Shuttered Commons isn’t idling Liberals: MP
Yukon MP Larry Bagnell joined fellow Liberal MPs in Ottawa this week to rally around party leader Michael Ignatieff, who laid out plans to prevent future prime ministers from proroguing Parliament without the consent of the House.
Photo by Whitehorse Star
Yukon MP Larry Bagnell
Yukon MP Larry Bagnell joined fellow Liberal MPs in Ottawa this week to rally around party leader Michael Ignatieff, who laid out plans to prevent future prime ministers from proroguing Parliament without the consent of the House.
For much of this week, Liberals have been hosting “panel discussions” on Parliament Hill; a publicity stunt to remind Canadians that in spite of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s prorogation of Parliament, the Liberals remain ready and willing to debate policy.
“I think we’ve really had very serious discussions on issues that are a real concern,” Bagnell said of the exercise. “There’s very high unemployment for students and youth .... These are among the things we are pushing (to have addressed) and what we would do as the government,” he told the Star.
Parliament was supposed to resume last Monday, but won’t sit again until Mar. 3, when Governor General Michaelle Jean will present a throne speech to be followed by the Conservatives’ 2010 federal budget.
On Tuesday, the Liberal-sponsored panels’ “soup-de-jour” was governance, with employment also on the menu.
On Wednesday, the Liberals served up women’s issues, and on Thursday, veterans’ affairs. Beginning next week, poverty and northern issues will be among topics the ad-hoc panels will tackle, Bagnell said.
The Liberal’s Ottawa sideshow also gave the Opposition party, its leader and panel participants a chance to dredge up past embarrassments of the Harper government – some directly linked to actions by the ruling party and others ancillary.
“Liberal-organized forums focused on ... Conservative interference in independent agencies overseeing the RCMP, military and nuclear safety,” reads a Liberal press release.
Last summer, the chair of the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP complained that the independent watchdog lacked the power to see its advice put into action.
Two years ago, the government sacked Linda Keen, then-president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, when she refused to reopen the Chalk River nuclear reactor.
Late in 2007, Keen had ordered the reactor shut down due to safety concerns. Unfortunately, the facility is one of the world’s four primary producers of diagnostic radioisotopes.
Earlier this week at one of the Liberal panels, Keen recalled, via a pre-taped message, how she was fired.
“I said at the time, ‘This is going to send a chill through federal tribunals.’ Are we in an era where tribunals must be more interested in meeting the needs of the government than doing their jobs?” she asked.
While Keen’s replacement gave the green light to fire up the Chalk River facility, it was forced to shut down in May of 2009 due to a water leak in one of the reactors, exacerbating the ongoing world shortage of isotopes.
But not all criticism heard at this panel was aimed at the Conservatives. Political scientist Ned Franks reminded those in attendance it was under Jean Chretien’s Liberal government that the inquiry into the conduct of Canadian troops in Somalia was shut down and the head of the Business Development Bank was fired after refusing a loan to a hotel in which Chretien once had a financial interest.
“Everyone has to learn here to respect the institutions of independent oversight ... there are lessons for every political party,” Ignatieff acknowledged later.
And one of the lessons Ignatieff hopes the Conservatives learn is that it cannot shut down debate when the subject matter is distasteful or damaging.
Scrutiny of the government’s handling of the growing Afghan detainee scandal has been stymied, charge the Liberals, as the parliamentary committee investigating the affair was disbanded when the prorogation reset legislative proceedings.
Ignatieff’s proposal for more accountability prior to future requests for prorogation would ensure committees remain operating, said Bagnell.
But as Liberals attacked Harper’s “sudden interest in maternal and child health in the developing world” after the prime minister pledged in a Toronto Star op-ed piece published Tuesday to make that a priority of his government, then repeated the sentiment during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bagnell was more diplomatic.
“I applaud him for doing that,” the Yukon MP conceded. “If he does make a serious commitment to the millennium goals of reducing maternal death and infant mortality, then I applaud that.”
But Bagnell remained skeptical in light of his view that the Conservatives watered down their foreign policy by expunging “gender equality” and “child soldiers” from their lexicon and replacing these with “equality of men and women” and “children in armed conflict” respectively.
On Feb. 10, Bagnell, the Liberals’ Northern Affairs critic, will chair a panel discussion on issues affecting the North.
Representatives of aboriginal organizations from across the three territories, northern Quebec and Labrador are slated to make presentations.
– With files from The Canadian Press.
francias pillman
Jan 29, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Give it up larry. Where were when liberals did the same thing?? Nowhere.