The first throne speech from Canada’s new Liberal government was short and to the point, and didn’t contain much in the way of surprises for anyone who followed the 11-week election campaign.
One welcome note in the speech was contained in the section titled Open and Transparent Government, where the government says it will not “resort to devices like ... omnibus bills to avoid scrutiny.”
In many submissions to government over the past several years, the CBA has expressed its discomfort with the practice of inserting controversial clauses into omnibus bills and then limiting discussion.
In 2011, the Criminal Justice Section, with input from the Immigration Law Section and Civil Litigation Section said in its submission on Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act:
The CBA Section is of the view that bundling several critical and entirely distinct criminal justice initiatives into one omnibus Bill is inappropriate, and not in the spirit of Canada’s democratic process. Again, some of these initiatives have received no Parliamentary committee consideration to date, yet contain fundamental shifts in Canada’s approach to criminal law and the treatment of offenders. Even without an arbitrary 100 day deadline for passage, it is unrealistic to expect that, as part of a huge legislative package, those unstudied proposals will receive the detailed and careful consideration that is appropriate when considering significant legislative change. For the bills that have been studied in significant detail, there was either reason to object to their passage, or the government was unwilling to make amendments to achieve sufficient support to achieve passage into law. For bills where changes were previously adopted by Parliamentary committees, the same proposals are now included in Bill C-10 often without those considered amendments. Further, Bill C-10 adds changes to bills previously studied by Parliamentary committees, without transparency as to exactly where such changes have been inserted. That transparency would have facilitated review by concerned organizations like the CBA, attempting to respond to the breadth of Bill C-10 within the short time available.
Even as late as this year, in a letter from the Chair of the Privacy and Access Law Section on Bill C-59, Part 3, Division 3, the CBA continued to protest the use of omnibus bills:
In previous submissions, the CBA has raised concerns about presenting significant changes to laws in omnibus budget legislation. Coupled with the extremely limited time given by Parliamentary Committees for public input on these measures, this militates against meaningful comment or debate of important changes to the law.
While there is no guarantee that the CBA will approve of the whole of the government’s legislative agenda as it plays out over the coming months and years, so far there’s at least one point with which the association finds itself in full accord.