Ottawa

The trouble with the budget bill

From her post-QP scrum today, Elizabeth May laments the budget implementation bill.

The horror of it is that for one thing I think we should be worried about disappearing democracy when this many bills can be changed by being stuffed in a budget implementation bill by a majority government. I mean I understood the sneaky reason that they were putting changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in 2010 in the budget implementation bill because they didn’t have a majority. If they wanted to get something unsavoury passed quickly, that was the only way they could do it when they didn’t have the majority of votes in the House. But when they have the majority of votes in the House, why are they hiding massive changes to environmental law and policy into a bill? 

So I think Canadians should be concerned about first and foremost democracy, the role of Parliament, having adequate opportunities to examine bills when there are such fundamental changes as repealing an Act and replacing it and sticking it in the budget bill. 

There are calls to have the environmental legislation separated into a different bill.

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