Alex Himelfarb and Craig Scott: A bad bill, and a goodbye

With support from the opposition Conservatives, the Liberal government is steamrolling Bill C-5, a bill of enormous consequence that will not get the serious scrutiny it deserves.

CBC report (on YouTube) of Indigenous leaders’ press conference and their expression of the profound disappointment with Prime Minister Carney and the steps backward from the record of the previous government on reconciliation and rights of Indigenous peoples in Canada. We urge you to click and view/listen. (“Bill C-5 'will not apply in our territories,' says grand chief” - CBC)

Bill C-5: The deal is cooked

We had intended to set out some suggestions for strengthening Bill C-5 while also respecting the need for speed, but it seems pointless in the circumstances. With support from the opposition Conservatives, the government seems intent on ramming the bill through pretty much as is.

Three opposition parties — the Bloc Québécois, the New Democratic Party and the Green Party — have made eminently reasonable suggestions for ensuring that this bill that puts core Canadians values at risk gets the scrutiny it deserves.

Split the bill to allow Parliament the summer to give the most contentious part the scrutiny it deserves - while moving more quickly on the less controversial internal trade component. Denied.

Lengthen the review period beyond “this Friday” even a little bit to get the witnesses needed — including Indigenous representatives who have made clear that pre-bill consultation was truncated and so pro forma as to have been conducted in bad faith. Denied.

Extend hours for committee review. Denied.

The deal is cooked. Second reading debate was closed down Tuesday. Now a single House of Commons committee — the Transport Committee — will ‘study’ and hear testimony on the bill for …. six hours. Yes, hours. Six. As CBC reports, “The bill is now set for an unusually fast one-day study by the House transport committee Wednesday afternoon and evening. The government expects to pass the bill by the end of Friday.”

This steamrolling of Bill C-5 will come back to haunt us. The failure to give Parliament the time up front will cost the country down the line given the divisiveness this bill has already engendered and given the price we will pay in terms of the social solidarity necessary to truly move forward in crisis times. And the undue haste will no doubt cost time later in protests and legal wrangling.

In these circumstances, there seems little purpose in setting out the amendments we were going to suggest in outline today — e.g., clearer criteria for national interest projects; a requirement for the government to provide Parliament and the public with reasons for its decisions, including a fully transparent account of what laws or regulations have been overridden and with what justification; a time-limited period for parliamentary review at key stages of the greenlighting of a proposed nation-building project; a parliamentary committee to monitor nation-building projects on an ongoing basis; the duty of the responsible Minister to appear before the committee within a designated short period of each key decision in the greenlighting process; a two-track process that would provide greater scrutiny for projects where there is provincial or Indigenous opposition; clear language in the binding parts of the Building Canada Act on Indigenous engagement that is consistent with the non-binding preamble’s reference to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and thereby also consistent with the federal UNDRIP Act; and a clearer statement on the sunsetting of the Act alongside a requirement for a comprehensive review of how the government(s) used the powers granted them.

Yes, it is possible to speed things up and respect democratic values and constitutional obligations — as Althia Raj also argues in her column in the Toronto Star (“Mark Carney’s Bill C-5 is a naked power grab that tramples our democracy” - June 17).

The future of this Pledge publication

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