This month my attention has been flicking back and forth between two political issues that, considered together, leave me nauseous about the state of Canadian parliamentary government. Well, maybe that’s not quite the way to put it: I feel a weird sense of contradiction, of being pulled in opposite directions. The first is the “green slush fund” story, the tale of the stillborn Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) fund. On Monday our Chris Nardi gave an important update on the bizarre standoff between the House of Commons and the federal public service, which is refusing to produce uncensored background documents on SDTC that were demanded in June by the House.
The federal auditor general found earlier this year that the SDTC had flung a giant wad of our money at enviro-tech companies without appropriate attention to their eligibility for the program or to rampant conflict-of-interest issues with SDTC’s directors. The auditor general’s report is unfortunately short on detail and colour, leaving only the foul whiff of a possibility that the Canadian public purse was preyed upon by a conspiracy of pork-gobblers and bureaucrats. The SDTC fund had been a showpiece for progressive Liberal ideas and economic management, but it barely got off the ground before it attracted the auditor’s unwelcome attention and had to be stubbed out like a cigarette.
Are we entitled to know what happened and how? The House of Commons’ demands for information are being met with redactions and withholding, most of it justified — comically enough — by what we’re not embarrassed to call the “Access to Information” Act. The Speaker of the House and its law clerk have both observed that this is anomalous if not ridiculous. Parliament, a body always regarded as having plenary power to summon papers and persons, is being treated by the civil service as if were some meddling private company or cabal of nosy journalists.
This offends the very essence of our constitution. The permanent bureaucratic blob ought not even to give the appearance of obstructing Parliamentary inquiry. And if some of the blob’s communications are to be regarded as altogether officially secret from Parliament, we are yet another step away from living in a democracy. I know, I know: tell me something I don’t know.
But then, over on the other hand … we have a Senate committee pulling disapproving faces at Bill C-282, an extraordinary private members’ bill passed in the Commons in June 2023. C-282 was introduced by the Bloc Quebecois before being hastened through the House with all-party support, and is, as far as anyone can tell, a completely original novelty in 21st-century world government. The text of the bill simply forbids our foreign affairs minister and her agents from “making commitments” in trade negotiations to reduce tariffs or increase quotas on imported poultry, dairy and eggs.
Our supply-managed food sectors are to be excluded from trade talks by statute, something no country has yet done. Few would even consider tying the hands of trade representatives in such a way. It amounts to cutting off your nose to spite your face and then setting to work on your gonads.
There appears to be political kabuki here: no party wanted to oppose C-282 in the House, because milk and chicken are sacred foods in mystical ways that beef and canola aren’t of Quebec, but everybody expected the Senate to take its time with the bill and slow it down, possibly pushing it beyond a prorogation or dissolution of Parliament. Sen. Peter Harder, a former close Trudeau advisor who is now part of the “Progressive” caucus in the Senate, gave a speech in April that was full of incisive, vigorous criticisms of C-282 — exactly the kind of speech one would have expected someone to give, on behalf of liberal trade principles, in the House.
The upshot of it is that C-282 turns the usual premise of trade negotiations upside-down. Normally the minister sends someone out into the world to make a trade deal, and then Parliament says yes or no. But here we have a Parliament proposing to create statutory negotiating taboos by which future ministers and representatives will be bound in advance.
It is enough to make one wonder what the hell Parliament is supposed to be for. When it expects to seek information about obvious malfeasance within Canadian government — a “slush fund” scandal that has no apparent connection to foreign relations at all — it meets with a brick wall. But when it seeks the power to obtrude upon hypothetical future trade negotiations, perhaps conducted by officials not yet born, this happens precipitously, almost by accident. “Make it make sense,” my mind cries out to itself, and it finds itself helpless.
National Post