I find it funny that Harper is like the Canadian Nixon. Firstly because he deserves it; his was one of three or four worst governments in the world on climate change (Bush, Abbott). But aside from that, has he done anything unbelievably disasterous? Has he tortured people or viciously wrecked people's lives for being political opponents?
Let me see...
He had enough of a spat with Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin that it actually became public, which should never happen, however many times the Court smacks down the government for doing illegal or outright unconstitutional things (which they did plenty of times, as I detailed in the Canadianlawgate thread).
He reversed decades of government policy and declined to seek to have a Canadian on death row in the US allowed to instead serve life in Canada (and when the courts told him he had to, he did so in about the most halfhearted manner imaginable).
Two words: Omar Khadr.
Three words: omnibus budget bills. Or, in his own words, when he was a Reform MP for Calgary West, in 1994 (hidden for length):
Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a point of order to make a procedural argument concerning the omnibus nature of this piece of legislation.
This is a new Parliament which I think has been working reasonably well in spite of our recent difficulties. I really would like to call the attention of the Chair to the nature of this particular bill and to urge the Chair to re-examine a practice we have fallen into.
The particular bill before us, Bill C-17, is of an omnibus nature. I put it to you, Mr. Speaker, that you should rule it out of order and it should not be considered by the House in the form in which it has been presented. I would hope that in making your decision on the acceptability of Bill C-17 in its present form you
will refer to the famous ruling by Mr. Lamoureux of January 26, 1971 in which he said:
However, where do we stop? Where is the point of no return? The hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre, and I believe the hon. member for Edmonton West, said that we might reach a point where we would have only one bill, a bill at the start of the session for the improvement of the quality of the life in Canada which would include every single proposed piece of legislation for the session. That would be an omnibus bill with a capital O and a capital B . But would it be acceptable legislation? There must be a point where we can go beyond what is acceptable from a strictly parliamentary standpoint.
Even though the Speaker in that case went on to rule that this point had not been reached, I submit to you that it has become a standard practice with governments to bring in omnibus legislation following every budget under what we might call the kitchen sink approach.
Beauchesne's sixth edition, citation 626 bears directly on this aspect of the matter. It states:
(1) Although there is no specific set of rules or guidelines governing the content of a bill, there should be a theme of relevancy amongst the contents of a bill. They must be relevant to and subject to the umbrella which is raised by the terminology of the long title of the bill.
Mr. Speaker, I would argue that the subject matter of the bill is so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.
In this present case, the drafters of Bill C-17 have incorporated in the same bill the following measures: public sector compensation freezes; a freeze in Canada assistance plan payments and Public Utilities Income Tax Transfer Act transfers; extension and deepening of transportation subsidies; authorization for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to borrow money; and changes to unemployment insurance with respect to benefits and the payroll taxes.
First, there is a lack of relevancy of these issues. The omnibus bills we have before us attempt to amend several different existing laws.
Second, in the interest of democracy I ask: How can members represent their constituents on these various areas when they are forced to vote in a block on such legislation and on such concerns?
We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others. How do we express our views and the views of our constituents when the matters are so diverse? Dividing the bill into several components would allow members to represent views of their constituents on each of the different components in the bill.
The bill contains many distinct proposals and principles and asking members to provide simple answers to such complex questions is in contradiction to the conventions and practices of the House.
As well this will cause fairly serious difficulties in committee. This bill will ultimately go to only one committee of the House, a committee that will inevitably lack the breadth of expertise required for consideration of a bill of this scope. Furthermore, the workload of that committee will be onerous and it will be very difficult to give due consideration to all relevant opinion.
In concluding my point of order, I would like to quote the hon. member for Windsor West, the government House leader who said on May 30, 1988: "For all the reasons I have given, I respectfully submit that this bill is of improper omnibus nature. This is consistent with what I consider and I respectfully submit to be, the relevant precedents. This is consistent with the traditions of the House and, more important, the purpose of those traditions in terms of the relevance of this House to the life of the country now and in the future".
This is a new Parliament. I do ask that we take a new approach to this in spite of previous rulings on this matter. I would ask that you give consideration to this, Mr. Speaker. I would also ask the government members, particularly those who have spoken on precisely this question in the previous Parliament with precisely the same concerns, to give serious consideration to this issue of democracy and the functionality of this Parliament now.
Harper, as Prime Minister, made such a habit of introducing omnibus budget bills (much, much longer than the one he spoke against in 1994) that Marc Garneau in 2012
quoted Harper in protesting an omnibus bill then before the House:
https://openparliament.ca/debates/2012/10/16/marc-garneau-1/He tried to reverse rules changes that allowed MPs who were not members of an official party in the House to introduce at third reading amendments that would otherwise have to be introduced in committee, since such MPs get no representation in committees. (He may even have succeeded; I can't recall.) This was essentially him trying to shut up Elizabeth May, who would introduce hundreds of such amendments to his omnibus budget bills on the floor of the House, all of which would then have to be voted on (subject to some consolidation by the Speaker), with each vote being a matter of confidence, forcing the government whip to ensure there were always more government MPs than opposition MPs on the floor of the House.
He (or at least members of his government), shortly after rightly praising Peter Milliken as the greatest Speaker of the House of Commons ever (and he was one of the best Speakers of any Westminster Parliament, ever), called him a partisan hack (he was elected as a Liberal MP, but for him that was only a stepping stone to becoming Speaker--once he was chosen as Speaker in 2001, the House kept electing him as Speaker even once the Liberals were in Opposition, despite the tradition that the Speaker should be a Government MP--the rules had been changed to make the vote for Speaker conducted by secret ballot) when one of his last rulings went against his government. (This was shortly before they were voted as being in contempt of Parliament.)
He imported US Republican-style campaigning to Canada.
He got rid of public financing of political parties, a blatant attempt to beggar his opponents, by spinning the issue to convince people that their tax money was going to support the Bloc Quebecois (and nobody was able to counter this by presenting it in the light that would have made it clear that this was not so).
He convinced the Governor-General to prorogue Parliament just so that he could avoid a confidence vote he certainly would have lost. (Granted, this is partly on the Governor-General for knuckling under when she should have told him to suck it up and face the music in the House.) He also painted a proposed Liberal-NDP coalition, which would have replaced his minority government, as undemocratic, playing both on the incorrect notion that as the party with the plurality of seats in the House, only his Conservatives had the right to form a government absent a general election, and on the incorrect notion that Bloc MPs are illegitimate and that any government propped up by them (as that coalition would necessarily have been) would be equally illegitimate.
And he did absolutely fuck-squat-all about what might be the single biggest danger to Westminster democracy in Canada: the election of party leaders by the party membership rather than their Parliamentary caucuses. This is, in my view, the single biggest factor in enabling the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office that has been going on since Pierre Trudeau (not coincidentally, that was about when party leadership conventions started, because that was when US presidential nominating conventions began to be televised and Canadians wanted equally glitzy and glamorous things) and (so far) reached its peak under Harper. (Again, this is not entirely on him; it's not like any of the other parties are doing anything about it either.)
He muzzled government-funded scientists from speaking about their work--however groundbreaking, and however much the media might want interviews on the matter--without clearance from the government, which basically never came in time for the media to still be interested in the story. He also muzzled his cabinet ministers, and kicked reporters out of press scrums if he didn't like how they covered him. He even ordered the CBC to present Conservative-slanted viewpoints.
He basically ignored the provinces and first ministers meetings, even though Canada has a federal, not a unitary, structure.
He also decided in 2012 that he would spend lavish amounts of money celebrating the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 and fuck-all on the 30th anniversary of the Constitution Act, 1982 (which included the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms) because he chafed at having to follow the
Charter (and, probably, at the amendment procedure included in said Act, which stopped him from reforming the Senate with a stroke of his pen, as the Supreme Court was only too happy to remind him when he asked). He then threw a hissy fit and refused to name any more Senators, which was probably a violation of the Constitution Act, 1867, and while someone had put the matter before the courts, the issue was rendered null due to the intervening general election and Justin Trudeau's appointment of some Senators.
His Conservative-led committees regularly took their proceedings in camera (which normally was only used when the committee was debating its budget and travel schedule) and often used their majorities to overrule their own chairs.
Once he was the leader of the Canadian Alliance or, later, the Conservative Party, he regularly propped up Rob Anders, MP for his old riding of Calgary West, over the expressed wishes of said constituency's Conservative riding association (to the point where the riding association's executives quit en masse when he overruled their choice of a different candidate). Furthermore, when he returned to politics after heading up the National Citizens Coalition for a while when the Canadian Alliance elected him as leader, he bumped out the candidate the Calgary Southwest Alliance riding association had already chosen for the by-election to replace Preston Manning--Manning had announced his retirement from Parliament before Harper became leader of the Alliance.
And I can't think of many people bearing the title of Right Honourable who were more often wrong, or more often behaved dishonorably. Maybe Brian Mulroney. Maybe.
