. Eight days later, the House rose for the holidays.
This year, Parliament was suspended on March 13 because of the COVID-19 crisis. But thanks to Liberal motions to adjourn, the most recent one adopted with the help of the NDP, it has only had eight sitting days since then, all to pass emergency legislation.
There will be a one single day of committee hearings next week to scrutinize much of the Trudeau government’s hundreds of billions in new emergency spending.
Other than a smattering of planned sitting days between now and Sept. 21, the Liberals have sidelined Parliament, and they’ve been able to do that, despite being a minority government, because enough of the opposition (hello, NDP) has agreed to it. No one should be fooled into thinking otherwise by the special COVID-19 committee that has held sessions while Parliament is adjourned. The committee has given opposition members limited opportunity to question ministers and it will cease to exist next week.
With Parliament adjourned, none of its fundamental activities have taken place. That includes everything from Question Period to the tabling of a budget. Committees, too, have been curtailed or outright suspended.
Our democracy’s health is being compromised. But the real threat is the impression being created that Canadians don’t care that their MPs have been reduced to onlookers, while the executive branch runs the country as it sees fit.
The long and steady erosion of Parliament has brought us to this sorry point. And now the Trudeau government is exploiting that decline. To date, it has not committed itself to bringing Parliament back in September, as scheduled.
This is in spite of the fact a House of Commons Administration report said last month that it has the technological ability to carry out sittings using a combination of in-Chamber sessions and virtual feeds. The report also said that remote voting would be possible with a few procedural tweaks.
Enough is enough. Mr. Trudeau needs to recall Parliament in full by September at the latest, and bring the House and Senate back to life.
The vigour of Canada’s democracy depends on the vigour of Parliament. The Prime Minister has a duty to leave our legislature at least as healthy as he found it. Because if he diminishes it any further, it’ll wind up in the intensive care unit.