Good morning,
In opposition, Liberals decried the use of omnibus legislation. But in government, they’ve embraced it.
This week the Liberals introduced an 850-page budget bill that seeks to implement a number of promises from their spring budget, such as pay equity, along with a host of other measures, from climate change to how many vacation days an employer must provide.
Debate on the bill is supposed to get underway in the House of Commons today. But the Opposition has been calling for the massive bill (“almost clown-sized," NDP MP Peter Julian said) to be split into more digestible chunks. The Speaker says they’ll take the concern under advisement.
The Liberals say they shouldn’t need to split the bill, as all of the many measures were signaled in their spring fiscal plan. That indeed seems to be the line for the Speaker, too: Geoff Regan called for multiple votes on last fall’s omnibus bill, but only for items that weren’t expressly mentioned in the budget.
We’ll see if that’s the case this year, too.
This is the daily Politics Briefing newsletter, written by Chris Hannay in Ottawa. It is exclusively available only to our digital subscribers. Have any feedback? Let us know what you think.
TODAY’S HEADLINES
Canada, the U.S. and Britain are calling on Saudi Arabia to strike a ceasefire in Yemen. A Saudi-led coalition of forces began fighting in neighbouring Yemen in 2015, leaving thousands of civilians dead or injured.
The United Nations refugee agency is asking Canada to take more people displaced by war in the Horn of Africa. For instance, there are more than a million Somali refugees in the region looking for a new home. “The Somalia refugee crisis risks being forgotten as a crisis because of global competing attention for other emergency situations in Syria, in Yemen, in South Sudan,” Mohamed Abdi Affey told The Globe.
Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen – who himself came to Canada from Somalia as a teenager – says the government plans to welcome more immigration to Canada in the next few years, rising to 350,000 people in 2021. Only a fraction of that number is set aside for refugees, however.
The federal Privacy Commissioner is launching an investigation into Statistics Canada and its plans to demand banks hand over customers' financial information for research purposes. The statistics agency is trying to come up with new ways to study the lives of Canadians in an age where telephone surveys are becoming less useful, but the Conservatives and other critics are warning the government shouldn’t look too closely into citizens' personal data.
Rideau Hall also says Canadians shouldn’t look too closely into the personal expenses of former governor-generals, though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he’s going to review the program that allowed Adrienne Clarkson, for one, to bill taxpayers more than $100,000 in expenses last year.
One of the RCMP’s credit cards used for buying gasoline was cloned by what police think was organized crime, racking up more than $100,000 in fraudulent purchases.
Union leaders came out in support of the Pay Equity Act that the Liberals introduced earlier this week to try to address the wage gap between what women earn and what men earn. But research shows the gap widens even further for women of colour, Indigenous women and women with disabilities.
Though the wage gap may not long be the case in Canada’s judiciary: Women are now applying to sit on the bench more than men for the first time ever.
And could someone check in on Nicola Di Iorio? The Liberal MP (who we’ve written about before) hasn’t been seen on Parliament Hill in weeks. Mr. Di Iorio said earlier this year he was quitting politics. He got a job at a law firm and has been working as a lawyer, but then said he wanted to keep his seat in the Commons anyway. He made a public presentation last week in his capacity as a lawyer. Some of his colleagues admit to the Canadian Press that they’re just kind of confused.
Errol Mendes (The Globe and Mail) on Canada’s response to Saudi Arabia: “The imposition of Magnitsky Act sanctions against the officials identified in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi could also make a strong statement that we abhor the absurd and frankly insulting attempts to deny involvement in the brutal dismemberment of a journalist by the Saudi government.”
Frank Ching (The Globe and Mail) on Chinese diplomacy: “China is trying to deepen the international isolation of Taiwan wherever possible. But increasingly, it is not only telling governments but also private businesses and the media what to do and what not to do.”
Globe and Mail editorial board on Statistics Canada: “Statscan’s plan to require financial institutions to hand over records of the transactions of 500,000 randomly chosen Canadians is worrisome. We live in a time when the laws and mechanisms protecting our online privacy have not kept up with a growing hunger to harvest personal data for commercial and other uses. Data breaches, such as the one involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, are all too common.”
John Ivison (National Post) on governor-generals' expenses: “The news breaks at a time when the current Governor General, Julie Payette, is trying to rehabilitate the institution’s reputation after weeks of adverse publicity over her first year in office. The Clarkson revelation will offer grist for republicans who think the whole vice-regal office is a waste of money.”
David Moscrop (Maclean’s) on the secrecy of the expenses: “Important but unelected institutions, like the Office of the Governor General, need even more scrutiny and openness than elected bodies.”
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Chris Hannay