The QP Clip: Canada, welcome back to Ottawa
Your daily dose of political theatre. Monday’s moment in one word: Oops.
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Maclean’s is your home for the daily political theatre that is Question Period. If you’ve never watched, check out our primer. Today, QP runs from 2:15 p.m. until just past 3. We livestream and liveblog all the action, and recap the clip you can’t miss.
THE CLIP
Downtown Toronto’s newest MP didn’t ask about transit funding, nor any other file in his formidable grab bag of urban advocacy issues. Vaughan’s newest colleague from nearby Scarborough, Arnold Chan, covered the transit file. For his part, Vaughan asked the government how it could spend so much money on the search for the lost Franklin Expedition and so little on missing and murdered indigenous women. He managed to expose a real problem across Canada (including the far north) and, in the next breath, question one of the Prime Minister’s favourite projects north of 60.
In her response, Status of Women Minister Kellie Leitch feigned outrage at the opposition. “How dare they,” she said, vote against a Conservative budget that included $25 million, over five years, that hopes to reduce violence against aboriginal women. What Leitch conveniently ignored, of course, is that the government cobbles together omnibus budget bills that amend many laws at the same time—a practice abhorred by opposition politicians who, even if they find certain elements they’d love to support, spot so many other disagreeable bits that they can’t possibly vote for the whole package. The opposition even occasionally asks for bills to be split, but the government almost never cooperates. Oops.
One vote up for grabs to whatever leader promises not to run omnibus budgets. What an outlandishly irresponsible response to #MMIW in #QP.
— Belinda Alzner (@belindaalzner) September 15, 2014
(Also, for the record, an Aboriginal Affairs spokesperson told Maclean’s in May that the pledged money had not yet been allocated to programs. “No decisions have been made as of yet on the specific projects to be funded through the Government of Canada’s investment of an additional $25 million over five years through Economic Action Plan 2014,” read an emailed response.)