At the Centre of Government by Ian Brodie

Author:Ian Brodie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2018-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Note: * denotes minority government.

Private Members’ Business and the Government Agenda

The new rules on private members’ business have let backbench government MPs and opposition MPs challenge and, in at least one case, disrupted the sitting prime minister’s political priorities. In 2012, Conservative backbencher Stephen Woodworth used his turn in the order of precedence to challenge Harper’s election promise not to reopen the issue of access to abortion. Woodworth was cautious in approach. His private member’s motion proposed striking a special committee of the House to reconsider the Criminal Code’s declaration that a child becomes a human being when it has “completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.”9 Harper declared he would oppose the motion, and Gordon O’Connor, the chief government whip, argued against the motion in public (Fitzpatrick 2012). The issue must have been a difficult one behind the closed doors of caucus. Some government MPs voted with Harper and almost all the opposition MPs to defeat Woodworth’s motion. His motion garnered the support of eighty-six Conservative MPs, including eight of Harper’s Cabinet colleagues and two of his ministers of state. Two pro-life ministers were absent. Considering that the motion was substantively milquetoast – striking an all-party committee to hear from interested parties is not a draconian measure – Harper’s effort to stop the motion was heavy-handed. Given the balance of views in the House, the committee would not have made any recommendations to restrict access to abortions. When Justin Trudeau later one-upped Harper and declared that Liberal MPs would be forced to cast pro-choice votes in the future, their combined effort left little room for pro-life Canadians to air their views through the political process (Payton 2014). Woodworth’s motion might, if it had passed, have produced an all-party consensus on the issue.

Beyond abortion, there has been something of a boom in private member’s business in recent years. In the Harper government’s first two years, Rodriguez’s Kyoto bill and Paul Martin’s on the Kelowna Accord (Bills C-288, 292) both received royal assent and wrote new environmental and indigenous affairs policy mandates into law. Liberal MP John McKay got Bill C-293 passed; it set out a legislative mandate for Canada’s international development programs for the first time. A few years later, NDP MP Alexandrine Latendresse’s bill passed, mandating bilingualism for appointees to certain high profile federal offices. Joy Smith, a Conservative, successfully piloted two bills on human trafficking through to royal assent; opposition MP Maria Mourani added a third. Larry Miller used his turn on the order of precedence to enact a legislative ban on bulk water exports. When Brian Storseth’s turn came, he successfully had a provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act that restricted freedom of expression removed from the law books (C-304). Russ Hiebert had a bill passed to impose certain transparency requirements on labour unions.

In 2008, by the time the Harper government was re-elected, it was becoming clear that, in some cases, contentious private members’ bills were easier to get through the House than contentious government bills, provided a majority of members supported them.

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