Ottawa

It’s the opposition’s fault that these omnibus bills exist, apparently

On CBC radio’s The House this weekend, Evan Solomon interviewed Jim Flaherty. During that interview, Solomon raised Stephen Harper’s 1994 point of order about omnibus legislation and asked Mr. Flaherty what had changed since then. Mr. Flaherty responded as follows.

Well, you know, what has changed is that it’s very, very difficult to get a piece of legislation through the House of Commons because of the obstreperous nature of the opposition and so we need to, you know, make sure in the budget—it’s like, the budget itself is 473 pages, which I delivered on March 29. So we took half of it and we did it in the first budget bill. The other half we do in the second budget bill. There are no surprises, it’s all part of jobs, growth and prosperity for the government of Canada. It’s our agenda and we’re a majority government, we’re entitled to advance our agenda. I know the opposition doesn’t like that and good luck to them in the next election.

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