LESS SCRUTINY ON GOVERNMENT TABLED LEGISLATION COULD HAVE SERIOUS LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES SAYS MICHAEL HATCH
Unless you happen to be a Minister of Finance, it’s hard to get excited about government budgets. With so many layers of government active all around us, a time during which at least one of them isn’t in budget season is almost the exception rather than the rule. Add in “mini-budgets”, “fiscal updates,” and “economic statements,” and there’s no shortage of new policies being hurled at voters from all angles.
And some of these policies are good. On the whole Canada remains a (mostly) well-governed and (usually) reasonably-regulated place in which to do business, work, and purchase goods and services.
But increasingly, the way in which governments enact policies that govern how we live our lives more than most people are likely to appreciate is opaque and completely disconnected from the average voter, taxpayer, or consumer.
GROWING DISCONNECT
The federal budget, parts of which were tabled as legislation in late March, is every year a better example of this disconnect. The last sentence’s emphasis is required because the first budget bill weighed in at just under 400 pages. It’s probably longer than the last book that you read, and enacts amendments to more than 50 disparate pieces of existing legislation. And it’s not the entire budget, presented to Parliament by then-Finance Minister Jim Flaherty the month before. The rest will be presented to the legislature sometime in the autumn.
Among dozens of others, the first federal budget bill of 2014 amends the Hazardous Products Act, the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, the Judges Act, the National Defence Act, the Safe Food for Canadians Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. It also enacts the New Bridge for the St. Lawrence Act.
THE BUNDLING EFFECT
Increasingly, and over a number of governments, the trend at the federal level has been towards bundling entire agendas into single pieces of legislation and calling them “budgets,” though many items contained in them have little to do with budgetary or fiscal policy. Though this is a trend that predates the current government, the practice has been taken to new levels in recent years. Budget bills that averaged maybe a couple of dozen pages in the 1990s often number in the hundreds today. This year’s nearly-400 page bill is less than half the size of the 900-page monster passed by the government in 2010. It’s also nowhere near the size of the 658-page bill that was passed in 2011.
Though it seems like a technicality with which most people should not concern themselves, the trend towards ever more of governments’ agendas passing in single strokes as observed in recent years has serious consequences. Important issues covered in the bills are not given sufficient time for debate — opposition parties may agree with some aspects of legislation and yet have no choice but to vote against it — in documents that approach 1000 pages. Within such large documents, mistakes are inevitably made, while parliamentarians often lack the resources to properly
scrutinize such massive bills.
As a result, there is less media coverage on important policy areas that should probably not be included in budgets. Important questions of regulation touching on everything from environmental policy to food safety to internal trade become bundled up in huge bills that inevitably pass with little study and no amendments.
Governments will retort that modern agendas have become too complex and varied to allow for detailed debate on every single issue. It is certainly true that modern-day governments are called upon for a much greater level of services and responsibilities, and that Parliaments lack the resources to scrutinize every single piece of policy. But if we demand ever more from our governments, should we not at least grant them the means by which to enact policies that have an impact on our lives in a way that is thorough?
Most readers won’t spare many thoughts for this issue, and that is understandable. If governments are busier than ever the same is true of voters. But it is that disconnect that allows the passage of policy without the due diligence required of the simplest of business transactions. So the next time you’re in the company of a Parliamentarian, ask him or her if we really need 900-page “budgets.” If they know you’re thinking about it, they will too.
